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Can't say I'm too surprised Smart posted a hyperbolic screed threatening legal action against another games industry figure. The fact that he's accusing someone else of over-promising and under-delivering on an ambitious space combat game may be humanity's peak when it comes to lacking self awareness. As someone that used to lurk in comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.space-sim back in the 90's, I can attest that it's been his modus operandi for roughly 20 years now from BC3000AD, to Universal Combat, to Line of Defense.

 

Of course, the fact that Chris Roberts bankrupted Digital Anvil by failing to reign in Freelancer's scope means there's plenty of room for reasonable skepticism of Robert's promises. You'd be hard pressed to find a person more poorly-suited to deliver that message than Derek Smart, though.

 

Cloud Imperium posted a video interview with Roberts yesterday, partially in response to the recent criticism, and I was struck by the awkward CEO 

when their community manager Ben Lesnick (who's been part of the Wing Commander fan community forever) noted that Robert's brother Erin has the reputation of being the guy that reigns him in.

 

For those of you who weren't space game obsessives back then, Digital Anvil was one of the companies created by ex-Origin Systems folks and Erin's project Starlancer was the only game they ever shipped as an independent company. Chris Robert's failure to ship Freelancer after three years of development forced the company's sale to Microsoft, his ouster as CEO, and the cancellation of a bunch of interesting games like Loose Cannon, a near-future GTA3-like open world game (in development years before GTA3's release) by the Crusader No Remorse / No Regret team lead, Tony Zurovec (now Star Citizen's MMO team lead). After three additional years of development Microsoft released a much less ambitious version of Freelancer, the commercial failure of which ended Space Sims as a viable AAA genre.

 

While I'm not hugely optimistic about Star Citizen's prospects, I remain very intrigued. The potential for Roberts to redeem himself among genre fans is there, as it the potential for the whole thing to fall apart in a grand, hubristic fashion. Checking in on its development every few months has never ceased to be interesting, especially since it involves so many prominent game devs from my childhood coming back after more than a decade away.

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pkirkner that sounds like a sound assessment.  I have a question since you are much more well versed in this genre... Does Elite Dangerous' release affect your view on Star Citizen at all?  For genre newbie like me (only played X3), release of Elite Dangerous seems like damning proof against RSI's management because Elite kept their vision (still for a genre newb like me, a grand vision) in check and got a fully functioning game out while with RSI the thing just looks impossibly feature bloated.  Or does the fact that Elite Dangerous got made with much lower budget give you hope for RSI?

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My fondness for the genre was more based on narrative-heavy space operas like X-Wing, TIE Fighter, Freespace 1/2, and the Wing Commander series. More open world (open universe?) games like Elite, Privateer, or Freelancer never really got their hooks in me, and while I backed Elite Dangerous on kickstarter and have played it a bit, I'm not very well-versed in that particular sub-genre.

 

As near as I can tell, Cloud Imperium is trying to adapt CryEngine to a new genre and use the resulting engine to build two new games simultaneously with many shared assets. The single-player game (Squadron 42) just wrapped a 66-day performance capture shoot at Andy Serkis'

in the UK. While I've never cared for the narrative in Wing Commander games nearly as much as in their Lucas Arts or Volition counterparts, Squadron 42 is what I backed the project for. At this point, Cloud Imperium is the only game in town and I'm fairly confident they'll deliver a finished product. While it's been 15 years since the last significant game of this type (either Freespace 2 or Starlancer), they're just trying to update a traditional genre at today's AAA level of fidelity, with a bit of FPS stuff thrown in because they're using CryEngine. That's hard, but achievable, and I have confidence in the team Erin Roberts put together in the UK to do it.

 

The multiplayer game is an entirely different story. It's essentially trying to combine the scope of EVE Online with space combat mechanics that I've only ever seen work in heavily-scripted single player games, and FPS-style ship-boarding mechanics on top of that. Beyond the challenge of simply building the assets for the 100 bespoke star systems, dozens of ships ranging from massive Carriers and Battleships to tiny snub fighters, and planetary landing sites and space stations, they have to figure out a way to balance all of them from a gameplay perspective in an EVE Online style economy and make the netcode work to support interactions at a level of latency suitable for twitch dog-fighting and FPS combat. I'm not a gamedev, but that seems like an absolutely Herculean task. It reminds me both of Robert's promises for Freelancer and Smart's promises for BC3000AD except that it's even more ambitious and we're now in an era when game assets are far more costly to produce.

 

That said, I never would have imagined them raising this kind of money. I've been expecting their fundraising to stall out for over two years now and it hasn't happened yet. Their capital burn rate has to be awfully high given all the folks working on this game, but they've raised almost $40 million in the last calendar year alone. If they're able to sustain that kind of fundraising, they might eventually be able to deliver a game close to the one they've promised. They've been remarkably open with the community throughout the development process, and I wish them the best of luck. I just find it hard to conceptualize how they pull this off.

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They're doing another free public trial week, this time for QuakeCon. Just be aware it's a 25GB download to try out a fairly buggy alpha build. If you already have alpha access, the code should add a Hornet F7C to your account for a week.

 

https://robertsspaceindustries.com/promotions/quakecon2015

 

code: QCFREEFLIGHT2K15

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pkirkner that sounds like a sound assessment. I have a question since you are much more well versed in this genre... Does Elite Dangerous' release affect your view on Star Citizen at all? For genre newbie like me (only played X3), release of Elite Dangerous seems like damning proof against RSI's management because Elite kept their vision (still for a genre newb like me, a grand vision) in check and got a fully functioning game out while with RSI the thing just looks impossibly feature bloated. Or does the fact that Elite Dangerous got made with much lower budget give you hope for RSI?

I think that the main delay in Star Citizen is due to Chris Roberts' insistence for insanely high graphical "fidelity"; he wants extremely high poly count models and high resolution textures. These are all very expensive in terms of time and cost of creation, of inflating the game to ginormous proportions, and of graphical performance. It's his vision, but I think it very unwise to invest so much time and money into something that most people will only see for a tiny fraction of the play time, if at all (unless they go around with their nose pressed to the wall).

The Order 1886 looks absolutely stunning, but was received pretty badly, possibly due to an unwise portion of the budget being spent on graphics. In this respect, the delay is good for Star Citizen, because it will be only become cheaper to make and run these extreme graphics.

Elite Dangerous has a mostly procedurally generated Milky Way galaxy, with some 150,000 star systems added in by hand based on real stars. It is far from finished (Frontier revealed recently that they have a 10 year plan for development, and no aspect of the game is considered final), but all additions can be made in universe, and Frontier have been very good at making in-game events, announcements etc. when each new feature is added. They were able to release an unfinished base game and add morecontent in a series of free updates (with paid expansions planned for eg planetary landings).

Since Star Citizen has gone for a more hand-crafted approach (although it will also use procedural generation in many areas), the world will take a very long time to build, and they release stuff before it all comes together as a series of modules.

Unfortunately, the dogfight/ racing module (Arena Commander) is mediocre at best, although it looks really pretty on a high end card: someone calculated an average of just 225 concurrent players since the last public patch was released (out of >900,000 backers).

The first person shooter module is supposed to be out in a few weeks (but they also said that at PAX in March). I hope that this is better recieved than Arena Commander, or CIG may run out of backers to fund the game.

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That poll is a bit self-selecting since only people who are active on the forums will even see it, and only those with a strong feeling one way or the other would answer the poll. I'd wager that if you put that similar poll on the forums of Elite: Dangerous, or even Broken Age, you'd probably get about the same response.

 

That being said, I'm pretty much "tough luck" about people losing money on crowd funding. I put $150 into Shadowrun (not actually) Online, and I just ate it.

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That poll is a bit self-selecting since only people who are active on the forums will even see it, and only those with a strong feeling one way or the other would answer the poll. I'd wager that if you put that similar poll on the forums of Elite: Dangerous, or even Broken Age, you'd probably get about the same response.

 

That being said, I'm pretty much "tough luck" about people losing money on crowd funding. I put $150 into Shadowrun (not actually) Online, and I just ate it.

 

People seem to think Kickstarter is like a store, when its really more of a stock market. You can get everything from better than expected to a total loss.

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That poll is a bit self-selecting since only people who are active on the forums will even see it, and only those with a strong feeling one way or the other would answer the poll. I'd wager that if you put that similar poll on the forums of Elite: Dangerous, or even Broken Age, you'd probably get about the same response.

 

That being said, I'm pretty much "tough luck" about people losing money on crowd funding. I put $150 into Shadowrun (not actually) Online, and I just ate it.

 

It also depends on how the respondent thinks about it...

 

For example, if I got an email that said "Hey, want a refund on your Star Citizen pledge? Click here and we'll do it!" I'd totally do it. But am I upset that that's not an option? Not really, no.

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They released a pretty slick demonstration of a boarding mission at Gamescom today:

 

 

The presentation on stage had 10 players at once, across five ships.

 

edit: They also showed where they're at on their MMO stuff, which looks nice enough graphically, but is pretty generic otherwise:

 

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I liked the boarding gameplay, and the effect of the quantum drive. However, the scale is pretty disappointing, since they got 3 planets in the 3 million or so metre distance from the station to the derelict; I've taken longer domestic flights in the US!

I agree that the social module is pretty, but seems very sterile when deserted. Maybe it will liven up when it goes online.

Animation and frame rate were still prophetic, but can be fixed. I'm still looking forward to Squadron 42... I'm not sur if they are not showing it because of spoilers or what.

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Every time I see promo videos from this game I get super excited about it, conceptually, because it does so many of the things that I wanted out of Eve and STO, but was disappointed to discover that in both those games, your ship is also your player avatar, and it's one player to one ship, rather than observing the party dynamic put forward in basically every space adventure story ever, which is: the ship is the vehicle for the party, and each party member has specific roles to carry out aboard the ship.  

 

Star Citizen's concept is the closest thing I've seen to delivering that dynamic, where you can party up with your friends and fly across the solar system and salvage a derelict or whatever, which means I'm also having to remind myself constantly that the scope of this thing is way too huge to possibly implement successfully, and to reel in my expectations every time I see new material from it.

 

But aw man, if only. If only.

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cool article. 

 

i wonder what kind of financial turnover they get? according to piketty fortunes over 50 million have a return around 10% or more with good management. I wonder how much of that money is invested? it would be kind of foolish to just leave it in a money market account, no? 

 

that said, trying to deliver the Space Sim and FPS at the same time seems just way too ambitious. i feel like a more arcade style EVE would have been "easier" to deliver, as much as any game is, and then leave space to expand it. 

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From MassivelyOP: Star Citizen’s Chris Roberts responds to publication’s ‘long troll’

 

http://massivelyop.com/2015/10/01/star-citizens-chris-roberts-responds-to-publications-long-troll/

 

Recent reply from Chris Roberts about the anonymously sourced piece in The Escapist:

 

https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/14979-Chairmans-Response-To-The-Escapist

 

I find it particularly interesting that Derek Smart was threatening Chris Roberts with legal action back in the 1990s over the release of Wing Commander.

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Wow, that's a heck of a response from Chris. It kinda seems undignified really, but I can understand why he'd be frustrated so I'll give him a pass.

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Indeed, Chris Roberts has really come through with his promises in the last few years.

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As a scientist of nearly two decades, I think it only fair to include the Escapist piece, especially since it has been updated with responses from CR, and a detailed account of how the information was obtained (and approved by their legal department): http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/video-games/features/14715-CIG-Employees-Talk-Star-Citizen-and-the-State-of-the-Company.

I think that when we see the cast list for Squadron 42, we will get a better idea of how much truth there is. The employees speak of a truly extravagant cast list, far more so than any other game.

I would love Star Citizen to be a huge success, but I have been increasingly worried about interviews given by Chris Roberts. In one he says that it won't be the be all and end all, but should be a good game; that one, I'm right on board with. However, in a later interview he said that the game should be thought of as the icing on the cake, with the journey being the real experience.

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Cloud Imperium held their annual backer gathering today, this time in the UK. They showed off where they're at currently with the multiplayer:

 

 

Released a cutscene from the single-player (PC Gamer has the cast list):

 

 

And added an interactive map of the star systems in the game to their website.

 

I like what they showed of the multiplayer. They basically incorporated their FPS stuff into the Gamescom demo and added more stuff to do on that map. They only showed narrative stuff from the single player, and I've never been a fan of the narrative in Chris Robert's games, so that did nothing for me. All in all, I guess I'm glad to see them still making progress despite all the recent distractions, though I wish they'd take a break from having their devs crunch on these stage demos every few months.

 

edit: They also

one of the single-player levels:

 

 

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SO, there were some good things that came out of this conference, as well as some worrying things. However, I definitely got a sense of progress, albeit with a long way to go. I didn't like how Chris Roberts kept talking about the game they want to make, as opposed to the game they are making; he deliberately didn't give any release dates because he thought people got mad at him for those (nope, missing dates is the thing that disappoints!) 

 

I liked the map demo, and thought that the face technology is fantastic... they even have pupils that dilate or contract in response to light! However, this detail didn't really jump oiut at me in anyo f the demos or the speech.Maybe the results are too complex to render now in game, but the reference material will be used later. However, this is typical of the approach to making the game so far, worrying about the highest level of  detail when all of that work (expensive in people hours, money, and computer resources) will likely be unnoticed for the vast majority of the time. 

 

I was pleasantly surprised with the cast list... there are a lot of names with huge geek cred, but maybe not so much work these days. The performances are motion captured, meaning that voice actors might not be able to pull it off, but I'm sure there's a vast sea of more cost-effective talent that would have done just a s good a job. The speech really did nothing for me, apart from making me wonder how soon afterwards the Admiral fired his speech writer; however, I did rather like some of the characters shown in the intro to Squadron 42. 

 

By the way,  the set up for the story mode does bear a remarkable resemblance to Wing Commander. I know this is the reason why I backed the game in the first place, but it seems a little on the nose!

 

The friend referral programme is utterly repugnant to me. I wouldn't convince anyone to pledge for this game in its current state, let alone anyone I knew or cared about.

 

The Arena Commander Alpha 2.0 demo was fairly encouraging, seeing all the different play styles merged together in one large play area. There was no mention of Star Marine, and maybe it is just folded into the "baby PU"; this could be just as well. I first watched a video with only in game sounds, which was confusing as anything, but there was a later video on on the Star Citizen youtube channel that had Chris' commentary. 

 

Apprently, Erin Roberts has taken over global management of the project, which is encouraging news. While Chris has the vision, Erin is more likely to follow through.

 

It is clear that they have spent a LOT of money. However, that doesn't necessarily put them in dire straits, especially if they have other revenues than the crowdfunding campaign. 

 

One downside is that the ships still move like children's toys, with no sense of inertia. It is great that people can move inside the ships while they are flying, it's just a shame the ships fly like  they are on strings!

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They gave a demo of the multiplayer stuff at Gamescom that makes it look like things might actually be starting to come together. The FPS stuff still looks like rubbish, though.

 

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