God, so much crazy stuff has happened in the world of gaming recently that it's hard to pick just one topic to focus and ruminate all over, especially one so old. But I have put a lot of effort into researching as much as possible for this blog; so much so, that I have a bad taste in my mouth just thinking about this subject line, hence why I've put it off for so long. But I hate having a cloud over my head so it's about time I got to it and delved into one of the most 'cultish' communities in gaming. Let us dive into the wild and wacky world of 'The Verse' and Cloud Imperium Game's: 'Star Citizen'.
"What is Star Citizen", you may ask? And that would be a depressingly valid question. You see, despite being the single most successful kickstarter ever and raising more money than most of us will ever see in our lifetime, (They were at $250 million dollars late last year) the general public somehow still have no idea what on earth this game is. Perhaps they've caught the odd promo here and thought "Oh, it's a space Sim.", or they've caught one of Chris Roberts' press releases and thought "Oh, it's a persistent universe!"; Or maybe even seen that video of Mark Hamill coyly asking to be on the poster and thoughtfully deduced "Ah, it must be a star studded campaign-driven adventure rollercoaster." The confusion around what Star Citizen actually is stems from 3 distinct avenues. Firstly, conflicting information; everyone seems to have their own idea about what this game is, and when the developers address one person's interpretation their answer is usually just "Yes", making it difficult to pinpoint what this game's actual identity might be. Secondly, the impenetrable fanbase. Whenever most people approach Star Citizen all they are met with are huge barriers to entry making it unappealing to do their research and learn more. Finally, because this game is, apparently, everything they say it. Star Citizen is a game that is promised to be all-of-the-above and more, and if that sounds overly-ambitious to you, oh brother, you ain't heard nothing yet.
Let's start at the beginning, to understand Star Citizen you must first understand that it is the brainchild of one: Chris Roberts. "Who the heck is Chris Roberts?" You may think, and you would apparently be incredibly out-of-the-loop for doing so considering that every interview entitles him 'legend'. (And here I thought that in order to become a 'legend' you had to first accumulate some actual renown.) Okay, in all honesty Chris is well known... in certain circles. You see, back in the 1990's the game industry went down the logical path (For any industry dominated by space shooters) of exploring the vast reaches of open roaming space. Game technology had evolved to a point that allowed for 3d environments and so people could finally take advantage of the unrestricted movement that a space-based game yearns for. Chris Roberts was at the forefront of this trend as he worked as director, producer and programmer on the 1990's classic: Wing Commander.
Wing Commander was a mission based space adventure which put players in the cockpit of a star fighter and led them through a Hollywood-esque story during which their actions would determine the success or failure of the overall mission. It was like StarFox had been dragged off it's rails and set to fend on it's own, and it was a huge hit, garnering a lasting fanbase that still love it's eccentricities and ambition to this day. The game even came with a clunky control peripheral and somehow still made a profit, that's almost unheard off! Fans adored the feeling of dogfighting through space, the weighty 'realistic' controls and the ever-lovely FMV cutscenes that the later games introduced. (Cutscenes that featured talent like Mark Hamill, Malcolm McDowell and John Rhys Davies) Wing commander had two expansions, three sequels, numerous spin-offs and untold success, all in the space of 6 years. (Yikes, maybe this guy is a Legend.)
So, as you can imagine, whenever people think of the 'good old days' of space simulators, this is the guy that comes to mind for them. From the early 2000's to the mid 2010's, space videogames were all but spat on by the industry. Their flooding of the market back in the 90's had left a sour taste in the mouth of gamers and people longed for something different. Unfortunately, this meant that those fans who harkened for more space adventure were left wanting for at least a decade. No studio would ever fund a project that has little chance of making a profit, so people like Chris Roberts and the 'Elite' franchise's David Braben struggled to get any space-themed projects off the ground as we moved into the age of the military FPS. So what do you do when you run out of potential funding partners but have no shortage of fans hankering for a new game? You turn to them to get your funding, of course! And that's exactly what Chris did in 2012 with Star Citizen.
Star Citizen was founded on a simple ideal, Chris Roberts wanted to bring back the heyday of space simulator games by raising the funds to build his own. His kickstarter was simple and evocative, calling back, not only to his own critically acclaimed games, but to various sci-fi pop culture icons in a nostalgia onslaught. He mentioned a love for Star Wars, Star Trek and all kinds of 'Star' properties as he showed off test footage that clearly displayed the game he was pitching to make. Whereas some other kickstarters have little but hopes and dreams, Roberts had history in the industry, a back catalogue of good games and seemed to already have the skeleton for his next game. Needless to say, the kickstarter was a hit.
Originally, the pitch was for a campaign-based game similar in style to his own work with Wing Commander. He wanted to set up a studio, bring together a cast and shoot an epic space game that made use of all the benefits of modern technology to ape anything that modern Hollywood could produce. Old Wing Commander fans flocked in droves to pledge their little bit, or a lot in some cases, all reminiscent of the old games and expecting a final product in that vein. From here, I think it's best that I mostly stick to objective facts before I get into the specifics, so I'll give you timeline of events up until things start getting murky around 2016. I'll try to keep my bias out. (Although that is far from likely to happen.)
In October of 2012, Chris Roberts launched his Star Citizen kickstarter with the goal of $500 000 and an estimated release date of 2014. (This two year development time was standard for AAA studios of the age, although it's laughable by today's standard.) The campaign also came with several 'stretch goals' attached, promising extra content, systems and mechanics for reaching certain extra milestones. Those higher tier backers were even promised shiny new starter ships for ponying up more of that crowdfunding dough. The Kickstarter was an unreserved success, earning $2.1 Million with 34 000 backers. But that wasn't all. As Chris was also accepting donations through his own domain: RSI (Roberts' Space Industries). This meant that the total amount of funds acquired from the initial campaign was closer to $6 million, 12 times the asking amount!
This crushed every stretch goal that Roberts initially put out and several that he added mid campaign, allowing for the project to far exceed it's original scope. Now, Star Citizen would be a multiplayer experience with a huge cast of celebrity voices on the main campaign and a 'AAA Story' to accommodate them. (Whatever that means.) Things took a turn for the overly ambitious when stretch goal tiers were reached that promised a huge persistent universe with 'First Person Shooting' elements, a real-time trading economy, fleshed-out space combat and a range of diverse ships from single pilot rust buckets to multi-manned battleships. By the 19th of September, all these features were fully funded.
At this time Roberts and his new studio, Cloud Imperium Games, asked the community whether or not they should cut off funding or continue with the kickstarter. Fans were swept up in the excitement for the game and so urged the company to keep funding open and roll with it. As a result, in February 2013, Cloud Imperium were able to open an office in Austin, Texas; expanding the development team to 20 and allowing for them to increase the rate of development. At this point, you may notice a little discrepancy with what I've told you. I just detailed the massive, multi million dollar, AAA game that Cloud Imperium games intends to make, and then revealed that their studio just hit 20 people soon after making these plans. This alone probably should have sett off alarm bells within the community, but who has time for 'logical fallacy' when you're caught up in the whirlwind of the fastest growing kickstarter in history?
On July of 2013, Cloud Imperium opened another office in Santa Monica, increasing the staff count to 32. And they would need all hands on deck seeing that the funding had reached upwards of 15 million. It was at this time that Star Citizen started to win legitimate news coverage from main stream outlets as well as from popular hobbyists and content creators who piled on their own coverage (and thus attention) towards the game, curious as to what all of the fuss was about. All this attention did, however, highlight how Cloud Imperium had practically nothing to show for their year of work, urging the team to cobble together a slice of the game to feed a ravenous hoard of eager backers. This was a part of their promise to treat backers with the same respect they would a publisher, which meant assurances and platitudes whenever questions are raised about how well the game was holding up.
Thus the first piece of interactive Star Citizen content was launched; The hanger module. This module showed off the power of the Crytek engine to render the hand crafted models that CIG (Cloud Imperium Games) had put together, and that was it. One could simply wander about an empty hanger and admire high quality 3D ship models, none of that flying gameplay which fans thought had already been figured out, (Due to the test footage shown in the initial kickstarter) just a gallery mode. It all looked exceptionally pretty, but it was sorely lacking in the sort of substance that fans wanted. It was around about then that people on the outside of the project started peeping over the picket fence with a critical eye and asked questions like "Why on earth is anyone interested in this game?". Oh, and you were only allowed to see ships that you had purchased with your expensive donation or separately through the RSI site. (Classy.)
In October 2013, CGI went international with the founding of Foundry 42, the UK based studio headed by Erin Roberts (Chris' brother) for the sole purpose of handling the single-player campaign of Star Citizen: now named Squadron 42. (It seems that the campaign was no longer the main focus of the core studio.) Now staff count was up to 52, their number of RSI accounts ranged around 250 000 and the project had secured $21 000 000 in funding. Things were going so well that Cloud Imperium started hosting weekly videos with 'Q and A' sections about the state of the game. By the end of the year they managed to secure a whopping $35 000 000 in funding and opened up a whole bevy of new stretch goals on top of everything else that they still hadn't finished developing yet. This included things as small as new ships to options as excessive as adding whole new star systems to the planned universe.
In February 2014, Foundry 42 opened it doors to increase staff count to 93. Despite this being the original year of release, it was obvious that the game was not going to be in any finished state for that year. Rumors had floated around about a potential delay for some time but that was the year it became official that there would be a pushing back of the intended release to a unclear date. (I've heard people claim that CGI pushed it to 2016 but I have trouble corroborating that.) This disappointment was overshadowed by the accolades that Star Citizen enjoyed. On March 4th, The Guinness book of world records went onto to honour the game for being the most crowd funded project of all time with $39 million. Quite the tidy sum.
Fans who were still upset about the delay of the main game were given an olive branch to maintain their fandom through the release of the Arena Commander module in June. (Also called 'Star Citizen version 0.8') In this module players could actually take to the stars in their ships and dogfight amidst the cosmos. The whole thing was, again, rendered by Cry Engine and thus look positively beautiful to behold. Even it did run choppier than a coconut raft down the Mississippi. (That might be the most southern-American thing I've ever written.) More staff had been taken on to accommodate the increase of workload, bringing the total up to 139. These people were hard at work updating the released modules as well as working on expanding available ships that would then be sold (for real world money) on the RSI website. (Which is certainly not a racket in the slightest.)
In September CIG added space racing, although it was non-competitive so the word 'race' has debateable relevance there, and a co-op dog fighting mode called 'Vandal Swarm'. This was perhaps the first time that RSI started to realize how much money they could make on the ship market side hustle as the team positively flooded their store fronts with new ships and a brand new loadout system. At this point Star Citizen boasted a large variety of individual gameplay elements with no connective tissue to bring literally any of them together, which is undeniably a problem given that the game should have been in heavily finalised development at this point and instead was somehow still vastly shy of a Beta.
In October CIG released their first live demo of the first person shooting. They did this at a time where the entire gaming industry was still in the midst of it's FPS craze and so it wasn't too much of a stretch to compare the gameplay with any of it's contemporaries and come away pretty informed on how janky the gunplay seemed. Roberts did have one trick up his sleeve, however, when he showcased the way how their game's combat would feature a zero-g mechanic unlike any of it's competition. It didn't particularly look fluid, but Chris and his team merely labelled it as 'early days' and people, fans that were already financially sunk into this project to various levels of severity, believed them. This particular module wouldn't set back the main game's development either, as it was being made by an outside studio called IllFonic, so fans were excited to see what would come out of this partnership.
Cloud Imperium really hammed it up when talking about how big this game would be too, they claimed that the combat would be less arcadey and more similar to dedicated shooters like Battlefield 4 and Call of Duty. (Now just where have we heard that one before? >cough< Resident Evil 6 >cough<) In that way Star Citizen would borrow those game's uncanny ability to blend fun and realism. Then CIG started talking about a physics system linked with their damage output, allowing guns to affect specific body parts in a manner that was modular (they like that word) and thus somewhat realistic. Limbs could be crippled or destroyed, players could utilize and shift between stances (Which I'm sure meant something to Chris when he asked for the feature) and all of these systems could work whilst happening on a moving ship.
By the end of 2014, Star Citizen had managed to rake up 68.5 million in funding. To celebrate the occasion, they launched their first incredibly extortionate ship, the limited edition Javelin Destroyer. I've spoken before about games that try to lure in whales with exclusionary price tags but I must say, Cloud Imperium blows all competition out of the water with this particular 'addon' alone, which would set the average fan back $25 000. But it is rather telling about the kind of community that Star Citizen fosters to then acknowledge that the ship sold out in seconds. (Jeez, what am I doing wrong in life?)
In 2015 on February, (The month of studio openings) Cloud Imperium welcomed their Frankfurt studio, bringing the staff up to a respectable 205. It was almost looking like they had the man power to start making true on those grand promises that were made 3 years ago. Chris must have thought so too, because in April he brought together some of that 'Hollywood talent' he was always talking about to film some motion capture work in the UK. His updates showed off the likes of Mark Hamill and John Rhys Davies, alongside Gillian Anderson and Gary Oldman. After 3 months of gruelling work in the world's most expensive motion capture studio, filming was finally done and everyone got ready for the, seemingly inevitable, announcement that the game was nearing completion.
That August at comic con, the 'Planetside module' for the game was released, enabling backers to see the first gameplay zone that would be in the final product; Arc Corps area 18 in the Stanton System. This was accompanied by a demo of what multicrew gameplay felt like, (incidentally the first demo that I saw of the game.) which showed off the brand new tech that CGI had built. That year, fans got to seen the star-studded cast list, a starmap (which was then added to the RSI website) and the famous Gary Oldman cutscene where he stands around in CGI and does nothing but 'opera speak' for about 3 minutes. (Very 'dramatic' but pretty empty in substance.) Then on the 19th of November Star Citizen received it's first big step towards completion. The PTU server was announced alongside Star Citizen 2.0 Alpha. (Not sure how an Alpha can be legitimately called 2.0, but there it is.) At this point the game had over 260 staff working on the project and had planned for over 70 ships to feature.
From this point onwards, news towards Star Citizen becomes less about reading accolades and more about delving into the seedy elements. You might have noticed my sardonic tone whilst detailing all the promising history behind Star Citzen, and safe to say it is for good reason. Now that everyone is up to speed with exactly what Star Citizen is, I intended to spend my next blog in detailing as much of the behind-the-scene details that I've managed to dig up. Be warned, a lot of what I will cover next blog is hearsay and a little bit of heresy (You'll understand why I say that soon); don't take anything that I say about any matter to be the absolute truth and do your homework yourself. That being said, I hope you'll join me to see what I've found from the 2 months of homework that I did, see you then.
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