Star Citizen has had its fair share of criticism throughout its years of development due to the length at hand. Last week, YouTuber Camural made a video (seen below) critiquing the game’s atmospheric room system, a mechanic to assist with varying effects on the environment, which has been tweaked for four years now. Once Chris Roberts, the mastermind behind Star Citizen, responded about how the problem to the system is that “it takes longer to see results as opposed to scripting actions.” One response from the video creator later about how the space trading and combat game will take another 10 to 20 years in development, Roberts goes back into the forum for a lengthy response about the game’s development.
Roberts goes into how he wants Cloud Imperial Games to have transparency with its community. This is to “get better visibility into the hard choices that we face” and what each team is doing during the current development process.
He then goes into how the new roadmap was laid out at the beginning of the year, leading to some setbacks and a better guide for where to go in the future.
“The new format which tracks our 58 feature and content teams that work on Star Citizen and Squadron 42, will be able to show what each team is working on and if a new initiative like improving the cargo-hauling experience gets added you’ll see the tasks that get pushed back on the teams that will work on this new initiative,” he wrote. “As a point of data, these teams can be anywhere from 4 people to over 20 people and of the 58 teams only 11 are exclusively dedicated to Squadron 42 and 12 for Star Citizen and the rest are shared (things like graphics, engine, actor, vehicle, AI, VFX, sound and so on), although a lot of the priorities for things like actor, vehicle and AI are driven by what Squadron needs.”
Star Citizen continues to face criticism
The new system lets fans see what senior members of the studio see when it comes to what is being worked on. Roberts admits that the roadmap “won’t stop people from disagreeing with our priority calls” or stop people from criticizing “how long something takes.”
Towards the end of the post, he addresses the person responsible for the video that brought up this response in the first place.
“I sense from your reply to me that it’s the time taken and priorities that you’re frustrated with, as you feel like we’re focusing on the wrong things. I can see that point of view, but you’re looking at it from the outside without the full knowledge of exactly what it will take, and the order it needs to be done in to deliver the gameplay that will set Star Citizen above everything else. This is the game I’ve dreamed of my whole life. Now I am in a position to realize it, I am not willing to compromise it’s potential because it is taking longer than I originally envisioned.”
The game that Roberts and his team are aiming for is still in the works. To the creator, Star Citizen is “not a pipe dream, nor will it take 10 to 20 years to deliver.”
Star Citizen may get hit with criticism, but after being the most successfully crowdfunded video game project with $300 million, it continues to get updates. The latest patch, alpha 3.10.2, fixes various known issues and increased rewards to legal delivery objectives.
