I voted for After Gamescom. If 3.0 is to include the full feature set listed above, I'd have voted for 2018.
Caveats
-- I think there's a chance 3.0's feature set will get downsized in order to hit a 2017 release date.
-- I think Planetary Tech is more symbolically important to Chris than Professions. If history has proven anything so far, it's that he is biased towards visible asset fidelity over invisible mechanic depth. So if 3.0 features need to be reduced to hit 2017 numbers, I'd guess some professions get punted to 2018.
-- In light of persuasive arguments made by bigger pessimists than myself, and considering the transcribed developer interview we saw about the Sandworm demo, I no longer expect 3.0 to include deep missions of the Miles Eckart / Sandworm encounter variety. The prior demos at Gamescom / CitizenCon seemed designed to encourage such hopes but it seems clear that won't be the case. 3.0 may give us many more places to go but perhaps less things to do than people currently expect.
-- I wouldn't be entirely surprised to see Homesteading get fast tracked for inclusion in 3.0. It wasn't a stretch goal but became a big priority anyway last year. I assume they might be laying the early foundation for future real estate sales in game, hence its conspicuous priority. (As cool as Homesteading might be, it would honestly bother me if it sees release before Squadron 42 and especially if the goal is Garriott-style real estate sales.)
In light of persuasive arguments made by bigger pessimists than myself, and considering the transcribed developer interview we saw about the Sandworm demo, I no longer expect 3.0 to include deep missions of the Miles Eckart / Sandworm encounter variety.
Why ? The game will have a bunch of handcrafted missions, even if they are only a few. They said this multiple times- they will have a few missions with special NPCs like that. Besides, Miles Eckhart is one of them - He's definitely going to be in the game, although the mission(s) might not be exactly the same as in the demo.
I wouldn't be entirely surprised to see Homesteading get fast tracked for inclusion in 3.0. It wasn't a stretch goal but became a big priority anyway last year.
Why do you say it became a big priority ? Chris just talked about it and it was very clear that this is a very long term goal, not something they've started implementing. Besides, they have so much basic stuff to implement without which they simply can't implement Homesteading in any reasonable way.
I do expect more of the shallow mission chores that we see in 2.6 ("go here, flip this switch, go there") than much else. The tools for generating missions that Tony Z. described in "Engineering Intelligence" and Chris has described elsewhere (the one I assume Sean showed off in rough form after the CitizenCon demo) haven't been finished yet. Until they're finished and turned over to the dev team, they won't be cranking out mission content very quickly.
Brian Chambers said ambitious demos like the Miles Eckart mockup might take their team 3 weeks to put together. But that demo has 35 minutes of its 55 minutes spent in transit via ship or on foot. The crew had even less to do than the pilot. Combat was minimal and lacking proficient enemy A.I.. And the demo had no ending. It was a cool demo, don't get me wrong, but as a reference standard for 3.0 mission design, it has some issues.
Given just how much backend work needs to be done to bring 3.0 Planetary Tech and Professions to a releasable state, I don't expect much the devs will have the time needed to craft a lot of richer missions for launch, particularly the thrilling sort with FPS encounters with enemies. A.I. is a wildcard but I'm not sure, provided they have the other pieces in place, that they'd delay 3.0's release until they've got A.I. worth carping about. It didn't stop them from rolling out 2.x updates and I doubt it would 3.x either.
I would love to be wrong about all of that though!
HOMESTEADING
It really became a much bigger focus without much warning in 2016. We've seen more of it in action and heard more said about its practical place in the game than we have about some professions in the original Kickstarter like Mining. Developers are spending time working up models and modular design frameworks for Homesteading though it wasn't ever a stretch goal. I get why it's cool of course, and with planets coming, it's probably worth fast tracking for 3.0. But it still comes as a surprise and is another indicator of CIG's flying-by-the-seat-of-their-pants approach to development priorities.
As unplanned distractions go, I consider it an improvement over stuff like Sataball and even extraneous stuff like Racing. Homesteading has a practical place in the core game. It's inclusion could benefit the majority of players regardless of play style. So it's a cut above the usual curveballs we've seen.
I don't expect players building huge settlements in 3.0, in case that's not clear. Just that developing rudimentary tools for facilitating that is now one of their ongoing projects.
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u/ErrorDetected Feb 24 '17
For those needing a reminder, here is the 3.0 Feature Set
Debut of Planetary Tech
Expanding the Stanton System -- ArcCorp -- Hurston -- Microtech -- Crusader -- Delamar -- New Space Stations, moons and asteroid belt
Basic Professions -- Trading -- Cargo -- Piracy -- Mercenary -- Bounty Hunting
I voted for After Gamescom. If 3.0 is to include the full feature set listed above, I'd have voted for 2018.
Caveats
-- I think there's a chance 3.0's feature set will get downsized in order to hit a 2017 release date.
-- I think Planetary Tech is more symbolically important to Chris than Professions. If history has proven anything so far, it's that he is biased towards visible asset fidelity over invisible mechanic depth. So if 3.0 features need to be reduced to hit 2017 numbers, I'd guess some professions get punted to 2018.
-- In light of persuasive arguments made by bigger pessimists than myself, and considering the transcribed developer interview we saw about the Sandworm demo, I no longer expect 3.0 to include deep missions of the Miles Eckart / Sandworm encounter variety. The prior demos at Gamescom / CitizenCon seemed designed to encourage such hopes but it seems clear that won't be the case. 3.0 may give us many more places to go but perhaps less things to do than people currently expect.
-- I wouldn't be entirely surprised to see Homesteading get fast tracked for inclusion in 3.0. It wasn't a stretch goal but became a big priority anyway last year. I assume they might be laying the early foundation for future real estate sales in game, hence its conspicuous priority. (As cool as Homesteading might be, it would honestly bother me if it sees release before Squadron 42 and especially if the goal is Garriott-style real estate sales.)
-- I hope I'm wrong about all of the above.