Apologies for the reddit link, I generally don’t link to reddit, but I felt an exception was called for in this case.
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TLDR:
He felt the lavish office bling was excessive in Frankfurt too. SQ42 internal demos were always heavy on the 'interactive cut-scene' walk-n-talk. (He expects it to be terrible and won't be buying it...) 'Art before design' practices interfered significantly with earnest design attempts. He and his Lead Designer quit in 2022.Dunno if this is real but I don’t think it really matters to be honest. Not because people will believe what they want but rather because it doesn’t seem to say anything new really. Here are my 2 cents:
- Attractive office spaces are used to catch the eye of potential employees. Is it a great thing to spend money on? Probably not but I’m not sure if the decoration cost of these areas is even remotely close to the money wasted on all the reworks of systems and content made before they figured out a way to design stuff in an inter-operative and complementary manner.
Just to be clear, I’m talking specifically about bling - cost of building the office is a different matter since they wanted to focus all of their teams in a single space and would have to pay for that regardless. - Squadron comment is about what I expect from the game anyway. Nothing they’ve shown suggests that the game is going to be groundbreaking or special in any way - a space opera with star actors Chris always strived for, just with a way higher budget and no one to tell him “no”. Should be cool for fans of Wing Commander, I guess.
Besides, walk and talk segments are pretty much a staple in mainstream games these days so I’d be more surprised if Squadron didn’t have any. Can’t say I’m a fan of that but it is what it is. - “Art before design” is another thing we’ve already seen multiple times in regards to SC content and features. There’s so much focus on “what’s cool” that “what’s practical” often ends up being an afterthought. So much community uproar could be avoided if they started with gameplay and went from there…
While I’m not trying to defend CIG, the loudest voices are usually those who are unhappy about something. We’ve had a few stories in the past from ex-devs who spoke fondly of both the project and the company. As with everything on the internet one has to take things with a grain of salt. Everything the dude said might be true or it might be some random who came up with this stuff based on the stuff we’ve seen and heard throughout the years.
Either way, it doesn’t seem to change much in the grand scheme of things. Not for me anyway.
I don’t know how effective the office bling would be considering their average (not median) salary levels as per UK filings. It seems very low for the second largest city in the UK.
And the median is likely to be somewhat less than the average that was reported.
Yeah but when aiming for younger, less experienced devs (which seems to be a thing at CIG these days, at least to some extent) it might be something that will look interesting to some. Add the fact that the situation in the tech industry in general doesn’t look great right now and slightly lower salary might not be too much of a problem when getting a job in the first place can be a challenge.
Besides, pretty much all (A)AAA studios do this to some extent. Sure, CIG is in a bit of a different position due to their financing but it’s not exactly extraordinary.
Whatever the case I think that’s the smallest of their issues but that’s just my personal opinion.
- Attractive office spaces are used to catch the eye of potential employees. Is it a great thing to spend money on? Probably not but I’m not sure if the decoration cost of these areas is even remotely close to the money wasted on all the reworks of systems and content made before they figured out a way to design stuff in an inter-operative and complementary manner.
Am I the only one that expected SQ42 to be a walk and talk sim? CR said he wanted to make the Wing Commander he would have made if everything was up to him. The first one was the most (text based) dialog focused game I had played when it was first out, and the 3rd one was more cutscenes than anything.
Honestly its why I’ve been a bit apprehensive ever since they decided to make it a full stand-alone title, way back when. It was supposed to be a > 10hr single player tutorial that just got you into the MMO and earned you your citizenship.
There will almost certainly be 20-30 hours of cutscenes in SQ42 if it does actually release at some point and then don’t just keep saying “it will be ready in two years [from current year]” as they have more than a decade.
I personally wouldn’t call the WC3 cutscenes good. Not so much the technical aspect (low resolution), but the stort and characters.
I watched it later in the 2000s, I would imagine the FMV as an experience was nice when it was released.
Yeah, it’s definitely grown in scope from the initial goals.
Wing Commander III was a lot of fun for me, and the main reason why I backed SQ42/SC. So I expect the game to have a lot of cutscenes and storyline happening between missions as we return to our main ship.
I am very satisfied with what we saw at the most recent CitizenCon.
The game won’t be for everyone, but I’m expecting it to have a good storyline and some fun action between the long cutscenes. Plus it should have a lot of the features that we’re currently missing in SC due to performance issues (like Maelstrom, fire physics, working atmospheric changes, etc.).
I just re-read my comment and realized it sounded critical when I just meant it doesn’t seem surprising. I did back the project because I love the Wing Commander franchise.
But I do think SQ42 (or what I’ve recently been hearing as “SQ42: Episode 1” or similar) grew too much at the expense of SC. I want that cinematic space war game, that then lets then me live the world after its over. And I’m afraid the PU won’t be in a state that can be that for total newbies when Squadron first lands.
I’ve been playing the Guardians of the Galaxy game over the last couple weeks and it’s been really fun to play. There are tons of walk and talk scenes in that game, but it doesn’t matter cuz the story is engaging character banter is entertaining.
If done correctly, I don’t see any of that dev’s concerns as being game-breaking. But if the conversations are wooden and boring, then yeah, it might be painful to play.
Cool conversations/world building can really add to an experience.
You start getting issues when the script/writing/lore is not good and it’s a huge part of the game.
