[silentsanctuary]

> Those games are huge, with ~40 hours of content each, easy.

This isn't really the way to measure the work required to build a product. A series of books that takes 80 hours to read doesn't cost twice to make as much as Mass Effect. Complexity and uncertainty is a huge factor. Mass Effect was a game principally composed of components that everyone involved has built many times before, and where most of the difficult problems are already solved. It's a complex project by some standards, but it pales in comparison to even what is already playable in Star Citizen.

A single feature of "being a person who walks into a ship, sits in a pilot seat, flies up into space, lands on a space station, gets out of ship and into the station, without clumsy transition screens in which you just magically become the ship" is a promise that many games (including EvE, Elite Dangerous) have promised and spent money trying to build for many years, and eventually given up on. Only Star Citizen has actually managed to deliver on this.

It's certainly the case that Star Citizen has lots of very annoying bugs, and doesn't have nearly the number of game loops it wants to have, even after this level of spend. However, it's also very intuitive to me that if someone is solving a novel engineering problem that the other leading experts have attempted to solve and failed at great expense, that this project that actually has managed to get further than anyone else is probably not going to be able to be cheap.

[A_D_E_P_T]

> Mass Effect was a game principally composed of components that everyone involved has built many times before, and where most of the difficult problems are already solved.

This is emphatically not the case. In its time, Mass Effect was considered very innovative -- one of the first "cinematic" game experiences, if not the first. (e.g., https://www.wired.com/2007/07/preview-mass-ef/ )

They did a lot of stuff with in-game cinematography and character face/voice acting that seemed extremely advanced at the time. Don't forget we were just a few years removed from 2D RPGs.

> A single feature of "being a person who walks into a ship, sits in a pilot seat, flies up into space, lands on a space station, gets out of ship and into the station, without clumsy transition screens in which you just magically become the ship" is a promise that many games (including EvE, Elite Dangerous) have promised and spent money trying to build for many years, and eventually given up on. Only Star Citizen has actually managed to deliver on this.

Okay, this is interesting.

[silentsanctuary]

You're totally right that it was considered innovative - I was speaking mostly comparatively. Mass Effect did solve new and interesting problems, but my view is that the scale and inherent risk in those problems were on a different level. For example, Mass Effect released at the same time as Uncharted, which (though a shorter game) arguably outdid Mass Effect in terms of "cinematic" feel, quality of animation, etc. The big industry players trying their hand at the problem were able to meet them head on and solve them. Whereas when we look at the problems Star Citizen is trying to solve, several big players in the field have made substantial investments trying to solve them, but most have given up, and only CIG has actually managed to make substantial progress so far.