I can appreciate this as a general sentiment but they've been delivering so I don't think it applies here.
They're delivering, yes;
updates to an alpha. And the game—the full game—was supposed to be delivered eight years ago.
I used to be a stonemason. If someone hired me to build a wall enclosure, and I took payment upfront and said to them "Okay, I'll need three weeks to do that," but two years down the line the wall still isn't raised and I'm barely laying a couple of stones every month or so, I'd be sued. If someone hired me to carve an epitaph onto their mother's tombstone, but three years later only the first five leters are there while the rest is not even etched into the marble, I'd be sued.
Only Star Citizen is a much more dire case, because they're still getting money—and an obscene amount, at that.
If I'm right and the game does some sort of soft-launch with 4-5 completed star systems in the game with great server and client performance as they're on track to address in a significant way this year... Would Star Citizen's development be considered all that bad in retrospect when you take a look at what they've accomplished since 2015? I sincerely don't think so.
Frankly we're a small handful of client performance and network optimizations away from the game being completely enjoyable. Speaking as someone who plays a lot of this game, it feels really damn close.
To the first sentence: yes, it would be considered all that bad. To the second sentence: speaking as someone who
doesn't play this game, it feels really damn far.
I'm not being facetious here, nor antagonistic. But every six months or so, a certain manner of what could be called morbid curiosity pushes me to watch a few long gameplay videos of Star Citizen (most recently on a channel titled LevelCapGaming). And I've been seeing the exact same things for years.
– Players wandering around mostly empty spaces for rather long stretches of time, with nothing happening
– Players trying to carry a box or some such without tripping over the terrain
– Dropped items that glitch through the floor, again and again and again and yet again
– Broken physics
– Bland aesthetics (admittedly this one is purely subjective)
– Friendly or neutral NPCs who just stay there, doing nothing in a lifeless environment
– Hostile NPCs who more often than not pose no threat whatsoever (this is one is atrocious; time and again I've seen a hostile NPC, weapon raised, standing not five feet away from a player, looking straight at him... yet not shooting nor even moving)
– Etc, etc...
I think you might be too tangled in it. When you're deep in something, submerged into its every minutia, it's disturbingly easy to see the most minuscule change as something of cyclopean proportions. I mentionned Sui Generis/Exanima in my first post in this thread, and at one point its players were super excited because the last update made it so that they didn't trip so easily when walking over a plank or item lying on the floor. But looking at it from the outside all one could think was, "What momentous progress for a beta version eight years into its development."
Doubtlessly this will have nil impact on the game, on its development and financial or pseudo-artistic success, but as someone with a passing interest for the idea of a space-sim / space-faring game, I look at Star Citizen today and see what I saw five or six years ago: a glorified tech demo, only one that becomes a bit prettier over time. Though as evidenced by many videos I've seen, a group of friend can have great fun in this game, that much is true; but a group of friend can have great fun with a pebble, so it's not the effulgent praise some think it is.
If you love it, more power to you. Really. And who cares what those who don't pay and play might think—for verily we are inconsequential. At this point Star Citizen is mostly insulated from everything and everyone non-Star Citizen. But ten years of development and half a billion of freedom money for what's currently there? Yeesh.
