Star Cheating Citizens

 

Star Citizen remains one of my favourite worlds to catch up on, not just because of the crazed amount of research I put into that first demon-sized article about them that I wrote- but due to the fact that I genuinely believe that this has to be one of the longest running games industry lol-cows of all time. To perhaps match the absurdity of Yandere Simulator- although I suspect we might actually a working game out of Cloud Imperium at this point, as opposed to Yandere Dev who I expect to just give up working on the game and announce it's actually totally feature complete literally any day now. There's just really no matching the comedy of basic conceptual errors on the development front that Chris Roberts has stumbled into time and time again which paint a terrible picture for someone who, I genuinely believe, wants to deliver a game. Although at this point, I'll but wanting to keep the cash cow milking is a petty present concern on his mind at all times too. Considering, you know, he's got half his family employed to the nowhere project at this point!

Of course, even though Star Citizen has good and royally scuppered any chance they had of creating that brilliantly effectively open world swansong game that would have supplanted the industry, through pure merit of turning it into such a money-sink hell hole that no casual gamer will ever touch it in a million years- utterly destroying his potential for building fans with even the most well publicised launch in history: that isn't to say there's nothing of value tucked into Star Citizen. I still remember that sneak peak we got at the long belated Squadron 42 campaign mode for the game which looked- I'm going to be honest- really freakin' good! Like a solid Sci-fi themed COD campaign that you blast through on a spare weekend and walk away with the kind of fond memories that last a decade- I would definitely give that kind of game my time of day! Provided, you know, they ever actually release it!

But of course that single player game is not the draw for them- because that isn't where the Cloud Imperium game get off selling their thousands of dollars worth of ships to people in their Alpha which at this point might as well be considered the full game because you ain't getting nothing better anytime soon! Where's the recurrent monetisation going to come into a product you buy once? Nah, they need to siphon your money and funds as much as possible if Roberts wants to keep eating out the lap of luxury for the rest of his natural life- which is why this promising Single Player footage we've seen probably won't start materialising into anything real for at least another year. Until then, the man must protect his baby at all costs.

Which is what leads to a very interesting conundrum involving where the team place their priorities in development. Namely the amount of effort it has recently been revealed that they put into hunting down and removing 'cheaters' from the game with as much prejudice as possible. Now this is nothing new, of course- Cloud Imperium famously have paper thin skin and jealously guard their inner forums like a cadre of degenerate discord moderators, (they probably have a Discord too nowadays, come to think about it) but the fervour of the cheater problem really drove the team into overcharge. Over 600 cheaters have revealed to have been banned in a recent purge- which is valued work for any multiplayer game. Provided the game is finished.

Because you see- Star Citizen still hasn't launched. It still can only be accessed directly from their storefront as part of a 'starter pack' with fluctuating prices throughout the year. These are supposed to be those gooey formative years where the product is given shape and purpose. Systems are ironed out, scope is- well scope should have probably been solved before entering Alpha but this is Cloud Imperium so I guess they're arguing about scope literally every other day- these are the months that should not matter. Of course, bug fixing is important- but you won't find most developers hunting down the riff raff of their Alpha playtests. Then again how many Alpha playtests last multiple years? These are unprecedented waters we tread.

The big 'cheat' which was brutally afflicting the game wasn't really as fundamentally compromising as the old GTA Online cheat engine issues nor the bot spam in Team Fortress 2. All it actually was was an exploit that allowed players to generate vast amounts of ingame currency at little investment of their own- which of course means it threatened the very fabric of Cloud Imperium as a company. How could they possibly allow such a brazen assault at their supposed bottom line as was present in this glitch? How could they go on when such filth dared to undermine the Star Citizen money mill? When people can get what they want without dedicating their entire lives or wallets to the company, that issue overrides all over concerns- because unfortunately that is bottom line of what Star Citizen is. 

The game exists to funnel you into a never-ending cycle of grinding for the sake of grinding. What once existed as a utopian depiction of open space exploration underlying a championing of 'player chase' has rotted and given away to a much more rank and insidious cycle of locking players into loops that incentivises retention and plays up the 'fear of missing out' for the brand new ship the team squeeze out of the increasingly unfocused universe of design which supposedly unifies the brand. There's talent behind the scenes, programmers, artists, modellers- but it feels like there's no head at the top of it all to bring all those pieces together. Even when it comes to design philosophy, everything has denigrated over time to the point where the game feels past it's prime before release.

There was a time when I thought Star Citizen was a scam that was funnelling money out of the dumb and overly excited. There was a time when I considered Star Citizen to be an overly ambitious project undetaken by a team too high on their own supply to realise the pipe dream they'd fallen into. Now I see Star Citizen as a successor to the Grand Theft Auto Online model. A amusement park of promises, pay extortionate prices to test out some preliminary rides, hear promises about how cool the next update will be and then grimace through your disappointment when it doesn't go the way you want it to. Only in that context, where the visage is all you have, wouldn't it make sense to protect that integrity with everything you have?

Star Citizen Stirs

 I don't believe it...

So what's up with Star Citizen? Jaunary 2022 edition.

 Different year, same routines.

Another year, another check in with one of the most belated, bloated and beleaguered perspective game titles ever to grace this gaming industry of ours, cursed with indolence and fuelled on the back of inescapable sunk cost fallacy. If you've ever scoured the weirder corners of the web and found yourself utterly puzzled at how such bizarre fetishes as 'pay pigs' can exist ('in this economy?') then to you I say: at least those get to see the hole their money is being thrown down. Star Citizen is fraught with so many projects and side projects and reworks and redesigns and reimaginings, that one needs a four-year degree on 'Forum browsing' with a five year residency just to have any idea what this game is even meant to be anymore. Was it ever meant to be anything at all? Or was this just Chris Roberts' attempt to embark on a forever project that would keep him busy and stave off that sinking existential despair of uselessness that creeps upon us all in our quietest thoughts. Keep running Chris, but every time you pause to take in the scope of all you have wrought, know well that your substance is but vapours.

According to the claims of the developers themselves, this has been a project in the works for around about 11 years of active production and development, and to say what they have to show for that time is embarrassing is an understatement. There's a game, sure; but compared to the scope they proposed and still wrangle people on with, pertaining to the mythical, unattainable, 'full game'; it's a piddling and unimpressive thing. Sure it looks good, and I'm going to make a charitable guess and assume that in the two years since I last looked the thing up it probably at least runs with something approaching stability now. (Right? You finally made it run good- didn't you?) I would check first-hand myself, but Chris is charging a minimum of £45 in order to play his unfinished beta of a game which has enjoyed just above 463 million in largely independent funding. (63 million of which was from last year, apparently. They ain't hurting or slowing down at all.) And... yeah, I'm not doing that. If that were the way I liked to treat my money, I wouldn't have anything left.

And maybe you're out there right now going "Hey, at least they got out something for people to play whilst they drip-feed it into a substantial game." Which is entirely true, they've put out a thing. But I never claimed this whole endeavour was a scam, if it were I think Chris would have lost his nerve and cut away from this project years ago. No, this is a concerted effort from an overly ambitious man to make project that he has been unable to square-in on for more than a decade of supposedly active work. I'm not saying that makes him a bad developer, or even a bad person, but is sure as the sun is wide makes him a pretty pitiable manager. If Chris were put in charge of Anthem, that game would have launched with the amount of polish of your average Steam-store asset flip. He's a wild mind in need of some serious taming and the 10 years he's spent chasing a lofty pipe dream should be a testament to that.

Heck, we're still waiting for this 'incredible' single player campaign to release within this universe called Squadron 42. We've seen the technology behind the project, watched development goals slip out of timelines and into obscurity and still we're no closer to this key pillar of the original pitch. After a decade! This has taken so long, that actors who were signed up to this because of their Game of Thrones fame are now no longer hot-topic talk because that series went down in flames, they've lost the heat of the moment with all their shifted priorities and unfinished projects. (Who are these developers? Me?) All we get are vague platitude of what the project wants to be, or what we'll theoretically get out of the project. Oh, did you know that your performance in Squadron 42 will have an effect an your career in the main game? (Whenever that launches) What does that even mean? Do I have to scroll through forum posts until I'm blue in the face to find some clarification on the fifth page of the 'Why all forms of criticism is actually just as bad as race supremacy' forum thread?

Talk about a segue way, because that neatly leads into the topic that rocketed Star Citizen back into my mind after an era or two of down time. Recently, word from the main development team has been to lash out at it's many backers who have, arguably with just cause, taken the team to task over the years about the constant empty promise Roadmaps that the team have bought out only to reshape them as quarters are missed. Their excuse: Oh, you guys don't understand game development. Now you know how I get when people condescend me, and although I'm not a backer and so this isn't necessarily aimed at me, my empathetic drives are making me a little flush faced- so let me try and explain as calmly as I can the problem with this. By the team's definition (although this honestly reads like the whingeing of Roberts personally, and so I'm going to refer to this as Robert's words going forward.) previous roadmaps have all been fanciful estimations of ideas and concepts that Robert's wants to work on, not promises of what he thinks he can get done. How silly of stupid, childish, fans not to realise this most simple of concepts. Here is the issue with that.

No it's not. Seriously, what are you talking about? Companies have been using Roadmap marketing to push their unfinished 'live service' messes for nearly five years now and the understood definition of these documents is: This is the game plan for all the content we're going to finish, so get aboard now and you'll be able to enjoy all of this in the near future. It's a symbolic gesture to try and make players feel like they're in on the ground floor, make them feel as invested as those behind the scenes, when really it's just theatrics. When deadlines have been missed, reactions have been negative, because it displays a clear lack of understanding for what the team believes they are capable of and undermines the supposed 'trust' they've imbued to the player by flaunting these expectations in the first place. This isn't a matter of debate or interpretation; this is the clear and present effect that the introduction of 'Roadmap culture' has had on the consumer/developer relationship. Retroactively claiming that your roadmap is somehow atypical to that and that players must be morons for not clocking in on this division is not only insulting, it's disingenuous. 

But here's the part that really rubs me the wrong way, and the phrasing which makes me honestly believe this message was at least partly transcribed by a peeved Chris himself. "there still remains a very loud contingent of Roadmap watchers who see projections as promises. And their continued noise every time we shift deliverables has become a distraction both internally at CIG and within our community, as well as to prospective Star Citizen fans watching from the sidelines at our Open Development communication." That is verbatim. I copied and pasted the words themselves because I wanted you to read them pure and untouched. Needless to say, it's taking a lot of self control not to start swearing right now. This, right here, is the height of condescending and even breaking that down seems like I'm undermining everyone's intelligence. But trust me when I say I'm doing this for me, not to disgrace you. So, referring to critics within your circle of consumers (because you need to own a version of the game to be part of the forums) as 'noise' and dismissing them as 'Roadmap watchers', is a betrayal to people who have donated money, time and belief in this project and just want to see it be realised as the best it can be. Chris has no superiors, no producers, no one to tell him to pull up his socks and come together (which, historically, every project he's worked on has desperately needed in order to actually release) and all he is required to do is treat paying members of his own fanbase with basic human respect, and he can't even manage that. They're "distraction"s. And worst of all, their good-faith criticism gains attention whenever a new eye looks upon the Star Citizen project and says "Oh this looks coo- oh wait, it seems they've failed to hit their development objectives repeatedly for years on end. Maybe I'll hold off on that purchase." If I wasn't so sure Chris was a hopeless dreamer, he'd fit the archetype of a opportunist scammer so well.

Everything that Chris Roberts has helmed in the past has been over budget or late, Star Citizen is both, and has been for a very long time now. From here on out, Star Citizen is going to stop publishing roadmaps and focus only on the next update, and were this the proclamation of a proven and put-together developer who has shown they can go through this beta process timely and deliver high quality outputs before (like Larian Studios) then I would have no problem with that. We're talking about a poorly managed machine with a broken navigation module, and now we won't even be able to probably chart when they're going off course anymore because the team have chosen to hide it from us. 'We'll take the free funding money, but we're going to hold off on the accountability, thanks.' At the end of the day, nothing real is going to change. Star Citizen will vacuum in the sick investment dollars, those who wake up from the dream-spell Chris has them under will be quickly replaced by other useful rubes and Star Citizen will continue to miss development window after development window in perpetuity. It's the circle of crappy management, and it disappoints us all.

The Rise of Star Citizen

Aim for the stars and you'll hit... something...

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.