Star Citizen creator calls “bulls**t” on feature creep and overambition

Star Citizen will "change the way people perceive games for the PC and... breathe new life into space combat games." It was easy to believe the words of Chris Roberts, creator of the Wing Commander series, back in 2012. His ambitious plan to revive the space sim, a genre that had been largely confined to the '90s, was leapt upon a PC audience keen to relive the experiences of their youth. An initial crowdfunding campaign on Star Citizen's site raised $2.6 million (£1.7 million), followed by another $2.1 million (£1.4 million) on Kickstarter.

But that initial enthusiasm has taken a battering of late. Since 2012, the space sim and space combat genres have seen a huge revival. Today, you can play the likes of Elite: Dangerous, and Strike Suit Zero, and soon you'll be able to play Eve: Valkyrie (a launch title for the Oculus Rift), and No Man's Sky. You can play Star Citizen too, of course, but it exists in a very different form—a form that's seemingly no closer to seeing a release date than it was when it was announced back in 2012.

Various parts of the game have been delayed over the years—most recently the first-person shooter portion—but its scope continues to grow. As key members of the development team leave, virtual ships to play in the unfinished game are continuing to be sold, bringing the crowdfunding total up to a frankly amazing $85 million (£55 million) from over 900,000 backers. That's the kind of money that creates behemoths like Borderlands 2, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, and Final Fantasy XIII. Different kinds of games, perhaps, but equally ambitious.

Questions surrounding Star Citzen's development have started to pour in from backers. There are accusations of the game being overly ambitious—that Chris Roberts and his company Cloud Imperium Games have succumbed to "feature creep." That's not to mention the grey market that surrounds Star Citizen, a market that resells virtual ships—ships that are mere ideas and don't even exist yet—for thousands of dollars.

Roberts has had to respond to criticism in the past. "Will we build everybody's dream game? Of course not, that would be impossible!" he wrote in a New Year's letter to backers. "But... I think we'll build something special that people can happily lose themselves in... Star Citizen isn't a sprint, it isn't even a marathon. There is no final finish line the way you would have with a traditional retail game. Star Citizen is a way of life for as long as the community is engaged by it."

But in his latest post to backers, Roberts has gone on the record to directly address community and press concerns over the recent departure of Executive Producer, Alex Mayberry, and if his game can actually deliver on his increasingly bold promises. To date, the game has released two of its promised gameplay modules: the Hangar module, which lets you view your spaceships, and Arena Commander, the spaceship dogfighting portion. Still being built across four studios in Los Angeles, Austin, the UK, and Germany are Planetside (Star Citizen's social space), Squadron 42 (the game's story campaign), the first-person shooter Star Marine, and the Persistent Universe module to bring it all together.

"There are people out there who are going to tell you that this is all a BAD THING," wrote Roberts in response to the increasing scope of Star Citizen, "that it’s 'feature creep' and we should make a smaller, less impressive game for the sake of having it out more quickly or in order to meet artificial deadlines. Now I’ll answer those claims in one word: Bullshit!"

"Star Citizen matters BECAUSE it is big, because it is a bold dream. It is something everyone else is scared to try. You didn’t back Star Citizen because you want what you’ve seen before. You’re here and reading this because we are willing to go big, to do the things that terrify publishers."

Indeed, publishers might be a little terrified by a game that's soaked up $85 million in funding, has missed its initial deadline (Kickstarter backers were promised a finished game by November 2014), and continues to grow in scope in spite of it. The games industry has no shortage of overly ambitious games by developers who didn't know when to say no: see the likes of the heavily delayed and ultimately disappointing Daikatana, Messiah, Too Human, and dozens of cancelled MMOs that have come and gone in the past decade.

"You’ve trusted us with your money so we can build a game, not line our pockets. And we sure as hell didn’t run this campaign so we could put that money in the bank, guarantee ourselves a profit and turn out some flimsy replica of a game I’ve made before," Roberts' post continues. "You went all in supporting us and we've gone all in making the game. Is Star Citizen today a bigger goal than I imagined in 2012? Absolutely. Is that a bad thing? Absolutely not: it’s the whole damn point."

"Will it take longer to deliver all this? Of course! When the scope changes, the amount of time it will take to deliver all the features naturally increases. This is something we are acutely aware of. How do we balance the mutually conflicting wants of the community; to have this hugely ambitious game, but not wait forever for it?"

The original plan for Star Citizen was to release a multiplayer dogfighting alpha, followed by a beta of the game based on the current Squadron 42 module. But as the money poured in, Roberts changed the direction of the game dramatically, splitting it into its current module-based form, and adding feature after feature.

"Is 'feature creep' a worry? Sure... it’s always a worry, and we are well aware of it," wrote Roberts. "However, building the game to the stretch goals embraced and endorsed by the community is not feature creep! We made the decision to stop stretch goals at the end of last year. That was a hard choice to abandon one of the central tenets of crowd funding projects, the idea that the sky is the limit... but it’s one we felt we had to make for the better of the game."

"Occasionally I see comments out there from people who haven’t taken the time to watch the thousands of YouTube videos of people running around their ships and hangars or dogfighting in space, or visit our site to read the vast amount of information we make publicly available that call us vapourware or a glorified tech demo. Arena Commander, which is still evolving, is a better looking and playing game than a lot of finished games out there. We are maintaining a live game and building one all at the same time. It’s harder than just developing."

The scepticism surrounding Star Citizen is understandable. There are many of us at the Ars Orbiting HQ that dearly hope this game will be as good as Roberts promises. But as time marches on and the money continues to pour in, the pressure on Roberts to deliver—and to be held to account if it doesn’t—increases dramatically. CIG will be showing off "something special" at this year's Gamescom, which will hopefully go some way towards restoring the faith.

"We genuinely want people to be happy with their decision to back Star Citizen, because I and everyone else on the team passionately believe in Star Citizen," says Roberts. "This is the dream game that all of us have wanted to build all our lives. And while I can’t promise you everything will always go smoothly or features or content won’t arrive later than we want them to, I can promise that we will never stop until we have achieved this dream."

We'll be at Gamescom next month in Cologne, where hopefully we'll get a closer look at this "something special." Stay tuned.