Read the first post in its entirety, skim the rest as needed.
As far as ship sales and chris roberts goes i’d make the argument that a lot of what we’ve seen so far is the results of attempting to make a game in technologically uncharted territory and announcing it the day development starts.
I think the biggest reason we’ve only seen ship sale after ship sale is due to how damned ridiculous the technological requirement of this project are, and how little they have had to build off of.
Well, I’d characterize the history rather differently but I appreciate that others are less cynical than I.
In my opinion, the urgency of metronomic ship selling has on many occasions misallocated developer brainpower and time. The Road to CitizenConshows that on stark display as developers (even at the Director level) were crunching for a month or more, losing sleep, stressed out of their minds to produce:
1) One demo they didn’t show for a 3 year late game.
2) One demo starring sand nomads and a giant sandworm in a game that still lacks basic enemy A.I. five years on.
All of that work was obviously quite costly yet found its logical justification in the imperative to maximize ship sales out of the event. Lest the point be lost on us, the same event that didn’t produce even a slice of the 3 year late Squadron 42 still gave us a lovingly detailed “War Bonds” commercial that most of us actually thought was going to be a Squadron demo. A month later, we got a procession of Galactic Tour videos which were themselves commercials for ship manufacturers.
The financial claims made by so much time spent producing disposable media to maximize asset sales are highly atypical by industry norms. When people claim “CIG doesn’t spend money on marketing” they ignore that several months out of any given year are spent by CIG’s own development staff in the production of (marketing) media for ship sale purposes.
Does this make business sense? Well, it’s certainly been effective as the majority of the $180 million raised thus far have come from ship sales not game sales.
But has it all been to the benefit of the game itself? That’s a harder case to make when fundamental, first year gameplay concerns like core mechanics and satisfying game loops remain embryonic or not yet even conceived five years in.
An enormous amount of work has been paid for and thrown away over the years as well. Sean Tracy said as much on Reverse the Verse a couple years back when talking about the waste issues. Some examples of waste are tacitly acknowledged in CIG’s own videos, as with Road to Citcon. Other examples, such as the Illfonic subcontract, had to be extracted like a rotten tooth from Chris’s own mouth by Kotaku UK. 9 months after Roberts chewed critics out for raising a stink about Star Marine, he finally had to concede the specific project mismanagement failures that ultimately binned the project.
(In the interest of disclosure, I provided minor research assistance for that effort at Kotaku UK’s request and was only too happy to be asked.)
We see only too clearly also that the technological requirements have themselves been in constant flux in the absence of rigorous upfront scope work and design docs.
To have heard Brian Chambers share the story of just how PG came about is both exciting and disturbing at the same time. Exciting because it’s pretty cool tech — disturbing because the skunkworks effort that produced it happened outside of Roberts awareness or sanction yet once fully prototyped and demoed for management it meant the entire plans for Squadron AND Star Citizen changed to not just include PG but require it. It’s pretty amazing that a 400 person Game Studio’s entire development plan for two late titles could be completely upended on the spot as a result of an off-the-radar experiment by a single developer.
Am I against PG? Not at all.
Is it incredibly thrilling to see a cool breakthrough at an indie studio? Absolutely.
Did that radically alter schedules, introduce entirely new delays, and highly complicate / overburden the development going forward? Most certainly. It meant much more time would be needed and much more money required, to complete both games.
What is the solution to this new set of problems? Ship sales, of course. :)
Now, I’ve clearly gone on at great length about this so you understand my own point of view on this. It might seem by having offered so much detail that I have an axe to grind about it all. But the truth is, the stuff that bothers me most is not that Chris Roberts has unbridled ambitions. He always has and in some respects, I admire it. What bothers me isn’t the ambition, it is the abuse of backer trust that has been deemed a necessary evil in order to fund those ambitions.
I have seen others, like some of the guys at Relay, who agree that it is wrong to keep overpromising and underdelivering, wrong to be so consistently abusive of backer trust, yet still express the hope that the ends might eventually justify the means. I for one can’t agree with that. I’m old fashioned enough to believe that the trust of your customers is too precious to be taken for granted or abused, even if one can somehow justify that “they’ll be happy in the end.”
Discomfort about some of Roberts excesses is shared by many devs at CIG, some of whom have openly stated it. Neither the scope nor the ambition is the problem; indeed, it’s a thrill to work on huge scope, big ambition projects. The issue is simply that there are honest ways to fund soaringly ambitious projects and there are dishonest ones. The latter may make you more money in the short term but it always, always, always costs you more in the long term, and in the end those costs aren’t just financial, they’re reputational.
(Whew, well, now at least you know why goons turned “GORFisTYPING” into an SA joke.)
I think in the coming year or two as new core features start coming online and back end networking and engineering tech is put in place you and me both will get our wish of seeing more focus on gameplay.
Yeah, I hope for the sake of the enterprise at large that gameplay design commands high priority if/when they put the networking issues behind then. Gameplay design has languished for years and the Squadron slice seemed to put that on full display, yet sometimes it seems like Roberts forgets that all the fidelity in the world are not sufficient to make a beautiful game good. So godspeed to Todd Papy and anyone else at the company with their fingers in game design challenges. Even if Chris has forgotten it, there are people there who know most essential ingredient of gaming itself is the beautiful, invisible soul of Play itself, Fun.
EDITs: I corrected some grammatical errors (my eyesight is terrible) and added hyperlinks to reference material in case any of it was unfamiliar.
So will construction materials for that second outpost you want to build be purchased from CIG for cash?
I know it’s all routine to us. It is to me to too, yet every once in awhile it just hits me in a new way. The Mercenary mechanic was in the game from day 1; it is actually Chris Roberts core mechanic and primary game loop.
Roberts prattling on about its legitimacy as an honest-to-goodness game mechanic glibly, as if the fact that charging players real money for protecting their security and then subjecting them to an in-game bureaucratic red-tape marathon somehow elevated a dirtbag cash grab to respectability. On and on he goes.
So much time, forethought and preparation has gone into this that of course it’s not just a pitch for cash purchase of the claims (and protection.) It’s The Next Great Star-Fleece.
It wouldn’t bother me half so much if all the other space sim gameplay pitched in the Kickstarter were behind him. If he’d built a great game then wanted to sell housing rather than subscriptions to cover operational needs, it would be at least a defensible rationale. But doing it before even his first star system is complete? Before Squadron is released? Before his flight model is perfected? Before combat is fun? Before AI gives “life and danger” to the world beyond your fellow players?
G0RF
There are probably artists and modelers at CIG LA and elsewhere working up the next great monetizable pixeldream - player housing. Hideouts for pirates, mansions for the 890 Jump types, and a wide variety in between. Chris can’t grow the revenues outward right now — the market too small and brand damage to dire. But he can count on the Errises and Mikus and other Concierge Level whales, even if they’re cash strapped, to be ready, willing and eager to buy themselves a little plot of land, a place to park their ship, a dwelling to call home.
I assume Chris will ape Garriott’s model shamelessly and squeeze even more oil out of the super whales. Structures don’t have to deal with physics grids and flight models yet can command prices commensurate with ships. A little hideout might be $50 (plus your protection racket land claim fee). A full scale, multiroom luxury villa with the works and a view might be $1000.
However he does it, Chris will squeeze the whales as hard as he can until they can get Squadron to a releasable state. It’s a tall order that hasn’t had any urgency after the cessation of work in early 2016 but it’s clearly the front burner for Chris again. He sees that as a windfall that buys them the more time to try to figure out all the stuff they ignored for five years. You know, the Game part.
I think that’s why CIG is tiptoeing around the particulars for now. Now is the time for prepping soil, planting seeds, and shoveling heaps of bullshit atop it all. They started it with Homesteading at Gamescom 2016, it will only fully flower when they finish get the cash extraction mechanisms in place. They say Q4, and while it’s normally a safe bet to ignore dates, of all the priorities Chris has right now I suspect this one is the biggest. He just might hit the target for once!
G0RF
STATE OF THE GAME - Q1 2018
Despite the claims of the funding tracker, I think parties at the very top of CIG see themselves looking at the downward revenue slope of a saturated market. A couple of years ago, and before many joking embellishments followed, I put up the old bell curve model:
No real inputs — I just grabbed a traditional bell curve off google images and made a guess where things were in late 2015. It was a little premature because I think the blowoff actually hit in 2016…
2016 - THE YEAR CHRIS LOST THE PLOT
The fictive miracles of Gamescom / CitizenCon that year probably gave them the last truly meaningful boosts to organic new demand and deferential hype amplification from the gaming press, even as Roberts himself planted seeds of his own credibility destruction during that same critical period.
How interesting that the Streetroller refund controversy(July 2016) broke a month before Gamescom and “Inside the Troubled Development of Star Citizen”(September 23rd, 2016) broke right after. If nothing else, that series sent signals far and wide to others in the gaming press that this project about which there had already been much hype and controversy was at the very least struggling, perhaps mightily, under Chris’s chaotic leadership. Kotaku UK’s inclusion of the Level story translation framed the controversial elements (Derek Smart, Beer, “goons”, War) pretty fairly as well, and sent signals via new sourcing that perhaps some of the smoke coming up from The Escapist had some fire under it after all.
The net impact of that exhaustive series — coming as it did between two gollywhopper megahyper CIG events — was a very loud signal to the more serious writers at the more serious publications that perhaps the era of fawning deferential coverage of this Hype Train needed to slow because perhaps there were serious organizational/developmental/ethical problems still challenging it.
One can see the impact of this starting in 2017. Coverage didn’t stop, but it certainly slowed. A new caution and sometime snarkiness started creeping in to the coverage . Kotaku UK made it much safer to call Chris’s project “troubled” and “mired in controversy” and all the other qualifiers so common to stories nowadays. Even Charlie Hall does it, though usually as buried lede.
Yet the greatest blows to CIG during that incredibly consequential period of both hype and controversy were new self-inflicted wounds inflicted by the master himself.
Chris Roberts, with the note perfect timing of a Savant Self-Owner, helped confirm the “Troubled Development” narrative of Kotaku UK’s coverage at CitizenCon 2016, when the long-awaited, much-hyped Squadron 42 demo was a last minute no show after months of build up. Instead we got a ginormous Sandworm as the biggest, baddest symbol for hope yet. It was as fictive as phallic yet for some neither were enough to compensate for the MIA Squadron 42.
The Road to CitizenCon was quickly released as a palliative for the faithful, yet a deeper reading of the work shows only too clearly how damning it is of the development itself. In fact, it is one of the most inadvertent self-incriminating pieces of self-congratulatory agitprop since Sandi Gardiner’s disastrous Sunny’s Diner appearance years prior.
The purposefully manipulative “documentary” showed key developers losing sleep, highly stressed and enduring up to two months of constant crunch to deliver two demonstrations for CitizenCon. The Squadron 42 demo was meant to update fans on the actual progress of the two years late game yet could not be completed in time. The “Homestead” demo was crafted expressly as a fiction starring a fake sandworm, fake enemy NPCs and fake combat, was CitizenCon’s redeeming ‘triumph.’ How perfectly appropriate.
—A BRIEF TANGENT
(This will read as bridge too far for some, yet I have trouble shaking the sense there’s truth to it.)
I am cynical enough now about Roberts vanity to believe that the Squadron demo never really stood a chance and that Chris and a trusted few knew long in advance he would not show it at CitizenCon.
Yes, that’s pure , and I’d never fight to defend it, yet the circumstantial case is quite suggestive and it’s hardly unlike Roberts to craft fictions with cynical intent. That is in fact one of his only proven talents and has been key to their stratospheric fundraising (yet at this point of waning appetite for the game even that fundraising itself appears partly a work of manipulation.)
It makes no sense to christen so dramatic a production so far in advance absent foreknowledge that you were going to need it. And indeed they did need it, as the CitCon 2016 rage was real for many until the opiate of “The Road to CitizenCon” was administered and all was forgiven.
It is more plausible to me that Roberts decided well in advance that Squadron would not be previewed at CitCon because he genuinely feared further humiliating comparisons with Infinite Warfare. It’s Wing Commanderish campaign was as slick, bombastic and cinematic as you’d expect from a AAA powerhouse, the motion capture was often near photoreal, and the prospects of either the media itself or “the anonymous hate campaign” juxtaposing clips from his Squadron demo for a game he himself once described as “the equivalent of huge AAA Call of Duty but better” legitimately worried him. Even the Fanboys had taken to reddit that summer to praise what they’d seen at E3 and chide CIG using Infinite Warfare as rebuke.
(BTW- if his RTV claim about touching emotional territory rarely reached with video games was not Roberts telegraphing
>! the self-sacrifing death of ‘Old Man’ at the end of Squadron 42, I’d be amazed. You have to wonder if that’s what Lando is referring to here. It’s the easiest, most obvious possible way to emotionally manipulate the Wing Commander nostalgiacs, so I’m calling that big mashing of the FEELS button here now.)
—END OF
The absence of a Squadron slice denied the media and his mockers a chance to put his “Call of Duty but better” claims to the Trial by Memes Roberts rightly feared. The ‘presciently’ sanctioned documentary about its absence turned the legitimate anger about the no show demo back onto the victims, provoking yet more guilt they shouldn’t feel for Roberts’ sins. HE was the one crunching devs on show demos. HE was the one demanding that ‘not a joke’ sandworms be grabbed from the sci-fi trope box and inserted into his fundraising fictions. HE was the one selling things not in the game.
With refund dramas and “troubled development” narratives competing directly against Roberts increasingly tiresome flyboy swagger at Gamescom and CitizenCon, it was Roberts who proposed the final test to determine whether a deluded bug mouth or a brilliant visionary helmed the enterprise.
Could he or could he not deliver the whole of Stanton by year end? 4 planets, 12 moons and a handful of new mechanics that could finally give long-suffering backers renewed faith in his competence, his genius, or trustworthiness?
He said he thought they could, even though he’d never bothered consulting his Devs on that possibility and indeed, many were horrified to see him once again throw a gauntlet down they’d never be able to lift. Yet would this time be different? Was he just a guy with chronic mismanager with a runaway mouth running a Troubled Development, or might Chris actually deliver this time?
As with nearly all things but disappointment, Chris Roberts delivered much less, much later, and in the case of 3.0, even upon delivery, he delivered mediocrity at a fraction of the originally promised scale.
With 3.0, Roberts failed the test he himself inadvertently proposed.
In so doing, he confirmed for all but the most devoted faithful that his critics were right. The dichotomy that prompted so much uncertainty and debate in 2016 was over. It was not the cynics who bested Roberts, it was Roberts, and he did it as the cynics expected he would, by being himself.
2017 - THE YEAR OF LIVING DISSAPOINTINGLY
If 2016 was the zenith of years of cumulating hype and expectation, 2017 was the year of diminishing expectations and growing outrages. Until the “miraculous” turnaround of the anniversary sale you could see it in their own reported numbers. You could read it in the growing number of full combat comment fields under any Star Citizen news story. New voices of skepticism on the Star Citizen subreddit were sometimes catapulted to the top of the charts not with memes or praises but with criticisms, warnings, frustrations. The widely read /Games subreddit saw skepticism about the project flourishing amongst the mainstream gamer population.
In 2017, CIG’s efforts to bolster the faithful at the usual venues only compounded the damage further.
Gamescom 2017 delivered cringe so real it hurt, reinforcing further still the “Troubled Narrative” claims and sending the “Chris Roberts, Savior of PC Gaming” myths up in glorious self-parody.
2018: CAPITULATION TO THE OBVIOUS FOR ALL BUT THE OBLIVIOUS
Though the year-end numbers managed to mask it, 2017 was the year Chris Roberts faced down his mortal enemy — himself — and lost.
Those looking ahead in 2018 for truer hopes to cling to than bygone show buzz and the 100th rewatch of the Imagine video will find an emptier horizon line than in prior years.
That we’ll see no Squadron release in 2018 is obvious already. Chris Roberts is unlikely to explicitly state the infuriating obvious and instead will just show clips and progress on a monthly basis like the carrot on a stick it has been since 2012.
The decision not to attend Gamescom this year is itself a telling sign, yet lest we risk missing it, CIG explicitly stated their reasoning; they don’t want their developers distracted with all the preparation work such an event demands of them. That this concern never stopped them before and was glorified in “The Road to CitizenCon” suggests a deeper reading, and that reading is capitulation.
What good might such an event be when they’ve saturated the market and hype fatigue plagues even the faithful? When the very game itself has become so unplayable that marketing it courts frustration and mockery? There is too little to be gained this year in so exhausted a marketplace with so damaged a brand, so tired a narrative, so broken a game.
Since he employs a gigantic army of modelers and artists it would not be surprising if a subset is already working up models for shacks, hideouts, condos, bases, rest stops, whatever… I’d also not be surprised if he’s bent Garriott’s ear for tips but even if not there is a lot that can be gleaned just from playing SOTA and exploring their cash shop. Where Garriott sells castles, Roberts would sell space mansions, and the rationale would be “you don’t really want to park your 890 Jump at just a sad little outpost, do you? Poorly matched AND unprotected? Well have I got a deal for you!”
SPECULATIVE: For Sale By Owner, a piece of the Dream Factory itself?
Similarly, it wouldn’t be surprising if Garriott’s seedinvest experiment hasn’t been studied for replication by Roberts as funding sources decline. It wasn’t a barn burner but they hit their minimum target, and Roberts being Roberts, he’s probably doing napkin calculations already to map out worst and best case yields.
These aren’t explicit predictions so much as cynical hunches, and the cynicism is rooted in seeing last year defy worst case scenarios. There are obviously some big fires they need to put out too this year, not the least of which is basic playability.
As much as it probably hurts Chris to put player needs ahead of his own wants for a change, until they fix their networking / performance issues, they’re pretty much in a tar pit unable to get back to the good work Chris prefers; selling things, redesigning things, polishing things. It remains to be seen if and to what extent they can clear those obstacles.
Even assuming they clear the Stability / Performance hurdle, a hurdle they’ve given little confidence they can overcome, the next hurdle before them remains no less vexing — can they start to design a game worth playing? Roberts himself is no ally to such an endeavor; indeed, he has proven only too clearly how much it disinterested him, for during the six years he could spent designing and refining The Best Damn Space Sim Ever, he instead was focused on an entirely different game and still it consumes him. Selling an unbelievable future at an unjustifiable price to anyone still foolish enough to trust the industry’s biggest underdeliverer will somehow deliver it.
Discussions shift to the impossible laundry list of 3.2 gameplay features supposedly coming. Twerk asks Bored what they should name their Mining operation. Bored, “I don’t know — I haven’t even thought about it. I can’t imagine gameplay.”
Boredom and theorycrafting until they take a question from voicemail from a player called Commander420. He seems to make a subtle joke about being one of their weed dealers. The voicemail is actually in a goofy, committed way and worth listening to.
A boring theorycrafter’s voicemail follows, and then TheOperatorcalls bullcrap on CIG and aUEC ship sales. He thinks starter ships may be purchaseable via credit but that the ships people want will remain cashmoneysales only because CIG is too greedy to do otherwise. He expects Land Claims and player housing / buildings / apartments will be aUEC purchasable (an interesting alternative option) but the good ships? No way. WTFO agrees short term, but for launch CIG surely won’t go back on that promised feature.
CrimsonFire: “Why are they making Shipjacking Armor if we can’t properly steal ships?” Boom! They all crack up because whatelseyagonnado?
—
There is more I skipped but this is a decent highlight reel. The best moment was Commander420’s call — I ’d.
G0RF
Lando has clawed his way to the upper ranks of the “Most Annoying People at CIG” — I find him insufferable to listen to at this point.
I actually was pleased to see an appearance by “Good Sean” on the Livestream earlier this week. “Bad Sean” showed up on that Newegg stream in Q4 to repeat Chris Roberts bullcrap about hundreds of star systems blah blah blah… but Good Sean was actually talking openly about some of their development dysfunction on the livestream which I appreciate hearing confirmed. The talk about Asset Rot evokes Star Marine familiarity, only this time its internal not with a contractor. (Though of course that can’t be possible because Chris said those days were behind them!)
The talent at CIG is stymied and undermined by abject stupidity and hubris that “filters from the top” as they see it. Anyone below them sees it as just more bullshit rolling downhill.
She makes her way to her ship because she wants to talk about MFDs, grousing further about frustrations with being shut out of the CIG loop. (If I recall she at one time spoke of an upcoming interview with Eric Davis which ever seems to have fallen through, as well.) She also notes the crappy frame rate she’s dealing with but plans to power through it so she can offer her critique of MFDs in the game.
Batgirl gets to the heart of her frustration — the game is a labyrinth of unintuitive menus and interfaces that make little sense and produce too much confusing navigation work on the player. Batgirl being an honest to goodness pilot pleads the case for using real world aircraft as a reference point in design.
Batgirl adds an emotional postscript. She gives her viewers more context about her withdrawal from the community and recent general silence about the game. Yet even as she does this, she serves up as classic a Batgirl moment as past hits like “death by door button” or “Batgirl the Pilot tries to land a ship.”
It’s the perfect ending and makes me only too happy she’ll be returning to regular broadcasting about the game after this period of understandable hurt feelings along with a testing of her project faith. I look forward to the continuing adventures and musings of Batgirl in the months ahead.
The scope that was described in general terms in the Kickstarter has changed quite often, and the absence of anything resembling a hard design document that defines the more specific vision for gameplay mechanics was never set in stone. The architecture itself changed radically midway through the work necessitating the wholesale purge of a prior vision of the Verse itself.
Basic gameplay IS in and the more basic among those HAVE been in since the very beginning. FPS, space flight and combat, basic cargo. In SC, that much itself is a pain to do.
Yes, basic gameplay. No FPS was not in from the beginning. As you no doubt know FPS was outsourced to Illfonic, just as AI was outsourced to Moon Collider, and both were ultimately paid for and then thrown away as CIG decided on bespoke solutions instead.
But no company that has prioritized gameplay from the start would still have basic gameplay from the start. Game companies usually put gameplay first and use basic assets so they can test and known that the “play” of the game feels right. That has not been Chris Roberts approach and that is why as year 6 begins we have basic and incomplete mechanics (with most of the Kickstarter professions as yet not implemented) while the spaceships in game look retail release ready.
I’m more familiar with the specific historical details of this project than you apparently understand, and have had conversations — not always encouraging ones — with multiple parties connected to this project.
The core tech that they have been telling us about for so long is all about gameplay!
Yes, they’ve been telling us about it forever. And selling beautiful spaceships all the while, many of which have as yet undesigned mechanics they told us about in their various pitches and commercials. Drinking mixing mini games for the Starliner, the myriad new mechanics associated solely with the Endeavor. So much telling has taken place and people assume that this means there’s a specific action plan with developers right now at Cloud or Foundry working diligently on refinement passes of mechanics like space farming and deep space telescope hunts and the Root Beer Tapper equivalent for keeping those hundreds of passengers on your Starfarer happy as you fly them between various systems.
There is a tendency on the part of many to assume that CIG’s processes are entirely normal and in keeping with the best practices of traditional software development. Any person who has read Kotaku UK’s Inside the Troubled Development of Star Citizen (a series I provided minor research assistance to) knows that project management under Chris Roberts has been chaotic, with many do-overs, much waste, and time and money wasted due to a disregard for the virtues of proper scope planning. You can’t implement a plan that is perpetually in flux because its leader had a fever dream and saw a competitor feature he wanted to ape.
I harp on this point a lot but the very fact that PG itself was a skunkworks project out of Foundry Frankfurt that went from side project to “the thing we must implement as soon as possible” after Chris saw it tells you everything about how fluid the project plan is and has always been. The switch from providing discreet landing zones on planets to “go anywhere do everything seamlessly” was a disruption of three years of prior soft planning and effectively amounted to a complete restart in many respects. You surely recall just how plagued with difficult Alpha 3.0 has been, but on the off chance you don’t, here is a summary of 3.0’s record for the first half of 2017.
100 Star Systems cut to 5 or 10. The first system supposedly due by end of 2016 reduced from 4 planets and 12 moons down to the 1 planet they already had in and 3 moons + 1 planetoid borrowed from Nyx. (That was because so much work had been done on Nyx in the pre-PG period and they at least wanted to redeploy parts players could see today.)
If you take the gameplay mechanics Star Citizen already has now Star Citizen already has way more mechanics than many other games.
What, iPhone games or something? There are more mechanics in Microprose’s Xcom, an ancient turn based strategy game, than there are in Star Citizen. Star Citizen is bereft of playable mechanics and that is why so many people aren’t playing it. You want to see a game with mechanics, play Overwatch. Every character is a wonderland of distinct movement and combat mechanics which show the diligence of constant polish and balancing.
No, Star Citizen has an unsatisfactory flight model — one which pleases very few who actually enjoy either dogfighting games or flight sims. It has a Cargo mechanic that literalizes physical pickup and delivery. If you want to see what 20 minutes of that looks like in 30 seconds?, click here.
Elite Dangerous, for all its flaws (and I’m overfamiliar with them at this point), has robust mechanics of play. They started at the same time, put their mechanics first, and have. space sim that serves up the entire suite of specific professions Chris Roberts pitched in his Kickstarter. Do the planets look as good? No, they don’t. Can you get out and walk around? Engage in primitive FPS combat? No. Is it cool that Stat Citizen allows us to do this? Yes. But aside from frustrating space combat, mundane cargo transport, and rudimentary FPS, there just isn’t much Play in the game yet. Why? Because Mechanics took a backseat to Assets and Chris Roberts never met a project plan he wasn’t happy to throw away midway through work due to some new set of priorities he seized upon impulsively.
I know all the excuses “They had to build a company first”, “Illfonic screwed up”, “PG is better than landing zones”, “Erin had to take over when Mayberry left”, “Behavior didn’t do (x)”, “game development is hard”, etc.
There was a time through much of 2017 when we heard “CIG can’t show Squadron because of spoilers!” Remember that? It was the constant claim after CIG pulled their vertical slice 2 dats before CitizenCon 2016 and focused on a demo about nomads and sandworms and other things they still don’t have in the game 1.5 years later.
Yet just yesterday we saw the deep dive on The Coil in Squadron. And the Holiday 2017 livestream was lengthy and specific. And all those prior excuses about spoilers melted away as CIG opted to show what formerly could not be shown.
This is all testimonial to the chaos under Chris’s leadership. It did not stop after Kotaku UK’s coverage and it will not stop because of Chris’s contempt for process and constraint and his impulsiveness that can not be restrained. I promise you he has spent far more time thinking about what exactly the helmets of Star Citizen should look like than what Mining should Play like. If that sounds extreme, watch The Road to CifizdnCon again and watch him tell Hannes Appell he doesn’t mind if they put in some sort of scanning mechanic overly for the Homestead demo, though it’s clearly just being worked up for a demo. Roberts himself says that “I just want to sell the narrative” of gameplay, even while he fixates on the movements and cinema of a fictive Sandworm his Foundry guy described in Jump Point as “a joke.”
That is exactly what I’m talking about. That’s Roberts as a Game Designer in a nutshell. Fixated on visuals trying to sell a narrative with trailers and demos so he can focus on Assets, Lighting, “Fidelity”. He fixates on Assets like Miyamoto fixates on Play Mechanics and while nobody ever claimed Super Mario Galaxy was the highest fidelity creation of its time, it was a wonderland of satisfying gameplay, clever physics, a perfectly designed skill curve and ironically gives players far more fun “in space” than a pre-Alpha that has costs several times more to make yet still hasn’t figured out the particulars of the gameplay Chris has been talking about for years while polishing his lovely Assets to a mirrorlike shine.
TANGENT
in a goofy, committed way and worth listening to.