Star Citizen 3.0 update "akin to Early Access" launch "It would be the worst scam in the world." By Tom Phillips Eurogamer Published 11/09/2017
There are two schools of thought on the long, long-in-development Star Citizen. For fans, it is an in-development wonder, a work-in-progress promise of a bright, stellar future. It's a game in which people have already invested significant amounts of money.
But it's that same money that, for others, is a problem. Here is a crowdfunded game - or the foundations of one, at least - which is way behind schedule, which often fails to hit deadlines, and which never seems to quite live up to its promise.
I met up with the Star Citizen figurehead, Chris Roberts, at Gamescom last month for a frank chat on how things were going. Unsurprisingly, he falls in to the first school of thought - and was keen to explain why.
Gamescom saw a huge press conference for the game. Those who were there - or who watched remotely - got to see more details of Star Citizen's hotly-anticipated update 3.0, plus future enhancements such as the game's fancy new face over IP technology. My original plan for this interview was to run it alongside the launch of 3.0, which was expected by many fans to launch last week. But again, Star Citizen's development is taking longer than expected. The latest best guesstimate for launch now seems to be early October.
So here we are, with fans again wondering when the next update will arrive. Five years after its announcement, where is the future of Star Citizen headed? Will it ever be finished? Here's Chris Roberts with his take.
At Gamescom we're getting a good look at Star Citizen version 3.0. Are you in a state now that you'd term beta? What's next?
Chris Roberts: The term beta in terms of Star Citizen - with 3.0 the game is moving into a phase akin to Early Access. It'll build and grow from there, and then you could say 'well, it's not really Early Access anymore'. The price will probably go up a little bit and it will have much more of the features and content going on. 3.0 is the first time you'll have some of the basic game loops and mechanics. It's the first one which has proper persistence for your character, ship and items in terms of what their state is, their location is. When you log off and your ship is damaged, when you come back it'll still be damaged. There are a lot of jobs and options. The AI is still fairly basic - there's a lot more coming, but the AI... the previous 2.63 update was done the old scripted way. Now it's a scalable, modular mission system which designers can build from different blocks. We have procedural missions so there's a lot of 'go deliver something to this place', 'go identify a dead body on a spaceship', 'go after this particular pirate'. It's all templated up. There's a basic buying and selling mechanic, hauling cargo, the ability to earn and spend money on clothes, weapons, ship items or ship weapons. 3.1 will let you buy ships as well. And then from there we'll add more features for specific activities - mining, repair, building out more of the infrastructure for a dynamic universe. Chris Roberts. Where do you draw a line in the sand between alpha, beta, Early Access? Are they just labels?
Chris Roberts: I feel like they're just labels - people still think of the old way [of making games], like my past games. We'd talk about a game for years, we'd show it, but no one would have their hands on it 'til it was out. There was an obsession with 'when will it get released'. Even with those [traditional boxed] games now, they get patched, they add things, make things better over time. The way I look at it is, if you've supported Star Citizen you can download and play 2.63 which is a mini, early-stage version of this universe and play around. There's a game experience there - it's not got nearly as much as we'll have in the final game but you can go and see how ships feel, find out what you think, and get your voice heard in our community as we make it better. It's like saying 'hey, we're going to have this really fancy hotel, but if you want to stay in this wing which is finished but maybe all the bits aren't quite working - there's no hot water yet - you can'.
You're getting in there at a much cheaper rate than when it's finished and you can maybe help us define how we operate. I think even if we said, this is now past beta, the paradigm for online stuff just doesn't work that way now. You see it all the time. League of Legends continues to add new heroes, even more traditional stuff like World of Warcraft has revisions every year. Even if we said, 'we're released', we're never going to stop adding content. That's how online games die. If you look at EVE Online now, it looks nothing like the game which launched. GTA Online, too, it originally launched on PS3 and Xbox 360 which aren't even supported now, they're constantly adding new stuff to it. Maybe people need to shift their point of view - the way I look at it on Star Citizen, if you get involved it's not going to be completely polished or finished but you'll get your voice heard. It's not for everyone, of course - you can always take a back seat for a year or two and reassess it.
When will you make the call to raise the price point? Do you have enough money to finish the game?
Chris Roberts: We run the business like a live business - we look at what we bring in every month, every year and plan our business by that. If that changed, we would change what we do. Outside the fact we're not finished or released, the company runs like we had an online game which was monetised every day. Which it essentially is - we have people joining every day, buying a starter pack or a ship. All the money we've raised dictates our budget - to a certain point where we have pretty much everything on our wishlist. Right now it's a very not-for-profit enterprise where we plough the money back in.
Some people have spent a lot of money on the game - have you ever thought about putting in a spending limit? Chris Roberts: I know some people don't think we say it, but I do - you don't need to spend any more than the base amount. That's all you need. I definitely think there are some people out there who just like the idea of supporting this. For them it's their hobby. I have friends who aren't necessarily into computer games but maybe they're into golf, which can be a pretty expensive hobby. I like to play games, I don't buy antique cars and restore them, or play golf, or any other middle-aged person's hobby. So I figure I'll spend a couple thousand dollars on games, I'll budget where I'm going to spend that, on World of Warcraft or EVE Online or whatever, because I like what's happening and I want to support them. It's nice to have that level of support, but by far the majority of the people who have backed it have paid $40. What happens is, it's much more of a headline to write about a person who's spent $100 or $1000. Longer term, people who have spent a decent amount of money in the game will have more value than if they'd spend $1000 or $10k on a Kickstarter and got to have dinner with a developer. Most of our stuff is related to the ships you have, and dollar to the actual in-game cost, the money cost is significantly less than the in-game cost. Some of these ships, like the Idris, are massive capital ships. As an individual, maybe Bill Gates could afford a carrier. Nations buy those things, not individuals. That's part of the appeal - ships in Star Citizen are so fully-realised. I would love to be Roman Abramovich hanging out in the south of France but I don't have that much cash.