Duke Nukem Forever. Half-Life 3. Beyond Good and Evil 2. And now – Star Citizen.
All of these games share something in common: inordinately long development cycles, wild overpromises, and failed expectations. But even among similar games that had troubled histories plagued with financial issues and other such setbacks, Star Citizen remains a unique case.
While the game appears to be progressing in its own deliberate – if slow – pace, new features are still being added to it. This resulted in a production that seems to be forever at odds with its own increasing scope and ambition – ensuing a project that, paradoxically, seems to be less complete the more work is done on it.
But to understand Star Citizen in all of its convoluted glory, we first have to go back to its very beginnings, to a time when space combat sims were all the rage – the early 1990s.
Chris Roberts and Wing Commander
Born in California in 1968, Chris Roberts grew up in England. Showing interest in video game design from an early age, he created several computer games for the BBC Micro. Upon returning to the United States in 1986, he soon found a job over at Origin Systems.
Home to many prominent video game designers at the time, such as Richard Garriott (creator of the Ultima series), Warren Spector (the director of Deus Ex, one of the best stealth games of all time), and John Romero (founder of id Software and the man who helped popularize the FPS genre with revolutionary titles like Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Quake), Origin was the ideal place for young Chris – one where his talents and the urge to innovate would be right at home.
After working on a couple of titles, he designed Origin’s most successful franchise – the eponymous Wing Commander. Taking advantage of rapid technological advancements, Wing Commander offered players the freedom to fly across space in 360-degree movement, engaging in thrilling dogfights against enemy spaceships.
WC is a seminal game in more ways than one – it helped establish space combat sims as a viable genre, but more importantly, in the words of fellow game designer Christopher Crawford, it: “Raised the bar for the whole industry.”
With a budget that was five times greater than the average title of the day, it could be argued that it had a hand in starting the gaming industry’s obsession with AAA titles and their ever-increasing development costs.
To illustrate just how important and profitable video games had become, Wing Commander 3 and 4 had FMV (full motion video) cutscenes – a fad at the time – featuring famous and accomplished actors: Mark Hamill (Star Wars), Malcolm McDowell (The Clockwork Orange), John Rhys-Davies (Lord of The Rings), Tom Wilson (Back to the Future), and more.
This culminated in a Wing Commander movie. Directed by Chris Roberts himself and starring teen heartthrob Freddie Prinze Jr., it was a complete critical and financial flop.
More space combat sims followed – the best of them being competitor LucasArts’ Star Wars: X-Wing and TIE Fighter titles. And, for a time, they were some of the most popular games around.
But, like with other genres of the 1990s which aren’t nearly as common (and commercial) today as they once were (looking at you, point and click adventure games), the end of the decade saw a rapid abandonment of this type of game.
Seeing the writing on the wall, Roberts left Origin in 1996. Since then, he worked on several games as a producer and writer (most notably – Freelancer) but soon turned his sights towards Hollywood movie production. He saw limited success in this field, his biggest. In 2011, he founded Cloud Imperium Games and proceeded to look into how his dream game might be funded.
Luckily for him, this was right at the time when crowdfunding became feasible, thanks to Double Fine’s Kickstarter project in 2012.
Star Citizen – The Crowdfunding Campaign
After Double Fine kickstarted the Kickstarter craze (pun intended), many companies were looking for ways to cash in on this sudden wave of nostalgia.
Projects promising “the return to classic gaming virtues of yore, made by a ‘Legendary Game Designer Who You’ve All Definitely Heard Of But Who Hasn’t Done Anything Worthwhile In A Long Time’” were popping left and right.
And so, in October 2012, Cloud Imperium Games simultaneously launched a crowdfunding campaign on their website and on Kickstarter that lasted until November 19th.
The campaign focused on all the right marketing beats and buzzwords: the revival of a beloved genre thought to be extinct, a spiritual successor to one of gaming’s most venerated franchises, completely PC-centric, fully independent and creator-driven and owned, wrapped in a lovingly-rendered open world that caters to your playstyle preferences and is shaped by your decisions.
The result – they raised $4,104,189 through the website and $2,134,374 on KS. But it didn’t stop there: by the middle of 2013, they had raised more than $15 million. This rose to just shy of $40 million in 2014 – which is also when the Guinness World Records officially named them as the “largest single amount ever raised via crowdsourcing”.
By August 15th of the same year, Chris Roberts boasted that they have passed the $50 million mark. In 2017, $150 was raised through crowdfunding alone. By the end of 2018, the project had more than two million backers that pledged $200 million.
With 2.4 million backers in December 2019, the project’s crowdfunded capital exceeded $250 million. And this is without taking into account all the outside private funding that the game has attracted.
All in all, Star Citizen is already one of the most expensive games of all time – right up there with Grand Theft Auto V – and it hasn’t even been released yet.
Squadron 42 and Star Citizen
Star Citizen isn’t only well-known for its numerous delays, but also for its decision to provide two distinct ways of playing the game. Squadron 42 is the true successor to Wing Commander – a singleplayer space sim where you are part of a military unit.
While Star Citizen is shaping up to be one of the best open-world games (or, more precisely – open universe games) out there, with its focus on free-roaming across a hundred star systems and freedom of choice (be a trader, a pirate, a fighter, etc.), SQ42 is comprised of story missions that advance the plot of the game.
Supposedly, when both parts of the game are released, you will be able to seamlessly switch from one to the other. If you aren’t interested in zooming around space and yearn for a more structured experience, then SQ42 is the game mode for you. But if you would rather not be bound by single-player limitations, the independence Star Citizen offers is likely a better fit.
Squadron 42’s beta is scheduled for release in the second half of 2020, but at this point – it would not be at all surprising if this ends up as yet another missed deadline. It will be released episodically – the first of three chapters will have an estimated 20 hours of playtime and about 70 playable missions.
Besides the dogfighting and FPS parts of the game, other features include a conversation system that will let you affect the relationship your character has with NPCs in the game, as well as a cooperative multiplayer mode that will let you play SQ42 alongside friends and family.
Squadron 42 Trailer
Even gamers who had, up to that point, been uninterested in Star Citizen, or those who had long since given up on the game, took notice with renewed interest once the trailer for Squadron 42 came out.
Featuring a star-studded ensemble cast with some of the same actors that already appeared in Wing Commander 3 and 4 (Mark Hamill and John Rhys-Davies) it also includes Hollywood powerhouses like Academy Award winner Gary Oldman (The Fifth Element), Gillian Anderson (The X-Files), Mark Strong (Shazam), Liam Cunningham (Game of Thrones), Andy Serkis (Lord of the Rings), and many more.
The trailer gives off a very polished, movie-like feel, not surprising considering that Chris Roberts personally directed these motion capture sequences in a studio built by the master of motion capture acting himself, Andy Serkis – better known to movie and epic fantasy lovers alike as Gollum from the Lord of the Rings.
The overall tone of the trailer immediately brings to mind the space opera ambiance of a game like Mass Effect – military personnel standing around looking severe and making grandiose speeches, fleets of spaceships poised to attack, alien races, futuristic weaponry, and breathtaking images of stars clusters and swirling nebula.
Star Citizen Controversies
Star Citizen has already seen its fair share of drama.
The most obvious (and continuous) issue is the feature creep. The game was initially supposed to be out in 2014. But, with so many new parts being added to it all the time – this is becoming an unattainable goal.
Chris Roberts himself has also come under fire. Many are accusing him of mismanaging the project, focusing on small and irrelevant details, instead of finishing up the core gameplay loop.
Out of a hundred promised star systems, only several planets and moons of the introductory first solar system have actually been completed. Chris promised that tech that will help automate this process is being worked on, but he has been known to be wrong before.
An example of Chris’ excessive micromanaging style comes in the form of former lead artist David Jennison’s leaked letter to HR, where he explained why it took him 17 months to finish only five characters.
He points to constant revisions and reversed approvals made by Roberts: “All the decisions for the character pipeline and approach had been made by Roberts. It became clear that this was a companywide pattern—CR dictates all.”
Star Citizen Funding
Another big issue is the way that the game is being funded. Because the project is burning through cash reserves at an alarming rate, other avenues of supplementary funding have been greenlit by Cloud Imperium Games’ co-founder Sandi Gardiner. Who is, incidentally, Chris Roberts’ wife.
A controversial figure on her own, Sandi is the head of marketing at CIG. Together with her husband Chris, they came up with a way to keep funding the game using a very ethically-dubious method – by selling spaceships. These models can sell for as high as $3.000 per spacecraft.
A common predatory practice across the gaming industry – where companies will deliberately target people who, for one reason or another (gambling addiction, or an obsessive compulsion to own every item/skin/model in the game, etc.) are going to spend exorbitant amounts of real-life money on a game. The industry has a name for these people – they call them whales.
CIG has even made new versions of existing ships and nudged the players into selling the old models so they can buy newer ones. Like any organization that wants to keep its customers spending more and more, they’ve concocted ways to make the players feel more special the more they buy.
If you spend $1000 on the game, you attain the rank of High Admiral. When you reach $10.000, your rank goes up to Wing Commander.
Sandi Gardiner sees no problem with this: “Nobody is obligated to buy more than just the starter ship. All of the marketing is done by the fans virally, and a lot of those ships are because the community has asked for them.”
To this date, the Federal Trade Commission has received over a hundred customer complaints, with consumers requesting refunds for sums in the tens of thousands of dollars, and often citing poor game optimization and a lack of content.
Roberts dismisses these allegations: “Star Citizen is a playable game. It has more functionality and content than a lot of finished games.”
Final Words
Though it may seem like we are being too hard on the game, we just want to provide the full picture before you opt into buying it. Many gamers who have played it are more than satisfied with it and the game is shaping up nicely.
But like with every game that’s been in development hell for as long as Star Citizen has been – the question becomes one of the expectations. Because, let’s face it, most crowdfunded projects are never as good as what their creators (and what we’ve) hyped it up to be.
Even so, we hope that Chris Roberts and his team will get it together, concentrate more on finishing the game than marketing it ad infinitum, and actually release Star Citizen one day. It is a project of almost unbridled ambition and technical wonder, and it would be a shame for it to end up vaporware.
One thing is certain, though – to play it the way a rich, complex game like that deserves, you will need a top of the line gaming PC.
Related: Best Star Wars Games of All Time