armchair-developers
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More Star Citizen features mean more devs, Roberts says
You don't have to look very far to find armchair developers wringing their hands over Star Citizen's supposed feature creep. Heck, some bloggers and forum denizens have even gone so far as to label the space sim sandbox vaporware in spite of its publicly available pre-alpha hangar module. Cloud Imperium founder Chris Roberts spoke with Ten Ton Hammer recently and addressed the backlash. "Feature creep doesn't mean quite the same with Star Citizen as it might in other games. In other games, it's a concern because they have a hard release date and as you add new stuff it gets to a point where other things have to be rushed or dropped," Roberts said. "We add new people to the team to cover the new features and because everything is so modular, it has minimum impact on the rest of the game."
Leaderboard: Do you play around with game development tools?
For some reason that I can't quite fathom, I now have the Unreal Development Kit installed on my computer. I'm certainly no developer, nor would I make much of a designer I'm afraid, but something nonetheless compelled me to download the toolset and muck about with its documentation and various tutorials. Call it curiosity, or boredom, or whatever you like, really, but there it is. What about you, Massively readers? Do you play around with game development tools (assuming that you're not really a developer), or does your obsession only extend to finished games? Let us know after the cut. Ever wish that you could put to rest a long-standing MMO debate once and for all? Then welcome to the battle royal of Massively's Leaderboard, where two sides enter the pit o' judgment -- and only one leaves. Vote to make your opinion known, and see whether your choice tops the Leaderboard!
The Soapbox: On armchair development
Disclaimer: The Soapbox column is entirely the opinion of this week's writer and does not necessarily reflect the views of Massively as a whole. If you're afraid of opinions other than your own, you might want to skip this column. A couple of weeks ago I penned a Soapbox that, to put it mildly, elicited passionate responses. While a few people sided with me in my belief that MMO combat is silly and sucky, the cries of the masses drowned us out with variations on "you know nothing, Jon Snow" and "go back to consoles, you inexperienced newb!" Some of the responses got me to thinking about game design in general and about game designers and their cult celebrity status in particular. When you cut through the anonymous insults and keyboard courage, most of my would-be critics were actually right about one thing: I'm not a game "developer." You know what's funny, though? That doesn't make a lick of difference when it comes to the ability to talk intelligently about games and game design.
