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On
the edge of known space, we centre the object in our meteor-scratched
canopy and hit the thrusters. In time, it begins to loom large in our
vision, monolithic and yet somehow indistinct, its obsidian, almost too
perfect alien surface melding into the pervading blackness. Clearly it's
colossal, but it's also beguilingly mysterious.
Yet the problem
isn't really a lack of information: early probes have returned full of
data, it's just that much of it is apparently contradictory and there's
plenty of disagreement over what it all means. The object is Star
Citizen, and the only conclusion everyone seems truly happy with is that
it's made a hell of a lot of money.
That could not be more
perfectly calculated to wind up Chris Roberts, the creator of the
beloved Wing Commander series, CEO of Cloud Imperium Games and chief
creative officer on Star Citizen.
"I do get a bit disappointed,"
he admits. "I mean, it's today's news cycle... If you're on the online
24/7 game blog, they don't have time to [do in-depth articles], so
they're always about the headline. So for them it's like, 'Oh, Star
Citizen's made X million or X million,' and everything focuses on the
money. And then you can read it and say, 'Well, all they care about is
the money.' Not really."
Accusations fly
It is the
distorting weight of $60m and counting, raised by some 640,000 backers,
which has seen the developer variously accused of running a cult, a scam
and, thanks to the $30 to $15,000 game packages on the Roberts Space
Industries site, a pay-to-win operation. Alternatively, for the
faithful, this is the second coming of Chris Roberts after a ten-year
break from games. But Star Citizen's even harder to get a read on: it's a
space dogfighting game, only with ships big enough to walk around and
live in, except when it's an FPS, set in an online universe.
The
list of features defies credulity, but if Star Citizen is a con, it
might be the worst-run one on the planet. For starters, it's intensely
public, with Chris often making appearances on game expo stages to
reveal more in-engine footage. Secondly, while only a sliver of what's
promised, the dogfighting and hangar modules are both in public hands
already, the former the beneficiary of a huge update in recent weeks.
Some 110 Cloud Imperium staff have accounts on LinkedIn, and these are
not sock puppets, but people who have portfolio sites and histories at
Crytek, BioWare and Activision.
As slight as accountability in
crowdfunding projects may be, the conspiracy theory doesn't stack up.
Chris refutes the pay-to-win accusations himself: "The design of the
game, and this is just personal preference, because I hate it in
free-to-play games, is there's nothing that you can buy with money that
you can't earn in the game." The packages are pledge tiers, their values
set to offer funding options. Come release, the basic starting package
is all you'll need.
Massive scope
The
problem for outside observers is really scale. Baffling, mind-boggling
scale. "We're essentially giving them four huge games all in one," Chris
explains. "Squadron 42 is going to be what, or better than what, a
next-generation Wing Commander would have been, and that's just by
itself. And its level of fidelity – I mean, the scope and the size of
the story and the missions we're doing in it is huge. I mean, I'm pretty
sure if I was doing another Wing Commander for EA, I don't think they
would allow me to do as much content. Because right now I think we're
estimating something like 50 hours or so to play through the full
narrative story.
"I mean, it's so big we're going to release it in
episodes. Think of it as a miniseries, like five episodes. So the first
episode is what we're going to release next year – well, hopefully
there are two episodes next year, but for the first one I think we're
aiming for Gamescom. But the first episode itself is about ten hours of
gameplay. So compared to modern FPS games, that's more than you get in
most of the campaign modes with a Call Of Duty.
"And then, of
course, there's whole persistent [online] universe. You've got the 4X
space game style, because if you don't want to get into combat, you can
go into building a business up or building a trade empire and doing all
that kind of stuff. And then we've got the FPS section. So someone could
make a game just by itself from any one of these."
Five dev studios?
Ambition
of this scale takes not one studio, but five, each working on separate
modules of the game. While Chris heads up development on the persistent
universe in Los Angeles, CIG also has satellites in Texas and
California. IllFonic, a relatively unknown quantity whose output
includes the lukewarmly received Nexuiz, is in charge of the FPS module.
Rather more promisingly, Erin Roberts is studio director of the
Manchester-based Foundry 42, entrusted with creating the singleplayer
campaign, Squadron 42.
Unlike his brother, Erin never left the
industry, but after producing Wing Commander: Privateer 2 and helming
Starlancer, he wound up at TT Fusion making Lego games. Though he
enjoyed it, he took little convincing to rejoin his brother to make
Chris's self-professed "crazy dream".
Erin's part is certainly the
easiest to contextualise. Taking place before the timeline of the
persistent universe, Squadron 42's arc tells the story of a war between
the alien Vanduul and United Empire of Earth (UEE). The setup is
battle-worn: you'll play the rookie working your way up the ranks. You
start with a light fighter, the Gladius, waiting in your hangar, earning
the right to fly more advanced craft over time.
But Erin explains
there's been a gestalt shift that defines Star Citizen; Wing Commander
has long been famous for its firstperson view on the cockpit, but pilots
here will be free to tear open the canopy and stretch their legs. "It's
not, for me, really a space combat game," he says. "It's actually an
FPS game where you use vehicles. So, 'cause you're always a person, you
[might] decide to fly a ship, get in a ground vehicle, or go places and
walk around."
So while the storyline's linear, moment-to-moment gameplay is
anything but dictatorial. Ronald D Moore's Battlestar Galactica is
namechecked before Erin describes 1km long battlecruisers with
explorable interiors, and how ships are modelled down to the latrines
and manufacturer's marks on the rivets. It seems one such capital ship
will serve as a hub and home for a time, with you at liberty to wander
its cafeterias and halls between spells in the cockpit.
The idea is to give a sense of a living place, so the people on board are just as important as the
immaculately rendered bulwarks. Crews will assemble in the canteen at
lunch, then scuttle off to service hangar craft, and key NPCs will catch
your eye if they want a quick chat. Dialogue option lists are out, a
body language and reputation system in their place. Stay and listen to a
garrulous wingman's tall tales in a bar and he might form a closer bond
with you that means more help out among the stars; get him going and
dash off mid-sentence and he might give you the cold shoulder instead.
"I
mean, it's crazy," says Chris, "because the Wing Commander format was
that you fly your mission in space, shoot a bunch of stuff up, and then
you come back onto the ship, you have some conversations and the story
advances, and you basically rinse and repeat that. This is not like
that. It's completely fluid. You can be going around your
It's not
simply physical scale, either. Across the hour we spend with Erin, he
touches tantalisingly on the topics of dropships to fly, popping out in
your EVA suit to perform mid-mission spacewalks to get around problems,
and calling for air support from inside a location.
All too much?
It
sounds like mad overpromising until you consider that PAX Australia
gave the world its first glimpse of Star Citizen's considered, tactical
gunplay before capping it off with a less constrained zero-g shootout,
soldiers and pirates locked in an aerial ballet as they pushed off from
walls and dodged floating crates. Perhaps most attractively of all,
because many of Squadron 42's systems have hooks in the persistent
universe, they have been built to work in dynamic, unscripted
environments, not just for set-pieces. A linear tale may deploy them
that way, but Erin stresses the primacy of choice.
Yet the power
to choose may mean you never experience his work: in the final release,
the entire Squadron 42 campaign will be optional. Still, according to
Erin, you can opt out more dramatically than clicking 'no thanks' after
character creation. "We're going to give you the ability to pretty much
mutiny. So you may decide you're going to be an evil pirate, and you go
and shoot your captain in the back of the head and make an escape...
Obviously that puts an end to the campaign for you."
These
choice-based systems are set to reach maturation in the persistent
universe, which blends a game-shaping economy simulation with a
massively multiplayer sandbox universe. Yet as you explore its 110 star
systems, and around 400 planned landing locations, you should notice
them free of tired old MMOG design.
"I kind of feel like in a lot
of online games, especially as you get to the higher levels, you get
forced into a social dynamic," says Chris. "OK, I'm 80th level in World
Of Warcraft and I've got to be in my raid group... We don't have levels
in Star Citizen. I don't want that. The goal of the game is there
shouldn't be any win, right? Because it's like in the real world: what's
your definition of a win?"
Your interpretation could mean
seeking out dogfights until you carve out a legend as a combat ace, but
it could equally mean starting up a junking and salvage business to make
a few credits. Chris wants every path to involve skill, with mining,
for instance, more a case of identifying mineral seams and extracting
them, rather than floating near a rock and holding the spacebar.
Nuts and bolts
So
how will it all work? On a technical level, the universe itself is
designed to cater to hundreds of thousands of players – and millions
more NPCs, the ratio being one human to nine AI characters – but a game
server can only contain 50 to 100 craft at this level of graphical
fidelity.
Instead of dealing with this via shards, space will be
dynamically instanced, those instances stacking on top of each other as
the player count in an area rises. Smartly, however, whenever you drop
out of warp, an algorithm will be making decisions about who to stick
you with based on your in-game affiliations and reputation, and your
personal preferences. Express an interest in PvP and you're likely to be
matched with humans. Eschew social contact and pirates in your instance
will more likely be AI bots. In this way, Star Citizen invisibly
tailors itself to you as much as your actions alter it.
And alter
it you will, entangled as you are in the web that is the economy
simulation, which acts to imbue the universe with consequence and create
a steady flow of missions. Chris provides the example of a factory in
need of raw goods.
To start with, it will post a mission to the
job board that's for simple haulage. Players get first dibs, but an NPC
trucker will step in as time passes. If the sector's lawless enough to
attract pirates, the factory may soon be cut off and, as the bottom line
is affected, the factory's owner may then seek to hire mercenaries to
protect their shipments. If that doesn't work, then you could be looking
at a bounty to bring back the troublesome pirate lord's scalp. But fail
to reverse the factory's fortunes and the workers will start to be laid
off, crime rises and the area deteriorates visually, a wear-and-tear
system responding to local affluence.
Planetside scenarios are
said to evolve equally organically, with Chris's team of designers
working on modular mission templates so that the universe will keep
providing things to see and do long after its scripted content is
exhausted. And it is here that the bamboozling scope finally begins to
feel grounded. Cloud Imperium may be crafting every ship by hand, but it
isn't trying to build a universe this densely packed via raw manpower
alone.
But such an emphasis on a bespoke, hand- shaped approach
has introduced limits. "It's not necessarily as big as a procedural game
like Elite or No Man's Sky that's doing a lot more procedural stuff,
because there's a slightly different focus," says Chris. "We're focused
on a more crafted, detailed- oriented approach. Even in what I'm
describing, there's still procedural stuff that goes on in building
elements of the cities, just because they're so big and we're doing them
in such high fidelity. Like, for instance, if you're in a big city, the
background city blocks and everything is all much more procedural
versus an artist placing down each single building."
Feeling the reheat?
With
all these promises to keep, is Chris feeling the pressure of his
literally invested fanbase? Well, no. "The toughest person is myself on
myself. The person that would be most annoyed if I didn't do what I have
this vision in my head for is myself. When I really see a game through,
I have this picture in my mind and I'm really obsessed about getting to
this point. The original Wing Commander was that way, and that's where
I'm at on this. I'm stubborn."
What Chris asks of his fans now is
the same stubbornness: to bear with him while he, Erin and the team
realise his grand vision, piece by piece. With so much riding on it – no
more or less than the reputation of crowdfunding whales – Star Citizen
can only either succeed spectacularly or fail disastrously.
No
publisher would take this kind of risk, but a great number of PC
enthusiasts have, perhaps seeking release from an industry driven by
predictable cycles and modest yearly iterations. Whatever Star Citizen
ends up being, it will shake the game industry, and that alone makes it
worth further exploration.
