You're in the project, wsippel, right ? Are you worried or confident ? What are you most reasonable and optimistic assessment of the games (SC and SQ42 part 1) being completed or going gold judging by whatever we have at our disposal now ? For all the sarcasm and bias I harbor with the project, I'm still curious to hear your opinion on this.
Yeah, I spent roughly €100 on the game. While I absolutely expect further delays, I'm still cautiously optimistic. I think one of the main causes for the backlash is that CIG appears to be very open, which leads people to believe that what's in the PTU is all there is. That is almost certainly not the case. They're evidently working on tons of things we haven't seen yet, and things only people who closely follow the project have seen teasers or leaks of. Also, when people talk about feature creep, they often forget that a lot of the planned features aren't supposed to be ready for 1.0. It's an MMO after all, it won't "launch" with 100 solar systems, tons of professions, all of the ships, alien races, pets and god knows what else they've been talking about. Even procedural planets and orbital mechanics weren't initially supposed to be 1.0 features. Plus, I expect several of the promised feature to never make it, not necessarily because they're too ambitious, but simply because quite a few don't sound like they'd work from a gameplay perspective.
Now it seems CIG might even be going for a rolling release, which is fine by me. I have to say though, 2.7 is a bit of a litmus test. If they truly have a complete star system with 40 landing zones, three inhabited planets with cities, several uninhabited procedurally generated planets you can land on, dynamic missions and all that other jazz out by the end of the year, that would certainly help their credibility. What Tony Zurovec, SC's director, said last week also sounded reasonable: They'll roll out several major essential features sooner than initially planned, but start on a smaller, more manageable scale. Like, they'll start with handheld mining and salvage equipment which is much easier to implement than dedicated ships, simply because they need commodities in the game and they need to give people something to do.
That was about SC, of course. SQ42 is a smaller, much more focussed project, the kind of project Chris and Erin have been doing many times in the past (Erin's always been the guy who made sure Chris eventually shipped something, but he didn't work on Freelancer, which might explain some of the issues that game had). I'm certain it won't make 2016, but I'm pretty confident that it'll come out some time next year.