[everyone]

I'm a game dev and have been following this since the idea for this game was 1st publicized. It's like the ultimate case study in the sunken cost fallacy. Roberts was 100% in charge and made some utterly boneheaded technical decisions at the beginning (the main one being use cry-engine). And despite having many opportunities and many years they've just kept going.

More details. So Roberts initially funded a visual demo, which was made in cry-engine. He hired a bunch of 3d-artists to make cool models. Using this visual-demo he got a shittonne of crowdfunding in 2012. It was at this point that he should have dumped the demo and hired an amazing lead-dev who would figure out how they would build this game for real. Instead Roberts kept this cryengine visual demo, and hired a tonne of people who started haphazardly adding more stuff on top of the demo. So, it was really at that point the project became doomed, its been walking dead for ten years.

[Rebelgecko]

>It's like the ultimate case study in the sunken cost fallacy

If you have 5 or so hours to kill, there's actually a great video series about the game called Sunk Cost Galaxy: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7SIP0NDfM2yyHKfRmCAociCc...

[noahtallen]

An important bit of color is that the people who funded the game wanted CIG to go the route of more scope but taking a long time, rather than getting a lesser game more quickly. And this continues to be the general feeling of the community as I understand it. (Including myself for that matter!)

Doomed is also strong language — the company has clearly grown significantly and crowdfunding is clearly working to sustain it financially until they release the single player game. The alpha is bigger and better performing than ever. It’s not exactly dying :)

Certainly, I won’t disagree that the project has suffered from severe management, planning, and communication issues over the years. I chalk that partly up to CIG being a new company without established processes working in a unique environment (it’s rare for a big MMO to have to support a live environment while gamedev isn’t close to complete), and partly up to massive scope creep.

Anyways, I’ve easily gotten my $45 back in enjoyment of the alpha, so I’m not salty about it.

[throwaway743]

Dude, it's a dysfunctional pile of shit that requires a high-end gpu and connection.

If they focused on improving the game's initial loading times, cutting down on a hate inducing amount of lag, and making the elevators actually render reliably for everyone at any time, instead of bullshit like focusing on making bed sheets have realistic physics, then alright.

Until then, it's a barely playable piece of shit of a digital paper weight. It boils my blood just thinking about how shitty the experience they provide is.

[JKCalhoun]

I know this doesn't always scale, but in my experience it's best to get a game to the playable state before you can really know if it's going to in fact be fun.

Otherwise you're just a pitchman trying to sell/hype an idea. And ideas as we know are easy.