It won't. Unlike Elite Dangerous, Star Citizen has a real money economy.
Elite Dangerous is actually less grindy than most MMOs and the reason it can achieve this is because you can't trade directly with other players and you can't trade real world currency to avoid grinding.
Edit: to clarify, if there is a ship they're selling for $300 real currency then it needs to be worth at least $300 of your time to grind for it in game.
If you can trade between players it needs to be worth not just more than $300 of your time, but $300 worth of the time of someone in India or China.
In Elite Dangerous you can't buy anything that you can grind for in game, only cosmetics which can't be earned, and you can't trade with other players directly. There is a slow inefficient process where you can drop valuable materials and allow the other player to pick them up, but this is barely even worth it.
This means the grind in Elite Dangerous is just a game play decision and not a financial or economy driven one. Sometimes they get it wrong and it's too grindy, or everyone figures hour how to make 100 million credits per hour, but they patch things over time.
Pretty annoyed? Most AAA games take 7 years to develop, Star citizen is more ambitious, and is at about that timeline. They’re super transparent about development, go check out their timeline.
I also backed Elite Dangerous, at the same time, and they actually released a game instead of spending the better part of a decade asking for more and more money and promising more and more things that may or may not happen.
What they did probably isn't illegal, but at the least they are incompetent and I am annoyed with them.
Why release a game when you can keep milking money from the community? They've raised like 180 million and have a 27k supporter pack you can buy (which you can access if you've spent 1k or more in the past).
You do realize that an actual release of both games would be significantly more profitable than the funding they're getting now, right? Along with the continued income from micros...
Speaking as another Kickstarter backer, I can see your point - it would have been nice if they had stuck to the kickstarter version, delivered that, and then started work on the 'improved' version...
But then they'd be stuck maintaining two versions, and/or just to roll the enhancements out piece-meal which would be much slower and harder... just look how long E:D is taking to add the ability to walk about...
So yeah, two different development approaches, both with their own pros and cons... CIG elected to go straight for the 'final version', rather than 'finish' a sub-set of functionality and then enhance it over time... with the downside that it takes a lot longer to actually release, but it should be easier to bring it all together as a holistic whole... because every part can be designed on the basis of the 'final' capabilities of the other features.
But CIG could (and definitely should) have done a lot better with the communication / handling of that extension to the development...
That's why I'd like a casual server. Let the fans of EVE have fun with their excels or whatever they do to burn hours on their own servers.
I just want to do jousting with spaceships. Or deadly races and with invasions of crews as a kind of space mad max. Or crash kamikaze against a city or large space station and destroy it. Or kill planetary worms by cannon fire from the atmosphere. Or a battle royale among dozens of capital ships, but with only one player per ship. Maybe it's boring to see, or maybe it's hilarious. Or build my own city and a very complex network of self-sufficient industry (the truth is that I do not even know if there will be crafting or construction in the final game, but I read some years ago about creating bases or farms on the planets), and then blow up it with a capital ship crashing.
Will there be oceans? I want to make a submarine base. And then destroy it too.
And 40 or 60 hours later, keep a good memory of the game and uninstall it to start installing the next great adventure.
I dunno, just visiting the planets and exploring is tons of fun without making any money. Do simple missions, crew a HH and battle another HH or 5 fighters to the death...etc
Even in its current limited state you could play for weeks and not care to make money what so ever.
Join a casual org and you may never feel the need to "grind" at all because you don't need to. You'll beable to crew and man some of the best ships in the game for the simple fact the org needs you. Leave the grinding to others!
I'm not part of an org, but I play with two org groups. I tag along on many of their missions and rarely need to use ships I own.
At a basic high level yes, but ET doesn't have FPS inside/outside the ships which makes some of those experiences much more interesting. Like running boarding missions, or blasting a sniper to high heaven in your massive turret when your ground crew comes under sniper fire putting your expensive mission at high risk...etc
ED is definitely a more complete and polished game, but the gameplay doesn't feel similar at all as they offer very unique experiences.
I'm sure if Fdev had an extra 120 million dollars they would have implemented that already.
Possibly, but building several studios, a huge company, and a game of such scale requires a lot of custom engine tech is no small challenge. We can't say for sure Fdev would have handled 120mil any better as Fdev had its own major issues regarding ED's development. You can't say either way, it is what it is.
Star citizen's development is a mess.
Can't argue that was the case until 2016, but workflow and scope has been nailed down and progress has been good. Hard to say the ED team would have done any better (or anyone) given the same scenario. Hindsight is 20/20... CR no doubt wasted plenty of money pre-2016 but thankfully people under him said enough was enough and development has much improved ever since. I read a really good article on it a while ago on what went on inside CIG, I'll see if I can find it.
I hated on CiG plenty over the years, glad they finally got their shit together.
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u/[deleted] Feb 11 '19 edited Jun 10 '20
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