Be Excellent To Each Other

The thing that truly baffles me about the cult that follows this game, is that this has all been seen before. I don't mean the game itself, I mean Chris Roberts' utter lack of direction and ability to manage a successful project from inception to completion.

The last game he was involved with prior to this one was Freelancer, which was basically sold as something akin to what Star Citizen is being sold as now, just not quite as advanced. The project famously kept running into delays and budgetary constraints, entirely because of Chris Roberts' "vision", which led in the end to his publishers, Microsoft, stepping in and essentially kicking him off the project (just keeping him in an "executive producer" role presumably to avoid some sort of lawsuit) and released a game that wasn't without its flaws, but was passable - it just wasn't quite what people were sold on.

With this game, they originally claimed that $3,000,000 would be enough to make the game that they envisaged during the Kickstarter phase. Then the money kept rolling in, and that all went south. Then the magic number was $65,000,000 needed to do everything. We're at $119,000,000 at the moment (last time I checked anyway) and nearly 5 years later all they have to show is a glorified CryEngine mod, and not a very good one at that. With every update, they add in features designed to make money - they sell ships for frankly ludicrous amounts of money, the ship they announced at GamesCom is for sale for a cool $250 - and that's one of the cheap ones, people have spent thousands of dollars on what are basically just JPEGs until they put them in the game.

The last update added clothing stores where you can kit your avatar out with clothes, in a similar vein to GTA4/5, but done somehow worse, and with a clear focus on paying real money to get clothes. This in a game where you currently can't walk around your ship without falling through the floor, or can glitch out through 90% of the walls that are supposed to contain you within the space station. Oh, and where if you go into hyperspace at a certain place, you get water splash effects on your screen, because CryEngine has a water layer on every map that they've just hidden and not bothered to work out how to disable properly*

Without a publisher to rein him in, Chris Roberts just keeps blathering away, waving his hands around and adding a huge amount of technical debt on to the development team in every interview. Almost every question asked about the game and what people can do it is met with a "yes" - "Can we go to the toilet on our spaceships?", "Yes."

And when you listen to interviews with him and the team, it's all about what they "hope to do", and "would like to have" in the game - there's basically no content in there after 5 years. Compare Chris Roberts' mushmouth with David Braben's interviews at GamesCom this year, and they're a world apart. One shows someone who doesn't really have a clue what's going on, the other one shows someone who clearly loves what they do (and yes, I'm a bit of a Braben fanboi )

* They apparently spent months trying to work out why their ship handling was off in certain parts of their "world" - they'd be flying along and would just suddenly change course and slow down. Eventually someone realised that the water layer was still there, so the ships were literally flying into what the physics engine considered to be water and reacting accordingly.