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Kotaku's 7 month investigation into Star Citizen's development

Widge

Member
Surprised I didn't see a thread here about this or in the official thread.

Here it is though, quite an in-depth history of what has been going on since the beginning.

Inside the Troubled Development of Star Citizen

The 24-Year Feud That Has Dogged Star Citizen

Who Are the Star Citizen Superbackers?

What Happened to Star Marine, Star Citizen's Missing Module

What to Make of Star Citizen

Too huge really for me to pick out pertinent parts and apply emphatic bolding. Dive in.

Feel free to add stretch goal of "locked" if I've duped this.

I'm subscribed to this and will add in the rest as they go live.
 

Dmax3901

Member
kotaku_kickstarter.png

Damn.
 
Just finished reading this part, and I can't wait for the other parts of this piece.

God, what a mess. I loved Wing Commander and Freelancer, but I thought from the outset this was going to be far too ambitious to ever truly come to fruition.

More importantly for me, Roberts sounds like pretty much the absolute worst fucking boss to work for.
 

Spukc

always chasing the next thrill
Wanted to buy this game.
Went to his website and saw a 14000 dollar ship.
Decided to not spend any cash at all.
Will buy it when finished in a sale.
 
Wanted to buy this game.
Went to his website and saw a 14000 dollar ship.
Decided to not spend any cash at all.
Will buy it when finished in a sale.
Really? A $14000 ship? Does that come with..anything? Like something I can hold in the real world?
 

Raybunny

Member
Interesting read. I did help get those 124 millions even though I only invested around 2k euros.

Good news though, after so many months with some measly promises I sold my assets and got my money back by 2 folds.
 

Nzyme32

Member

I'm fairly sure this image is not completely accurate.

For example, it completely neglects the fact that people are also backing some of those games via their own site after kickstarter - such as Planescape Tides of Numenera, which isn't shown here because the numbers are not declared, meanwhile they only seem to show this for Star Citizen.

Of course, other games are not making nearly as much money, but it still seems misleading to title it and show it as such

Edit - actually it is definitely wrong, because some games do declare it

Planescape Tides of Numenera - - - Raised: $5,079,935.33
 

Jackpot

Banned
Some nice info on the development of the prototype back when they first launched their Kickstarter.

It seems a lot of the problems can be traced to the initial setup of the studios. Pop-up studios in multiple countries in places they weren't suited for with no hardline briefs, so they ended up swapping all the different sub-projects, swiping staff, etc. No communication. Countless contractors filling in the gaps. How many millions did that eat up?

Inside the Troubled Development of Star Citizen

For the past seven months, I’ve been talking to the people who have been making Star Citizen. This includes its directors, a number of anonymous sources who’ve worked on it, and the man who drives the whole project: Chris Roberts. From the outside, Star Citizen appears to have been wildly successful; to date, it has raised more than $124 million from passionate fans. The money has allowed its developer, Cloud Imperium Games, to open studios around the world and employ more than 325 talented developers.

Behind the closed doors of CIG’s studios, however, it’s been far from an easy ride, according to staff. They have all faced a unique challenge: how to nail down the scope of a game whose budget and ambition is always growing. Star Citizen has now been in development for five years, and over that time it has suffered through significant changes and unrest among its staff, huge delays and, 18 months ago, a radical restructuring of all its studios. CIG has released several discrete demos over this time, but there is still not even a date for the final game, which was originally planned for 2014.

Various community scandals have added yet more fuel to the fire, turning Star Citizen into a lightning rod for controversy. The questions I wanted answers to were: what exactly has been happening over the past five years? What are the reasons behind Star Citizen’s various delays, and what specific development problems has it encountered? Have things been mismanaged? And, as many Star Citizen backers are now beginning to wonder, can it ever actually be finished?

This early remote setup “made me think well, maybe we don't need to have one centralised studio”, Roberts told me. “Maybe we can spread this out and we can collaborate across the different areas and go to where the talent is.”

This setup, however, would be the start of another set of issues during Star Citizen’s early development: a spread-out set of developers with oceans between them faced challenges that a more centralised studio wouldn’t have. From the very beginning, CIG was using third-party contractors, remote studios, and virtual collaboration. All those choices made sense when developing the prototype, but as the team, scope, and budget of Star Citizen grew, the studio structure would have to radically adapt.

A tale of two studios… wait, no, three. Actually, five.

Following the huge success of all these crowdfunding efforts, CIG rapidly expanded upon its remote team of staff and contractors. Today it has its own studios in Austin, Santa Monica, West Hollywood, Manchester, and Frankfurt. While this has allowed CIG to hire talented staff around the world, it has also been the root of significant development challenges. Each separate studio had to go through the difficulties of developing its own culture, and as for getting them working together? That was an even bigger headache.

Roberts had also opted to use CryEngine as Star Citizen’s base engine, but it’s only in the past five years that anyone besides Crytek started using the engine to make games. So finding anyone savvy with the technology became a challenge. Tony Zurovec, who is CIG’s director of the persistent universe and is based out in the Austin studio, explained the implications: “Does it make sense to make Austin a major gameplay programming area when you could have had job adverts out for a year and still not found anyone with CryEngine experience?”

It quickly became clear that England had advantages over Austin and LA. It was cheaper to hire staff who were no less qualified.

However, this influx of qualified talent also meant the UK team started to pick up more of the work from the US studios. Soon, entire other projects were being handled by the supposedly single-player-focused studio.

“We had ten-year veterans of Crytek. They knew the engine inside and out,” a source told me.

“If you ask people to keep working 60-, 70-, 80-hour weeks without an end date in sight, it's going to put a strain on their personal relationships and personal lives. That in turn is going to start increasing turnover.”

The UK character team, made up of a lead and two junior artists, ended up handing in their notice over three months, between March and June 2015. “They were all miserable,” another source told me.

“Honestly, I don't know anyone working that [number of hours] here,” said Chris Roberts in response. “I don't want crunch as a culture, we don't do it. [...] We rarely do any kind of crunch to overtime.

When I asked Roberts and art director Paul Jones about the art team’s departure, they gave other reasons for the resignations – ones more to do with personality conflicts than working hours.

I smell bullshit on Robert's excuses over "no crunch".
 

Deft Beck

Member
I don't think this game will actually ever come out. It's gotten way too ambitious and will never live up to its own hype.
 

Danthrax

Batteries the CRISIS!
OK, now let's air the dirty laundry of every other game during their development. They've all had some, I'm sure.
 

Neoweee

Member
Surprised I didn't see a thread here about this or in the official thread.

Here it is though, quite an in-depth history of what has been going on since the beginning.

http://www.kotaku.co.uk/2016/09/23/inside-the-troubled-development-of-star-citizen
(1st in a 5 part series)

Too huge really for me to pick out pertinent parts and apply emphatic bolding. Dive in.

Feel free to add stretch goal of "locked" if I've duped this.

Good article. It's been about a year since the wave articles accusing discrimination and meltdowns, and the article references that they've been investigating this for a year. So it was spurred by those articles, but we'll see if the later articles actually uncovered more concrete details. The tone of this Part One strongly implies that they didn't really uncover anything as egregious as the allegations about discriminatory hiring practices.
 
Add me to the group of people who thinks this game will either never get released or released in a poor state because the money ran out ahead of time.
 

RulkezX

Member
I don't even care at this point. Talking about the game isn't fun because it has such a rabid fan based, criticism is of limits.

I've paid so if it comes out, great , if it's shit....well lesson learned.
 
The culture of blame left many of the staff and former staff I spoke to demoralised. “It was a nightmare at times,” one source told me. “It was a fear for your job. You know the adage ‘shit rolls downhill’? If anything went wrong, there were a few people whose problem it never was. The only people who ended up with responsibility for a mess-up or a problem were people with no power to put it on anybody else.”

“I think he got too much money too fast, that he wasn't held accountable for his words, actions, or things he was supposed to deliver, and he turned the project into a runaway idea. I think that if there were people around him to take the CEO duty off his shoulders, or he had more trust in his directors and didn't micromanage them as much, that he would be seen as a much easier person to work with.”

Another source told me that Roberts would sometimes give leads a dressing down in public. “The leads had a Skype call once a week and every week someone would be read the riot act, publicly, for all the leads to see,” another source told me. “It was a public shaming. It's something that happened more often than it needed to, and there's no justification... there's never justification. [...] Chris' involvement absolutely created that atmosphere of fear and tension and overall agitation.”

I asked each of my sources if they thought Star Citizen could actually be made, knowing what they do, and there was no clear consensus.

Despite everything, everyone I spoke to for this article praised the talent of their colleagues. My sources were agreed that they were working with some of the best developers they’ve come across in the industry.

One person in particular put it best: “Chris Roberts is surrounded by some incredibly talented people whom he pushes to the absolute limit, then demands that they stay there. There were some absolutely amazing things coming out of Star Citizen. Enough to fuel several AAA games. If Star Citizen does end up hitting the goals that Roberts has planned (by beating his horses to death to get to the finish line), there is no doubt in my mind it will be amazing.

“Will it be fun to play? Not sure. Will it be an amazing tech and beautiful art demo? Absolutely.”

Another thing was clear from conversations with Star Citizen’s current staff, people who have either survived these tumultuous years or were not there to experience them: they still believe that Star Citizen is possible, and they are working hard on it. But no game can be made on belief alone. As of right now, there is no Star Citizen. There are several different live demos, but they are just that: demos. There is no game.

Some fun stuff in here.
 

xealo

Member
Really? A $14000 ship? Does that come with..anything? Like something I can hold in the real world?

Offering tier packages that often costs thousands of dollars isn't that unusual on Kickstarter. They're just offering alternatives for the whales out there, cause they know they exist and will drop absurd amounts of money if they can be enticed into it.

For more normal people, it's possible to buy into the whole thing for about 60 in total.
 
OK, now let's air the dirty laundry of every other game during their development. They've all had some, I'm sure.

It's a little different when the game is being crowd-sourced to such an absurd degree. If I'm someone who is spending over $1000 on this game's development, I ought to be able to know what the fuck is happening in there.
 
“There was a lot of documentation,” one source said. “Too much. It was just a giant clusterfuck of documents and data, a lot of which conflicted with other bits. Sometimes documents were out of date and sometimes someone worked on something that someone else had already done. Other times there were two people making the same thing simultaneously but unaware of each other, and so they’d end up making two different things designed to do the same job. This was across all of the studios.”

Oh boy.
 

Jackpot

Banned
On Star Marine:

CIG wanted to use the environment assets Illfonic had created for its Gold Horizon space station level as an environment kit. But when CIG tried to fit the assets into their levels, they found that none of the assets worked with CIG’s kit system; they had all been built to the wrong scale. A source told me that after the studio had worked on the Gold Horizon map for more than a year

In short, no one person was in a position to spot deviation before it became too severe. This wasted months of work and necessitated months more to correct the problem.

How feature creep and modular releases crippled development:

As well as working on both Squadron 42 (the proposed single-player mode) and the expansive persistent universe in tandem, CIG is also continuing to support all of the different modules that it’s released so far with bug fixes and new features.

Multiple sources have told me this style of development was a mistake: it spreads the team and resources thinly, it means CIG has to maintain multiple separate live releases as well as continuing work on the game.

“A wise person would say, you raised money for a spaceflight sim [Squadron 42] and you've got grand visions for a first person, third-person social component,” opined one source. “Let's use the crowd-sourced cash and build the flight component. Using this giant amazing team, focus on all these various attributes. Monetise that portion and then roll onto the next component.

“You can solve those problems one at a time, but when everyone is trying to solve all the problems all at the same time, you're going to do nothing but waste money and come across huge technical limitations that you're going to need more hands on to solve. The problems were inherent from the beginning. It's just not a wise decision to attempt everything at once.”

The immediate effect of working on so many systems concurrently was that CIG’s engineers were spread thinly. Across the studio there were developers who couldn’t move forward on their slice of the game because the underlying technology they needed to implemented hadn’t been finished. Everyone needed time from the engineers, and there just weren’t enough of them to go round.

On Cryengine:

Let’s go back to a really early point in the Star Citizen story: the decision to use CryEngine. Multiple sources told me that adapting a game engine built for first-person shooters to run a massively-multiplayer universe has been a huge hindrance throughout Star Citizen’s development. Some of them say that building an engine from scratch would actually, at this point, have been more efficient.

“They wanted a brand new first-person system so, having licensed CryEngine, an engine built from the ground up to create first-person games, they stripped it and started building a brand new first-person system inside an engine that already had one,” said a source at Foundry 42. “I just think that was a stupid, stupid decision.

Stripping out the first-person systems that come supplied with the CryEngine seems like a bizarre decision, but Roberts says it was essential for his plans to unify first and third-person perspectives.

One big source of delays was a fundamental change to the CryEngine: moving it from 32-bit calculations to 64-bit.

Feature creep & Cryengine combined:

As the budget and scope of the game grew, one source opined that CryEngine made less and less sense as the basis of the game. “[Star Citizen’s] original remit was $500,000 to create a nostalgic, spiritual successor to Wing Commander in CryEngine. That's a perfectly reasonable remit. Then more money started coming in and Chris Roberts started to make promises to the press that he'd not discussed with the development team.

“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.”

---------------------------------

OK, now let's air the dirty laundry of every other game during their development. They've all had some, I'm sure.

Whataboutism? Seriously? Why so willing to bury your head in the sand?
 

ekim

Member
PLaying the current early versions this has the chance to become a real masterpiece if the pieces fit together as they are supposed to be. The last Gamescom demo was fantastic. But somehow I still have doubts but less so than with other games.
 

Gator86

Member
OK, now let's air the dirty laundry of every other game during their development. They've all had some, I'm sure.

Our first overly defensive response! Took way longer than expected. Looking forward to reading through the entire article. Everything about this game has always seemed like an inevitable disaster.
 
Counting the seconds until the Star Citizen defense force shows up

They were particularly fierce after the last expose article. Trying to remember what outlet did this last year

It will be interesting to see how the passing of time has affected the opinions of evens its most staunch supporters
 

Phinor

Member
I don't doubt this game will release some day, both the SP campaign and the overly ambitious MP component. What always messes with people's perception of this game is the fact that it was basically announced very quickly after development started. Huge AAA games are not usually done like that, first it's years of development before one day the marketing push finally starts. Considering the nature of this project it has been in development only for five years and it is still a project that started out of nothing, there was no EA or Activision with everything set up ready for huge projects like this. Still a nice read though, the development has been troubled like it is with almost any software project with hundreds of developers.

And obviously Star Citizen has been playable for few years now in many forms. It's rough, early, but it exists. Plus you don't have to back it at the $14000 level, I have put a total of $30 into this game.
 

mrpeabody

Member
Good article. Gives everybody a chance to speak.

The bottom line is about what you'd expect from the outside: These people know their shit and they're working hard. They're up against the insane ambitiousness of the project, engine issues, and coordination and communication with a half-dozen teams across the world. It's a very challenging project technically and management-wise.

Roberts is an experienced manager who believes in the project. He has some flaws -- that part about endrunning his reports is bad news. He's also a hard-headed egotist, which is sometimes an asset and sometimes a liability. You do need some of that in order to make a project like this happen. Steve Jobs was a pretty shitty guy to work for.

I want this project to succeed. I want to play this amazing game, and I want all the people who donated the $124 million to get what they paid for. But maybe it won't, maybe we'll never see a finished product, or even a beta. Right now I feel like it could go either way.
 

cakely

Member
This article means that Desktop Commander, PhD is going to get another fifteen minutes of fame, doesn't it.
 

Kysen

Member
I don't believe this game will ever be released in a complete state. I am fully expecting more promises to be made, stringing along the backers for years to come.
 

StereoVsn

Member
I put in $50 and somehow it feels this was a waste. NMS on a grander scale indeed. I think the chance we will see good quality SP part 1H 2017 is very slim. The MMO portion I don't even know when that would happen, maybe 2019 if they don't run out of money.
 
One word in the article summed it up. Clusterfuck.

The game may come out, and hell, it could end up great, but the project almost seems intent on running into every development problem possible.
 

Fersis

It is illegal to Tag Fish in Tag Fishing Sanctuaries by law 38.36 of the GAF Wildlife Act
It's a really well done article.
Kudos to kotaku.
 

Spirited

Mine is pretty and pink
Do not take this as a cheap shot at star citizen so if you're a star citizen fan don't come in here and try to explain it away or say dumb shit about kotaku or if you're one of those who's already decided star citizen will fail and will never release or live up to expectations I suggets you to read instead of posting things like "I told you so!" or liken it to a certain other space game which seems to have had another problem.
All games have development problems and in the unique nature than star citizen was started problems like these are to say the least expected and many seems to be things that star citizen share with lots of other games.
This post is just in preparation because star citizen threads always end up with a lot of both of these.

Article is great so go read it!
 

RK9039

Member
If the game is anything like the Gamescom demo then they've already succeeded in my mind, because that's a space sim I want to play. The part about Elite in the article I disagree with completely because the base game is so boring I'd rather watch paint dry.

This article means that Desktop Commander, PhD is going to get another fifteen minutes of fame, doesn't it.

He was probably one of the sources.
 
That's a big article. It'll make good bed-time reading.

They're still coming out with that singe player portion of the game, right?

The success of that is what will make or break this game. Or well, rather cement that it might well succeed. 120+ million dollars is beaucoup dollores, but you'd be surprised how fast that shit goes when you're talking multi-year development.
 

Jackpot

Banned
On culture:

“You had no idea if you were going to be called but everyone who got called in got shot in the back of the head. So there was this high amount of anxiety where your supervisor is coming over and assuring you that he's pretty sure that you're safe, but even he doesn't know. Then the guy next to you gets called into the meeting and you lock eyes with him and there's that look of 'Oh, man, I'm so sorry.' It's the worst way you could have handled lay-offs. They didn't do it to cause anxiety, but I was surprised. I'd never seen it done that way.”

It was described as a culture of blame, where when a job was delayed or couldn’t be completed, developers would shift responsibility onto other people, particularly those working at other studios. The animosity led to a hostile work environment; one source even told me that they’d suffered panic attacks as a result.

The culture of blame left many of the staff and former staff I spoke to demoralised. “It was a nightmare at times,” one source told me. “It was a fear for your job. You know the adage ‘shit rolls downhill’? If anything went wrong, there were a few people whose problem it never was. The only people who ended up with responsibility for a mess-up or a problem were people with no power to put it on anybody else.”

On Chris Roberts personally:

In many of my interviews (though not all), Chris Roberts himself was singled out as a domineering and, sometimes, disruptive presence.

“It would usually be around the time of a presentation,” another source told me. “We'd be near a deadline. Chris would insist on something being done a certain way, you would try to advise 'Well, actually no. That might make this happen...' and he’d say 'No, no, no, you need to do it. Do it this way.' You'd do it that way and then it would break and he'd be unhappy with it.”

“I've worked with other directors in the past who had huge ego problems, but they weren't bottlenecks,” a source told me. “They were instruments to resolve problems, not create them. I think in Chris' case he creates a lot of the problems by the way he chooses to position himself within the company.

Another source told me that Roberts would sometimes give leads a dressing down in public. “The leads had a Skype call once a week and every week someone would be read the riot act, publicly, for all the leads to see,” another source told me. “It was a public shaming. It's something that happened more often than it needed to, and there's no justification... there's never justification. [...] Chris' involvement absolutely created that atmosphere of fear and tension and overall agitation.”

“I do lose it,” Roberts told me. “There were definitely times in the early days where I felt like people kept giving me the same answers, and I would let them have it. I’d say 'You just told me this last time. You've got to have a better answer. Why isn't this thing working? Give me a reason. You can't just say it was their fault'. I'm generally quite nice until I feel there is something not happening, or something that I need to call out. But that's the way I've always been. Sometimes I think it can be hard for some people.”

Chris Robert and feature creep combined:

Once, a source says, Chris came to work after playing The Order: 1886. Impressed by the highly detailed art, he asked CIG’s character artists to match that standard. The team, my sources told me, saw this as impossible.

Roberts came back from seeing another in-development CryEngine game, Kingdom Come: Deliverance. He had been deeply impressed by the character inventory and outfits system, which involved multiple layers of clothing where each item has different properties, from its material to its weight and shape, that affect how it animates. Chris wanted it for Star Citizen.

“We spent four months having to prove ourselves right because that's the way it works with Chris Roberts. He will never believe you if you say you can't do something. You have to actually spend the time to make the entire thing and then show him when you push the button it doesn't work. That was a persistent issue. The team lost four months on that, a lot of manpower and hours, proving that, yes, in fact that doesn't work.”

"Can Star Citizen be made?"

I asked each of my sources if they thought Star Citizen could actually be made, knowing what they do, and there was no clear consensus. But there was clear agreement on ‘overscope’.

The last is quite important considering just how many Gaffers were insisting there was zero feature creep in past threads.
 

Phamit

Member
How the hell did it only make 2m on Kickstarter but 122m on his website ?

After the Kickstarter they basically presented every month or so a new ship to buy. Of Course it also developed a much bigger Hype after the Kickstarter and first trailers looked amazing.
 
I feel like feature creep is the cornerstone of this generations issues when it comes to game development

The race to 4k probably isnt helping any

Until there are tool and engines that can make fluid creation seamless, easy and efficient without having to worry about it "not working"... every single studio is vulnerable

That goes double for studios without well greased management and development chops
 
What is really going on with this game. It sounds like it is becoming a huge money pit or actually money black hole with how much money has been invested in it. I hope those who have bought or spent money on this get their full game etc. If not this will hands down be the most controversial game that may or may not destroy Kickstarter's perception for some people.
 
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