As we all know, Star Citizen is a game that has taken years to get to its current state. Even so, the game is still not complete. Initially, Star Citizen took to Kickstarter to raise the funds needed to create the game but far exceeded its original goal, raising just under the $150,000,000 mark. All of this has been made possible through crowdfunders, but currently no one even knows when the game will be released.
Star Citizen’s developers have so far been constantly adding content to the title, spending more money rather than releasing the game years ago and adding new content through patches and updates. Now, Chris Roberts of Star Citizen has issued a newsletter basically pleading for yet more money to continue developing the game. The actual quotes from this newsletter can be seen below.
“If you look back on the initial campaign promises and stretch goals, we only promised to put a small team together to investigate Procedural Technology for the game, not to dramatically expand the game by making every planet and moon explorable. But because of the continued support, we were not only able to hire the world class team we have in Frankfurt, and then allow them to make rapid progress in developing technology that will deliver Crysis-quality planets, we were also able to make the decision to go all in and deliver fully realized worlds and moons to visit and explore.”
Chris Roberts then goes on later in the newsletter to say:
“The ability to land and explore any planet or moon opens up a new set of challenges if we want to maintain the incredible attention to detail that is Star Citizen’s trademark. Our goal with Star Citizen is that every location, every star system feels like it exists holistically in a universe with palpable history. We can’t rely on magic formulas to do this; we want human hands guiding the creation. And when you can explore a whole planet or moon, having just one landing location or point of interest doesn’t sell the promise of the incredible new universe that this new tech will allow, so we think about ways we can add additional content and points of interest; Outposts, wrecks, small settlements, farms, mining facilities, abandoned ruins and so on. While we are building tools to help the artists and designers build worlds as efficiently as possible, ecosystems still need to be created, modular building sets made, props built, VFX and sound created. Each of these elements takes months of work to design in a reusable way while maintaining our level of fidelity.
“Most Sandbox games, aren’t trying to deliver a play area that has the scale or scope that we are going for. Most 1st person engines support a 128km2 patch of detailed landscape at most. We are aiming to deliver multiple star systems, populated with whole worlds and moons you can circumnavigate, all with living ecosystems and AI populations. The scale and detail we are going for is mind boggling.”
I, for one, hope that Star Citizen makes it to its release stage soon as I personally am very eager to play the game, as are many others. But at this moment in time, it feels like the Star Citizen developers are making fun of the gaming community who are parting with their hard-earned cash.