Inside the Troubled Development of Star Citizen

This is actually a pretty interesting( and extensive) article on SC, from Kotaku:

http://www.kotaku.co.uk/2016/09/23/inside-the-troubled-development-of-star-citizen

“It was clear that CryEngine wasn't up to the task,” the source continued. “CryEngine was a fine pick when $500,000 was all they were looking for and they needed tech to build a game on. You can't build your own engine for $500,000. But you can with $100 million. In order to make Star Citizen work it needs proprietary tech. A lot of what was happening was to do with rewriting CryEngine in order to make it do what was needed. That obviously slowed everything down.”

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Good thing they didn't start with Aurora.

This is one of those rare articles on Kotaku that do feel like a proper article and not like a random brag about journalist's pisspoor taste nor like a paid advertisments.

With errors. Star Citizen can't have been 5 years in development, if the money to make isn't in CIG hands before mid-November 2012 which isn't yet 4 years ago. The article also doesn't talk about how it is going after the organisational restructuring that happened in 2015.

Also, while people might think what happened is not normal, it actually normal multi-site software development shenanigans. I had/have all of those where I work in the last 9 years and most of them are still there despite taking step to resolve them.

Also, does anyone know a workplace where trying to act like you know better than the boss when you are the bottom of the hierarchy is a good idea?

joxer said:

Good thing they didn't start with Aurora.

This is one of those rare articles on Kotaku that do feel like a proper article and not like a random brag about journalist's pisspoor taste nor like a paid advertisments.

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No way...Gamebryo. Seeing a whole planet glitch out...priceless.

azarhal said:

Also, does anyone know a workplace where trying to act like you know better than the boss when you are the bottom of the hierarchy is a good idea?

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I think that'd be DrogerieMarkt. Against all odds, everyone who works there is super happy. Don't ask me why and how, I don't work for that company.

aaaand heres the next patch for ED
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/290122-Elite-Dangerous-2-2-Beta-is-live

azarhal said:

With errors. Star Citizen can't have been 5 years in development, if the money to make isn't in CIG hands before mid-November 2012 which isn't yet 4 years ago.

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According to Chris Roberts himself, it has been in development for five years.

You have stated that you expect to have an Alpha up and going in about 12 months, with a beta roughly 10 months after that and then launch. For a game of this size and scope, do you think you can really be done in the next two years?


Really it is all about constant iteration from launch. The whole idea is to be constantly updating. It isn’t like the old days where you had to have everything and the kitchen sink in at launch because you weren’t going to come back to it for awhile. We’re already one year in - another two years puts us at 3 total which is ideal. Any more and things would begin to get stale.

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Besides, he had investors lined up back then to drop $20 million on the project. It is also not too far-fetched to assume that he was a reasonably rich guy at the time. My personal impression is that those so called "investors" were in reality always him and Erin and maybe other friends and family but no outside investors.
Anyway, nearly all game development projects start small with a barebone crew working on concepts and the five year thing went undisputed by Chris Roberts so five years it is (yeah full production did not start until early 2013 but development launched in 2011 as per Chris himself).


Personally, I find the article balanced and fair. It explains a lot and -to me- confirms many suspicions I had about the possible reasons for the seemingly piss-poor project management.
They also got comments from CIG -including Chris Roberts- directly where appropriate so it's a fair piece.

I really hope that Squadron 42 will make it one day and that it will turn out well. I'm not overly optimistic that they will ever be able to deliver the full scope persistent universe. At the current rate, this will easily take at least another decade.
No big deal to me since I've always been more interested in more Wing Commander instead of a lame MMO where you get to play with incredibly immersively named players called "Captain Underpants" in a ship they have creatively named "Pong Lenis" .

Moriendor said:

Personally, I find the article balanced and fair. It explains a lot and -to me- confirms many suspicions I had about the possible reasons for the seemingly piss-poor project management.

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It seems he is not really team manager. To make his directors look irrelevant is sign of poor management. He is mainly creative lead who makes his dream project so he want to check everything personally and talk directly to artists who make things. He probably should make it clear to the team that important things will be always checked by him while less important things will be checked by directors. The article sounds like he didnt think about it.

I wonder if that clothing system heavily inspired by Kingdom Come is really important for Star Citizen. Because those layers of clothing and different types of armor are apparently much more important for medieval game because of melee combat and autenticity of medieval clothing/armor. But in sci-fi game with guns and shooting? Why Roberts didnt think about it in first place? What do you think?

I had a funny conspiracy theory thought last night. What if the No Man's Sky developers secretly sold their core game to Star Citizen, thus being forced to remove all that stuff from their own game? This would explain why No Man's Sky basically shipped a completely different game than what was promised. If Star Citizen comes out and it has all the advanced features that weren't in No Man's Sky, we'll know the truth.

Hats off to Kotaku, an excellently written article. I didn't know they could make such a good and well researched pieces of journalism.

Saw this a few days ago via PC Gamer. Interesting read but honestly I think it's pretty much par for the course. I'm sure there are development studios with less drama and I'm really sure there are companies with more (I'm looking at you Konami!).