As someone who has no skin in the game whatsoever...I really have to wonder if SC will ever be 'finished'. I mean - Why stop the money train?
Chris Roberts seems do be quite well off it, apparently.
If I had invested actual hard cash in this venture - I would be hopping mad.
I totally get it that people who already have invested their hard cash into the project, are defending it.
After all - no-one likes to admit that they have made a poor decision, and will defend that decision to the end...no matter what logic or sense says about it.
Maybe some people just have too much money.....
Actually, it won't. Not the persistent universe (PU) anyway. It's actually the main design philosophy of the game. That as long as people continue to play they'll keep adding stuff. It's going to be a space based version of GTA V, only with a lot more to do... eventually.
There's a couple of problems that haven't been mentioned that are/were slowing the development down. First is the fact that unlike a real Alpha anything they release needs to have a real high level of polish. Both from the design/game play view point so it doesn't disappoint backers, and the underlying systems, so you don't end up with backers computers getting wiped.
With a true Alpha you can have some really flaky builds that have the potential to simply be buggy to actually erasing the whole OS and system. But the development team does lots of images and back ups so if a test/development system gets borked it's child's play to get it back up and running. The developers don't have that same luxury with anything they release to the community. So it's almost like each release is a brand new beta, over and over again.
The second problem is CR originally attempted a "module" development strategy. His idea was to create test modules to build and test each aspect of the game. That's where the Hanger Module, Arena Commander, and Star Marine all come in. He thought that he could eventually just link the modules together and it would be a complete game.
But problems with Star Marine's development holding back development of the PU and SQ42 made it pretty clear that it wouldn't work. So they scrapped some of the work involved and just started in on the PU as a whole. How much they scrapped I can't say, but I'm sure the pivot and new focus cost the developers a significant amount of time.
So with everything considered, yes it's taking quite awhile. An unreasonable amount? Maybe. I have to disclose I'm a majorish backer and I haven't started to panic, yet. There have been some major teething pains, but I also think they're past that now. OTOH if I don't see the first installment of SQ42 sometime this year, yeah, I might start getting antsy then.
