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.

Star Citizen management sucks?

I don't know which 'fake shock gif' to use.

I went for Joseph Joestar.

Star Citizen. My god it's been a while hasn't it? Well, I mean it's been a long time since I did a blog which really went to task on the goings on over at Cloud Imperium Games. And that has been because of a couple of reasons. Firstly, that was because I didn't really come across anything worth talking about, they've been decently controversy free for the year (perhaps conspicuously so) and secondly because I just covered them so extensively in my first couple of blogs. The one's were I looked at their Rise and Fall. (Make sure you put some time aside if you want to read them, they're a doozy.) No, it would take something truly scandalous to get my attention again, something that either changes my mind 180 or simply bookends that which I've researched about them so far. (Today I'm looking at the latter kind of story, if you couldn't tell.) So buckle up as we take a look at a rather tangible, and pretty upsetting, example of how the mismanagement which defines CIG as a studio effects the world outside their game too.

So perhaps you remember a little bit of an natural disaster happening over the winter. No? In Texas? The whole sudden snowstorm which rocked a state that was totally unprepared for it? Basically it was like any winter over in the UK, during which everything grinds to a halt like this doesn't happen every year, except that core chunks of infrastructure were specifically built under the assumption that this wouldn't happen. State-wide construction standards typically designed all residential homes with methods to shed heat, great for the hot summers but potentially deadly for this snow storm, roads were inoperable for longer than one would like thanks to there being not enough anti-snow vehicles and materials to hand, and the power grid was knocked off course thanks to both the blizzard and the fact that Texas rocks an entirely independent grid from the rest of the country, meaning a few setbacks would bring the entire place offline with no backups. Safe to say, it was a terrible winter over there and it resulted in people losing heating for days, having their homes flooded from burst pipes and, in the worst of cases, dying. Serious stuff.

And that sort of makes you wonder what a game studio like Cloud Imperium Games has to do with things, doesn't it? Well, as I mentioned in that Rise blog I linked to, back in February 2013 Cloud Imperium opened up an Austin branch, meaning that they, alongside many other prominent game studios, had employees in the crosshairs of this natural disaster. What a conundrum. There's no stricter test of one's worth than placing them in situations of emergency, and as an employer who's expected to look after those under their company name, there come certain responsibilities that need to be met. Other studios like Aspyr, Certain Affinity and Owlchemy labs halted operations completely, aware that this week it was of much more import for their employees to focus on keeping their families warm and fed. EA and Gearbox didn't stop everything ('Too big to fail' as Activision is fond of saying) but they did put up employees in hotels, deliver them supplies and check in with them to ensure, you know, that they were safe. CIG on the otherhand, did none of that. And "why" is the question on everyone's lips right now.

Yes, during the snowfall in Texas employees were treated to the ultimatum from management that they had to either make their way into work, or figure out to make it up to in the meanwhile. (It almost sounds like a mafia movie when I phrase it like that, doesn't it?) Some sources that reached out to the news claimed that they were outright told to consider entering paid over time if they absolutely could not make it into the office or work from home. That's right, rather than try and reach out and help their staff through this troubling time, management did the rounds cracking the whip and keeping people sweating. It would be a couple of weeks before top brass could reach out through email about the situation, thanks to the state-wide Internet blackouts which, incidentally, made working from home pretty much impossible for a lot of folk; and when they were finally in touch, CIG used it as an opportunity to reinforce their stance on overtime and let everyone know that they weren't getting off the hook for this. You know, despite how every other industry in the state was trying to pick up the pieces as best they could. (Does CIG know something about the Texas storm that the rest of us don't?)

Of course this was ridiculous. Having to spend vacation days or go into overtime in order to make up the cost of a natural disaster is some dystopian 1984 kind of thing, unless CIG truly thinks that it's staff were living it up in the week they spent shivering in their homes hoping their sewer systems don't burst and try to flood them. (Talk about living the vacation dream!) All this smells suspiciously like CIG punishing their staff for trying to take a sicky, and according to some sources that is exactly what the impression was. Yeah, somehow the idea got around that the Austin office was taking a snow day and overblowing the effects of the storm, a perception which, apparently, lasted longer than the week of chaos. Do you believe that? Because I honestly don't. Even over here across the North Atlantic ocean I was aware of the situation in Texas by at least day 3, and I don't even have any employees in the state! The instant and interconnected state of world news makes ignorance a pretty tough pitch to sell, but then what's the alternative? Malice? Straight lack of a will to compromise? As I implied earlier, we can merely speculate.

For their part, CIG management at least came back with excuses on the 21st, offering that most ironclad of explainers in that "Oh my god, we didn't know, how terrible." It wasn't until the cult leader himself, Chris Roberts, got ahold of this that any promises of recompense were made, in that everyone would be paid. No word on whether or not he'd make plans to compensate any vacation days or overtime that staff felt pressured into entering, but I'm sure he will; they're all about damage control now. CIG have known about this pretty big blunder for a few weeks now and have been trying to reach out individually to staff to 'check up' whilst, I imagine, slipping a little bit of the "but we don't really need to tell anyone about this, now do we?" But it seems too late, as the story is now out there and it a fair number of staff have been more than ready to throw their management under the bus for being clueless and unhelpful in a time when there really was no excuse to be.

Cloud Imperium Games is a surprising company to see in one of these controversies, I must say, because outside of the hairbrained way they've been making their money-black-hole of a game; I've never really heard of any huge internal blunders like this coming out of them. I mean sure, there's been the odd accusation of nepotism considering how many of Roberts close friends are in important roles, but those accusations are typically being made from the outside and I certainly don't know enough about his family to comment on who's qualified for what role. And yet in the same breath I find it hard to believe a studio the size of CIG (Around 500 staff) couldn't have known about one of the biggest natural disasters of the year so far. Which leads me to believe that they undersold it to themselves purposefully out of some learned stubbornness in order to justify forcing staff into pushing themselves and either to ignore personal responsibilities or simply pass the buck in perpetuity. That's just my theory on the matter, but it certainly seems to make more sense right now than any official statements.

The only thing I can't reconcile in my brain after all of this is what the hurry was to push their Austin staff so. They've been working on the same game for the better part of the last decade and have proven how easy it is to raise more funds if things get dire by simply skewering their future in-game economy by releasing a new preorder 'megaship' and feeding off their backer's lifeforce. CIG doesn't have to answer to investors, (or at least, not to the same degree as other developers do) they don't have to answer to the community, (their cult shields them from criticism) perhaps somewhere along the way the big wigs decided they didn't even have to answer to themselves either. Take this flash of dystopian corporatism as a prelude and it spells a dark future for every industry, when employees are treated like soulless work horses and worked tirelessly without care. Or maybe I'm being hyperbolic and this was all a huge misunderstanding. Let me know where you fall on all this, I'm still undecided.

My love/hate relationship with the almighty hype train

Hype, the final frontier

We've all been there; anxiously nashing their teeth in the wake of the upcoming release of the latest series of your favourite show, a new exciting movie or, to keep things on-brand, that new video game that's caught your eye and captured your imagination. In the right circumstances it can be a wondrous time where myth and legend swirl your mind as though anything can happen and you're expecting it all. Perhaps the mystery is what grabs you or perhaps you know exactly what to expect and just need it to be here now else you won't ever quite feel complete. Although it can also be a time of soared expectations and inevitable disappointments, wherein all that waiting and anticipation is doomed to result in a mediocre reception on release day, and you partially have yourself to blame for that. This, in a nutshell, is the dichotomous hype train. Toot Toot.

As one becomes ingrained in a community or a 'fandom' around a specific field of interest, it seems inevitable that you'll also catch the hype bug. In relation to gaming, if you're a fan of exploring worlds and playing new games then it's inevitable that you'll eventually hear an idea or concept for something upcoming that tickles the old taste buds. Typically, this might result in you thinking about that new title in your mind and trying to envision what secrets it might hold, where the developers might expand upon their previous works and how great it will feel to get your hands on. (Yes, I know I just defined 'Hype' to you. No, I will not apologise, I couldn't help myself.) This is good for developers and publishers, because it means that they've provided a suitable enough amount of marketing and presented it well enough to ingrain an idea into your head, and at it's most basic level that's the ultimate goal of all marketing. Hype is what allows for creatives to keep the excite for their games alive from the time of announcement to the time of launching without showcasing every little secret that game has to offer, it can make communities self perpetuating and fan-bases last decades but, as I hinted at, it can also have a negative impact too.

As Steven Spielberg was well aware of during the creation of 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind', and Chris Chibnall seemed pigheadedly unaware of during the crafting of Doctor Who season 12; the power of imagination is a story telling machine without peer. The whole expression 'less is more' is built around that truth and as such many writers and story tellers know that when it's possible it is much more effective to leave an open mystery than it is to close that gap, because nothing you can write will ever be better than what the reader can envision in their mind's eye. Unfortunately, imagination is the same fuel that 'the Hype Train' runs on, and that can lead to some substantial problems down the line. (Is the 'train' analogy getting old yet? I don't think it's old yet.) Hype forms around the mystery of the unknown, and when imagination is allowed to swell untempered, it can create an idealised expectation in someone's mind that will never be matched by the final product, leading to inevitable disappointment. For a gaming example of this just look to 'No Man's Sky' which was a title who's premise ran away with itself when the audience fell in love with it. (I mean, it didn't help that Sony were hoisting the title up as the next coming of Christ.) The Hype proved so infectious that even Hello Games caught it when crafting their trailers full of things that they hadn't yet been implemented, but the team just assumed that they'd get around to them, and their CEO Sean Murray, who went around to every single press event on the planet earth confirming features about the game that were still in the 'talks' stage. (Many of which were dropped.) And we all know what eventually happened with that game... it's kinda good now, but it took several years to get there.

Personally, I have experience with both sides of that Hype Train. (Although I'm so stingy that I rarely end up getting lumped with 'Buyer's remorse'.) Although this is likely not my actual first, the first time I remember being hopelessly caught up in hype-mania was all the way back in 2011 during the lead-up to Skyrim. Or to be accurate, in 2010 not too long after that year's E3. For reasons that would be too long to get into (Although I'd personally attribute it to the talented writing skills of Andy Farrant.) Skyrim was the first fantasy product that I really gelled with in a serious way. I read the preview about this game probably hundreds of times over and the second that I saw Bethesda's E3 presentation for that year I was wholly sold on the product. From that point onward I was literally marking down every single day until that game's release and absolutely could not function every day without it. (Which, considering that the game came out in November, likely means I knocked at least a decade off my life expectancy with all that anticipating.) On the day of the game's launch, which I had actually preordered for (Yes, that was my first Pre-order.) I ended up getting a detention in English which almost tore my soul from my body. I had waited this long, only to be held up over some missing homework? (Safe to say, I never looked that particular teacher in the eye ever again.) But when I finally got my hands on the game, at least I was satisfied. (Hell, I still play Skyrim, so the hype worked out for me I guess.)

However things don't always go that... Well? (Could that story be considered as 'going well'?) and sometimes all we are left is are products which we got our hopes up for only to have them be callously crushed by the hand of reality. For that there are so many examples off the top of my head; Watch_Dogs, Assassin's Creed: Unity, Ghost Recon Wildlands, The Di- what do you mean I'm focusing entirely on Ubisoft games? Oh right... And Fallout 76. Whilst I cannot say that I personally was sold on all of these games hook-line-and-sinker, I definitely know of certain groups of people who were and consequently were gutted when those games failed to deliver. I will say that I did have my hopes up for Wildlands, so that one honestly did get to me. (I even dared to hope for Fallout 76, fool that I am.) So with this possibility in mind the question that I'm left is simple; is the concept of 'hype' worth the fuss?

One of the things that I love about 'hype' is it's ability to unite people over the love of a shared medium and/or product. I don't go out much today, but back when I had to I found myself occasionally drawn into unexpected conversations with people that I would never typically rub shoulders with. I remember going back and forth about the possibilities of Hyrule Warriors and that exciting teaser for the game that would eventually come to be known as 'Breath of the Wild', and it was Hype which facilitated that sort of discourse. Additionally, Hype allows us to get excited about the realm of gaming even when there's nothing coming out, in fact, for the last 20-odd years gamers have only made it through Summer because of hype, with those months typically being devoid of all except that year's E3. And I think that as long as one remembers to stay realistic than there's no harm in making guesses about what a future game could hold, it's actually quite fun.

But by that same merit it is all too easy for hype to descend into something less healthy once it becomes an obsession. Games which are announced too early or which fall into a development nightmare are often infamous for relying purely on hype to keep things alive, which can be a huge detriment in the long run. Fans find themselves building up their idealised version of the game to the point where they become irrational and inconsolable. Just look at Disney's tenure with the Star Wars franchise. They piggybacked off of the original trilogy of films which, by that point, was nearly 40 years old. Logically, there was no way they could continue that story in any way that could be satisfactory so the quality of the next two titles were practically inevitable. (One could argue how that's no excuse for how bad they ultimately were, but that's neither here nor there.) Some games are still stuck on that hype train and have a army of fans following them that have practically been driven to the limits of their sanity because of it, just look at the Star Citizen community. Those people truly believe that Cloud Imperium is on the verge of delivering the next gaming revolution despite all evidence to the contrary, and at this point it feels like those folk are too far gone to consider otherwise. They invested so much themselves, whether that be emotionally or financially, that they can't fathom looking at the dumpster fire that they've jumped into else they'll realise that they wasted all of that investment.

So is the 'Hype Train' good for the gaming world? Yes and No. I'd argue that a little bit of hype is great for any upcoming project, and half of the fun of creating a cool name game is figuring out how to inspire the imagination of your audience with it, so no harm no foul. However, just like with all things in life, over exposure leads to dependence and that is a relationship that is ultimately beneficial to no one. As you can see, I find it hard to come down on one side of this issue and that just might be the point; how could you possibly do anything about the concept of people getting excited, even if it is ultimately wrong? Well, you could do a 'Lena Luthor' and strip everyone of emotions that you consider to be 'unhealthy' through Project Non Nocere, (Jesus Christ, I just made a 'Supergirl' reference. Please kill me.) or you could just except that hype happens and just search for a way to come to terms with that. Either way, I won't stop hyping up Resident Evil 3 next month and the Internet won't stop hyping up Cyberpunk this October, so we all better just suck it up.

The Fall of Star Citizen

From the height of pride

Star Citizen is vary peculiar topic in the gaming industry, especially now. Cloud Imperium Games seems to have been working on this single title for as long as Cyberpunk 2077 has been a thing, and yet they both enjoy very different relationships with the mainsteam gaming community. Cyberpunk 2077 feel like it has been showered with nothing but celebration since it released that 2018 gameplay after years of doubt and uncertainty, whislt for Star Citizen it seems to be the exact inverse, for years everyone who knew of this project sang it's praises and inundated it with funding, only recently have people come around and started to wonder where that money has got to.

Maybe one of the key differentiators between the two games is that fact that Cyberpunk was never a publicly funded game, and so the public felt less attached to it's development. When the game was looking elusive, we could all just feel sorry for the poor sap paying for all this. With Star Citizen, the community are the poor saps paying for all this; so when, after close to a decade, we have a project that has failed to deliver little more than a feature-poor and buggy alpha, questions start to be asked. For the part of the Star Citizen community that doesn't practise the arts of mass ignorance, one important question seems to float around: is the delay behind Star Citizen due to nefarious actions or just plain incompetence? Let's take a look at the evidence and form out own opinion.

Before I dive into the seedier parts of Star Citizen, let me give you a little reminder on what the game is. I know that my entire last blog was about that, but the definition I'm about to provide you with is an important one, as it is one offered by project lead and CIG CEO Chris Roberts himself. I want you to keep this in the back of your mind as I go through all the nonsense surrounding this game, okay? Take it away Chris: "Star Citizen is an epic first person experience spanning hundreds of solar systems, where players can fly highly detailed spaceships, battle on-foot through massive space stations, explore life-size planets and discover adventure in an ever expanding and changing galaxy."

Let us start our adventure into Star Citizen by talking about its building blocks, we're going to get into the game's engine. For those unaware, an engine is a collection of systems and programs that are put together in a package to allow for easier development. Most games companies lack the resources to create their own development tools from scratch, and so they licence out popular engines to serve as the backbone for their game. Some of the most prevalent today are Frostbite (Known for being pretty but un-malleable), Unity (Known for being intuitive and diverse), Unreal (Known for it's incredible versatility) and CryEngine (Known for powering that one game that still runs awful 12 years later. It's also kinda good looking, I guess.)

Back during the original pitch for Star Citizen, Chris showed of his impressive (and in my opinion, campaign securing) early test gameplay on a modified CryEngine. At the time this made sense, he wanted to create a story-based space epic. CryEngine might be a little unwieldy for the task but the results would be a game that looked stunning. Later on this became more contentious, as more and more features were piled onto the 'to-do' list and the game began to change shape, suddenly CryEngine seemed to look more like a hindrance.

CIG would never admit to it, (That would mean being forthcoming to the fans that you promised to treat like publishers. Unheard of!) but Chris has let slip that some of their development woes, aside from netcode, have been around retooling the engine to create a game that it wasn't designed to make. I won't pretend to be a game development expert, but I do have a little experience with poor management; pigheadedly trying to make a rectangle fit through a circle hole seems to qualify. CryEngine became such a barrier for CIG that had to hire CryTek staff to help them retool the engine to make it more suitable. The biggest problem, however, is the plain fact that the engine struggles when it comes to networking. This wouldn't have been a problem in 2011, but now Chris was making a pseudo-MMO with unimaginable, (and seeming unobtainable) scope, solid Networking is kind of a necessity to that end.

At some point in development Star Citizen switched from CryEngine to Amazon's Lumberyard (A few years ago when CryTek were hard up for money, they sold the rights for Amazon to create their own engine using CryEngine as a basis. Amazon made it and then sold it essentially for free, undercutting CryTek.) CryTek sued Star Citizen for breech of agreement whilst Star Citizen affirmed that they did nothing wrong. Whoever is ultimately right, bad blood and mistrust was strewn from the event.

So why, oh why, would Roberts cripple his development staff for so long by handing them mismatched tools? Well the answer to that is the core issue to why Star Citizen undergoes so many delays. You see, Chris suffers from two distinct character traits that, when combined, equal a serious leadership flaw. He is both temperamental and a perfectionist. Chris will die behind a decision he made one day before changing his mind the next. (I'm being a tad hyperbolic with my timescale there, but you get the picture.) Chris choose CryEngine because he is really wants his game to be pretty (In a manner that is future proofed) and he stuck by the choice until the game was too far along for them to implement a sensible replacement. (Hah, Star Citizen being 'too far along'. There's a laugh.)

The man is obsessed with beauty and scale to a degree that seems to indicate that the he does not understand the shallowness of either. In one demo I saw, Chris pointed to a crater on one of the content-less moons that he decided to show off and boasted how 'all of Skyrim' would fit in that crater. This showed off both Chris' shallowness and insecurity. When he announced his game, it was the same year that Skyrim released; a game would go onto reshape what an video game open world should feel like, in a manner that not even Bethesda have been able to recapture. The world was brimming with life, people, interactivity and so many fantastic quests. Now that Sky Citizen is shaping up to be open world all in itself, Chris is determined to prove that his game can eclipse that game, even if only in pure size. But scale is more than just making a huge playspace, just look at No Man's Sky or DayZ, or even Daggerfall; all are physically larger gameworlds than Skyrim but all lack the authenticity and heart of Skyrim.

His perfectionism comes into play in the way that he insists on over designing every aspect of his world. Some people might remember how, in the highly-staged Star Citizen planetary demo, Chris bragged about modelling the engine behind the ship's panelling.The obvious question here being, why? Knowing how each ship works is great when you're trying to build a convincing science fiction story, and those are the kind of details that definitely belong in the lore, but when we're talking about modelling things that no one will ever see, you are just wasting time and money. Just like when they scrapped every asset from the original trailer so that they could be remade under Chris' new guidelines for what looked cool or realistic (Whichever design philosophy had his attention that particular day) And if you think I'm dropping undue responsibility at Chris' feet here, just look at concept art that they published in their JUMP point newsletter; almost every drawing has written feedback from Chris personally. I understand the desire to be the sole architect, I honestly do, but it takes a village to build an entire universe.

But Chris' over ambition is only one aspect of development, CIG has unfortunately undergone other major woes. One such being the noticeable absence of, what should have been, one of Star Citizens key module: Star Marine. Back in 2014, Chris teased off the zero-g first person combat that he believed would be polished enough to stand toe to toe with the likes of Battlefield and Call of Duty. (Series' that have history in mastering every aspect of gunplay.) The module didn't release on it's due date and everyone at CIG just became radio silent on the matter. Turns out this module was quietly delayed for reasons that were never officially addressed, but we can speculate.

As I mentioned in yesterday's blog, Star Marine was being outsourced to IllFonic so that CIG could focus on all their other projects. But who is IllFonic? Well, they're best known for designing the co-op for a little game called Sonic Boom. Yes, you read right. Sonic Boom. The game infamous for being one of the most broken, laggy and unplayable experiences of all time. IllFonic had a hand in that. In their defence they did work on one FPS; the remake of NEXUS. Although that game was terrible too, so hold the applause. Both those games did use CryEngine however, (Albeit poorly.) so Chris likely reached out due to their familiarity with the engine. What happened from there is anyone's guess, but I think it is safe to say that the product likely didn't reach Chris' standards in time to hit the release window. The mode did come out, however. In December. 2016. "What were the fan's recompense for having to wait 2 years past the due date?" you may wonder. A really crappy, poorly optimized, shooting module. (Who'd have guessed?)

With how much time and money that Star Citizen seems to burn, you might be wondering how they manage to keep the project afloat. (Or not considering they've made $250 000 000) Well, lucky for them, CIG have a game plan for that regard. Remember how, in the last article, I mentioned that backers who ponied up could guarantee ownership of fancy new ships for themselves? CIG certainly remembered how many people bought it these virtual preorders despite having no idea when they would receive that reward. They figured out that they could pump up their capital whilst feeding tiny bits of content to assure the masses of the health of development, thus was borne the ship market.

From this marketplace the Devs could, and did, sell the digital rights to concept ships and stacks of money that weren't yet in existence. Players spent real money to get their foot in the door and buy up the fastest and most feature complete ships, before the next 'best ship ever' was announced. To you and I, the downsides of a industry like this seem apparent and we couldn't imagine something like this going for a year, let alone 8. But the Star Citizen community are indeed a peculiar bunch. For their part, I will say that CIG were certainly aware of what kind of optics this practise would invite, unfortunately this just encouraged them to be more sneaky.

The most well-known of Star Citizen's controversies is an example of their underhandedness. A while ago, CIG decided to sell a heap of ships together that consisted of what was then the best the game had to offer. (We're talking endgame content.) Titled: The Legatus Ship Pack, buyers could look forward to 117 ships (When the game finally launched) and 163 extras. "Oh" you may think "That sounds like a good deal!" To which I would have to implore that you halt your credit card transaction to hear the price. You see, CIG knew that this deal would cause chaos out in the public so the hid it in a place where the thought they were safe, inside of the RSI site behind a log-in wall. Not just a log-in wall, but a requirement for that user to have already spent $1000 towards Star Citizen already. (Which labels you as a 'Concierge tier' backer) Those lucky few were given the opportunity to buy this special pack for... $27 000. (Huh. Guess I see where Respawn get their business model.)

How can all this stand? I find myself asking that time and time again. This a project that demands millions from it's backers and has yet to show anything impressive, even after 8 years. Under a publisher, Star Citizen would have been cancelled years ago as soon as the money men realized that it was going nowhere. Luckily, Chris has a fanbase full of the disillusioned to keep feeding him money until the company can cobble together something complete. (Probably by 2025) Don't believe me? Just look at anyone who criticizes the game or wonders where the content is, they are either belittled or ignored by the 'serious fans'. I understand that this is how the 'hardcore' of any fanbase operates, but when we talking about people who have significantly invested in a project like this, I feel like every concern needs to be heard.

Many who approach Star Citizen are put off by, not only how rough everything released is, but how cult-ish the fanbase appears to be. They praise every bit of content dropped by CIG like it's the greatest thing since sliced bread and will trip over themselves to make excuses whenever the team display their incompetence or mismanagement. People in this community operate with such heavy blinders on, that when Chris claims that the game will be feature complete by 2019 so that they can move onto on alpha (Before hitting Beta by the end of 2020) they actually buy up this nonsense and commend the man for his leadership.

At the end of the day this all comes back to the 'Sunk cost fallacy', just like it always does with projects like this. When No Man's Sky was in the height of it's hype, there were people or would fight tooth and nail against any potential skeptic because they had already invested themselves emotionally within the product. They believe that if they were to soften their stance or peer at the game objectively, then all the emotion they put in would be wasted. It is the same philosophy that has people commit to relationships that aren't going anywhere and the same things that keeps Star Citizen's community so vitriolic against criticism. Only, for them it is much worse as their ties to the game are not just emotional, they're financial. Who would want to admit that they've spent $27 000 on a game that is little more than vaporware? That sort of truth would be enough to drive anyone insane.

This also means that those who 'break free of the conditioning' so to speak, are usually the harshest of critics who have the most damning of theories. Some believe Star Citizen to be the largest kickscammer (To borrow DJ Slopes' terminology) of all time. And the evidence that they provide certainly seems interesting. Back when the game was first slated for a 2014 release,  Chris left a line in the Terms of Service that promised that if the project when 2 years overdue, then they would release their financial records to show exactly where money was being spent. As you can imagine, when 2016 rolled around, the TOS was gutted and that line was left on the cutting room floor. So that's the smoking gun, right? The whole thing must be a scam.

Only, not quite. You see, somehow, impossibly, Cloud Imperium Games' incompetence struck once again and the financials were released two years late. (How is that even freakin' possible? How can you be that terrible at hitting dates?) Conspiracy theorists claim that this was a ploy to draw attention away from the outside funding that Chris was securing from selling 18,500 shares to a company called the 'infa-trade group corporation', (For advertising purposes. Yeah right.) which is generally a faux pas for kickstarters. They're probably right too, but I still have a hard time believing that the whole project is consequently nefarious. Just a brief glance at the (apparently incomplete) financials seems to indicate that CIG are not performing some elaborate money laundering scheme but are simply burning more money than any creative endeavour in history. (Second only to Destiny and Waterworld.)

"You're just being alarmist." Some will say. "Sure the game is taking a while, but that doesn't mean that the game is spiralling out of control. How many games have you made? Because Chris made a ton!" And those people are absolutely right, Chris did make a ton of games back in the day, hence why he self identifies as a 'legend'. His experience in the industry, as well as in life, far eclipses my own and I'm sure he knows a lot more than I do about a great many topics. However, I do a little bit about a lot topics, one of which happens to be Chris' career. You see, whilst Chris has made many great Space sims in the past, the Wing Commander franchise doesn't quite resemble the kind of game that Star Citizen has become, (in concept.) so the comparison seems moot. However, Chris did work on one game that does seem to be a progenitor to Star Citizen.

When talking about Chris Roberts' achievements I left out one game that people always bring up: Freelancer. This is because I wanted to talk about all the man's unreserved success' and although most like to count that game among his number, the truth is actually more murky. You see, Freelancer started development back in 1997 under Robert's company: Digital Anvil. He had enjoyed all the success that Wing Commander had garnered him but he wanted to push the boundaries of game design with his next game and achieve the unimaginable. Chris wanted to create a persistent universe that featured a self driven economy that could be influenced by the player, AI driven factions that would make large sweeping political changes independent from interaction, the ability to visit large interactive planets and a variety of MMO like mechanics and infrastructure (Before MMOs had become the craze that they would.) All of this would be ontop of the Single player campaign that they were designing.

When they announced the game for a 2000 released date, everyone was totally blown away by what Chris promised with Freelancer. Sure, graphically the game looked rough (As outlets pointed out) but with the scope of the game in question, most were quick to forgive that. Unfortunately, the game wouldn't come out in the year 2000 because of development issues, and the fact that Chris kept adding features and shifting the goal posts. Microsoft eventually entered the conversation when the game was a year overdue, massively over budget and lacking the funds to finish what Digital Anvil had started. Microsoft bought the company and ousted Chris from the director's chair. He stayed on as a 'Creative consultant', but his input was likely mostly ignored as Microsoft stripped away a lot of his overly-ambitious systems and got the game functional. The game finally launched in 2003 to favourable reviews but Chris wouldn't return to the gaming world until he showed up in 2011 with a demo and a dream.

It seems that scope creep and technological limitations held Chris back from developing his dream game, but surely things will be different now, won't they? Well, Chris has self imposed the technical limitations by choosing CryEngine and the ever-shifting face of the game is indicative of scope creep; as I guess history is in the process of repeating itself. Even cold hard logic isn't enough to get through to the community however, as you'll just get hit with a "Don't be a Derek?"

When I first read that comment, I was immediately taken aback. 'That's rude' I thought, 'I'm sure there are many decent people named Derek. I mean I don't know any personally but...' then I looked it up and learnt the meaning behind the 'insult'? Derek Smart is another self proclaimed 'legend' (Is anyone not a legend at this point?) who is known for being a controversial figure, I guess. People say he's rude and 'outspoken', but personally I've seen few examples, so he couldn't have said anything bad enough to warrant quoting. He's a fellow with industry experience who also backed Star Citizen (at the $250 tier) and is a heavy critic of Chris and the game.

From what I have been able to dig up, Derek seems to be one of the individuals who believes in the 'Star-Citizen-is-a-scam' theory and pushes it through his own personal blog. He has called for an FTC investigation into their financials and had his RSI account terminated and issued a refund against his wishes. (Likely due to the whole 'FTC thing'.) When questioned about the decision, CGI responded: "It was obvious he was not a supporter of our project and was just using our visibility as a platform to gain attention and promote his current game and his past games. We have strict rules about people using our forums and chat for self-promotion and it was clear that he didn’t care about the project, or the backers, or a good game being made. He was just trying to create a huge fuss to make himself relevant at a lot of other people's expense and distress. So we enacted our rights through Kickstarter (that we also have on our own TOS) and refunded him and turned his account off."

Personally I have to 'press-x-to-doubt' on the accusation that Derek was promoting his own game through their forums. Firstly, Derek's games aren't that good (No offence) so there's not much to promote and; Secondly, CIG have a history of nuking comments of people who raise issues of contention with the project. Derek believes that this is the real reason behind CIG's retribution as he shared with the press. "They want me not as a backer, as that weakens any legal action that I initiate or become a part of, since I'm the only person on the planet capable of completely destroying their dev nonsense with regard to the game. In other words, I'm voted most likely to cause trouble." Then he also took the opportunity to highlight another issue that exists within the game's ecosystem "When you have an account on RSI, they convey ownership of those [in-game] items, which is why the grey market exists. I own all those items. I can sell them, trade them, etc., because on the RSI service, they are owned. I could fly them in Arena Commander, view them in hangar, etc. So yeah, I paid for them, and own them. Now they took them away without my asking. And I wasn't selling any items which would give them cause to take them as a violation [of the TOS]."

I have ragged on CIG heavily in this blog, although I think it is fair to offer both sides. Although that is difficult given that they ignore most points of criticism, there was one point at which they were confronted with, what I believe to be, the core issue behind Star Citizen's development on a medium in which they couldn't just nuke the account from orbit; an interview. When talking about the prospect of feature creep, this is what their spokesperson offered. "I don’t have much to say to this, beyond that it’s not accurate. At this point, we are not adding additional features to the plan, we’re building out the ones we’ve already scheduled. I’ve seen some recent posts about how Chris’ “first person universe” is at odds with the original Kickstarter-era plan… and that’s again not the case. It’s a more recent way of describing what he wants to accomplish, but everything we’re working on is still what was pitched back then: Privateer-style persistent universe, Squadron 42 single player game, first person boarding and so on. (A desire to avoid feature creep is exactly why we stopped doing stretch goals, despite being aware that they drive revenue.)”

So that's it, the sordid tale of Star Citizen, laid bare for all to see. With all the evidence in hand and everything laid bare, I'm still unable to deduce whether or not this is the greatest scam of all time or the biggest crowdfunded flamingo-up of all time. In my heart of hearts, I want to believe that Chris Roberts is just a man with an incredibly lofty dream, history seems to support that, but I would lying if I said that I believed the man had what it takes to bring that dream to life. In a couple of years, Star Citizen will have joined the ever exclusive club of games stuck in a decade of development hell, and then it'll be matter of time to see if the final product ends up more like Final Fantasy XV or Duke Nukem: Forever.

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.