I believe the salient point is that with AAA resources, 250+ employees, probably closing in on a 100 millionish now in budget, and 3+ years of development, what they've produced so far looks like a single A project, like it could have been done by 50 people in a year. And it's not just my admittedly unprofessional viewpoint here. Experienced game developers are concerned that Star Citizen is still grappling with basic issues that should have been mastered a long time ago, and that they have so little to show. This implies massive amounts of waste.
Please don't make comparisons to Witcher 3, especially Witcher 3's excellently written and expansive storyline. It's offensive. What I'm seeing is all pretty bare-bones involving minimal art assets. You're going to compare this to Witcher 3's enormous vibrant crafted world? A bunch of empty space with some ships and stations that you can walk around in? Really? Star Citizen Chapter 1 will have a story equivalent to Witcher 3? Really? You want to make this claim?
See this is the challenge. How do you compare? Where do you compare? Depending on your viewpoint either nothing is done because you don't have access to it or they are progressing on schedule with the reality is somewhere in between.
We won't get access to SQ42 Chapter 1 until mid to late next year. The simple fact is a lot of the assets simply haven't been completed yet. People are shocked but guess what? Mass Effect Andromeda with identical release date is apparently missing a majority of its art assets (it's mostly in gray box state so a lot of things are still missing textures, lighting etc which all takes multiple passes) but does it? Nope. Internal builds are always farther along than test builds for Friends and Family which is pre-Alpha or any other Alpha build. It's just a lot of features are not at a state where it's worth testing so developers use place holders and replace those in the late stages of development. If you were in the ME:A pre-Alpha test you would be making the same arguments except most people aren't allowed in such early stages precisely because people can't stand seeing the sausage made. CIG has shown that a large section of the gaming community has been so coddled with mass market PR that hits a few months prior to release that everyone assumes games are in a "like" state many months or even a year or more prior which in reality you would be shocked in what state those games are in.
Those experts you mentioned that are worried is a couple of people with very limited experience in games with very tiny scopes and feature sets in comparison. There isn't even a game to compare it to due to what consoles have done to gaming in general. Features are cut because consoles just can't handle them and the PC has to make do with the same shit except maybe upgraded graphics. Lipstick on a pig comes to mind.
As for Witcher 3 yeah I'll make that comparison. In terms of character depth and interaction Witcher 3 is the best of the old style games we currently have but SC is aiming higher. Since you aren't really interested in how SC will handle it I will keep quiet and let you experience it first hand. It should be quite a sight. As for length the Witcher 3's main story can be completed in about 25 hours. SQ42 Chapter 1 is apparently 7-10 hours of rapidly clicking through conversations and cut scenes without reading or thinking about anything according to the vertical slice tests they did early on. Actual gameplay should be about 15-20 hours and much longer if you take your time and walk off to speak to other people and do your own thing.
The closest comparison I found to how they plan to implement it is SWTOR The Fallen Empire if you make a Lv60 character. You can skip the whole thing and exit out to the SWTOR world to do your own thing out of base and can hit "Play" anytime to play through the chapters of the story. The logic behind this is SQ42 is your backstory and it has missions/NPCs etc locked until you play through a part of the story and unlock that by making certain choices. They will keep that up throughout the early Chapters but you can keep exiting out into the PU and play there. The biggest concern people have is will the PU get anywhere near the love that SQ42 will get. Honestly I don't know. I kind of doubt it but the writers and Tony insist they plan to make it as deep as you are willing to go down the rabbit hole instead of giving you to same boring missions over and over. A very rough version of this exists in SC 2.0 where one mission unlocks another but it's completely bare bones and has zero depth. Tony has suggested they will be building on top of this in the early and mid parts of next year so that's at least a number of months out. But yeah the mission system will be one of the core parts of the game.
As for the length again that's just Chapter 1. You get at least 3 Chapters to complete the entire SQ42 Campaign as part of the game you buy and the next two are roughly 10 hours each to complete. So at a bare minimum if you rapidly clicked through everything you should get about 15 hours of clicking content or 30-50 hours of actual gameplay. Having said this they did mention that you may get up to 5 chapters in the Campaign but some are smaller and closer to 5 hours to complete. All of that is meaningless until we see the quality of the worlds and interactions. We got a very tiny taste of that during their last major event prior to the livestream and still have a year to complete it. It looked rough but interesting. Pretty sure Witcher 3 looked rough a year prior to release.
I also find it funny you mention that Witcher is a vibrant world. Yes it is I would use those words to describe it. SC is not supposed to be vibrant. Would you describe Alien: Isolation as a vibrant environment? You are setting SC up to fail before you even install it if that is your expectation. Now if you mean colorful characters, complex stories and choices that leave you shaken to your core... that kind of vibrant I can't say. I know that I watched every single interview with the writers and commentary from the actors and that's the plan. Will they succeed? I don't know. Lets put our heads together this time next year and see if they succeeded or failed. With what I have seen so far I will give them the benefit of the doubt.
Funny how this game gets so much hate when other developers that have a franchise that sells in the billion dollar range have shit on-rails scripted stories with zero choices that's supposed to be the Gold Standard. Witcher series being the exception to that rule. I dunno why people hold those turds on a pedestal.
Anyway will see. Won't we.
