The Glade 4.0

So I'd take a look at what I wanted to do with the Hornet and the Freelancer, and try to judge which I felt I would be more at risk to lose to the dangers of space -- the Freelancer because it's a tasty target and a bit less defensible, or the Hornet because I'll be seeking out fights?

Then, pledge for that one, since you'll get more mileage out of the lifetime insurance.

I've noticed they have added pledge levels that seem to be duplicates save for the add-on of (Digital).

Not sure what these are as I thought that the lower tier pledges already were going to include a digital copy (Denoted by an *)

Why is there an "Early Adopter" and an "Early Adopter (Digital)" option if they both include the same thing. I want to have a hard copy of the game if at all possible, but I don't have the money currently to upgrade to a pledge level with the USB stick.

These ships are not, at some point, going to be "end game" ships (Constellation may be different, but I don't have that kind of cash handy anyway). I will buy a better fighter/explorer/freighter at some point in the future. But if everything blows up in space, which starter ship will get me back up to speed the quickest (given my very casual level of gameplay).

During GDC Online, I find Chris Roberts situated in a plain white room – with little adorning it other than a conference table and Roberts’ PC. Given the almost ridiculous grandiosity of his plans, the sparseness of the room makes for something of an odd contrast. But soon, all of that fades into the background. Roberts runs me through a surprisingly polished demo of Star Citizen in its current state, and it’s hard not to let my imagination get away from me. The foundation’s clearly in place, and the possibilities seem endless. But this is still a game. There have to be limits. Moreover, where’s the line between pie-in-the-stars ambition and reality? So naturally, I ask. I ask about EVERYTHING. In part one, we cover why the universe is broken up into instances, Squadron 42, why Roberts doesn’t think this will become some crazy political struggle ala EVE Online, and of course, Roberts’ aspirations to a life of space crime.


RPS: Your plans for the scale of this game are positively insane, but how does it all actually work? What happens if I, say, die in combat? What’s the penalty?

Roberts: Here’s the thing. I’m actually bummed by the current design philosophy, where there’s no penalty for doing not particularly well. A lot of games I play, console games, I don’t play very smart because I know that when I respawn, I’m a second away. I just go in guns blazing and bully my way through the story. I really like Demon’s Souls. I completed it and almost finished a second playthrough. I don’t usually put that kind of time into playing a game, but it was like 200-plus hours of being obsessed for two or three weeks straight. One of the things I liked about it was there were real consequences. The good thing about that was that when I achieved something, I really felt like I’d achieved something. It wasn’t easy. It was a combination of the most frustrating and the most rewarding game I’ve played in a long time.

In this, I don’t think we’re going to be quite as tough as Demon’s Souls, but there needs to be some penalty. You can’t just blast away and then respawn and go back. If you go out in space and your ship gets destroyed, you’ve lost your ship. We’re basically trying to do a lot of things like the real world. We’re trying to simulate an economy. You can buy ship insurance just like you could buy car insurance in the real world. You can buy cargo insurance. If you’re smart, you’ll pay a bit of money for insurance, because… With insurance, if you get blasted, you’ll lose your cargo, you’ll end up on the same planet again in a replacement ship. If you don’t have insurance you’re going to lose it all. You can take that risk, but it shouldn’t be the idea that you just go out there and get blasted and just instantly respawn with a ship. There needs to be a consequence.

For instance, if you’re someone operating on the outer edge of the galaxy, it’s just like if you’re living in a really bad neighborhood. Your insurance is gonna cost more than your insurance costs in the center of the galaxy, where it’s pretty safe. If you’re in the center of the galaxy and there’s a lot of military and law enforcement around, it’s safe. There’s not going to be a lot of PvP stuff, or people jumping newbies and stuff like that. Like out here [motions at, er, existence], I couldn’t just start taking stuff from people in the street. The police would stop me. But of course, when you’re landing on Earth and you’re selling goods, you pay tariffs and taxes. Someone’s got to pay for the infrastructure. Someone’s got to pay for the police force.



On the other hand, on the outer edges of the empire where there isn’t really law and order, you don’t have landing taxes or anything. But you also don’t have any protection from police or the military. So again, the concept is that it’s like the real world. You make your choices – where you want to be, how you want to play. If you want to be on the other side of the law, a player-killer, you can be. But there will be areas of space that you’ll want to exist in, because if you try to do that right nearby Earth where the strongest part of the empire is, you won’t last very long.

You can definitely attack people, it’s just that suddenly you’ll be on the most wanted list and every bounty hunter in the galaxy will be zeroing in on you. The times you can shoot people down inside those areas of law and order is when they’re on the most wanted list, so to speak. The idea would be that the systems that you build inside this universe kind of help regulate the world, just like in the real world. That’s one of the concepts. We don’t have it running yet, so who knows?

A lot of games, like even EVE Online, they do some things that happen in the real world, but they never do everything. I think if you’re going to do it, you should simulate it properly, because that’s the reason why the world works the way it does. You can have law and order, but you need taxes to pay for it. It needs to be done that way, rather than just be an arbitrary system. That’s one of the core ideas, because I think that if you simulate it to that level and you make it fun and interesting, then in some ways, I want the community [to create the rest].

I want some people to be the arch-criminal overlords that operate beyond the reach of the law in some asteroid field off in the rim. They have an underground network paying people to do hits. I want someone who’s a big merchant prince that’s trading a bunch of stuff and hiring other people to do runs. You should be able to have all those roles happening in your galaxy if you set it up right. Players gravitate to different things. Someone wants to be a bounty hunter. Someone wants to be an explorer. Someone wants to be a criminal overlord. You should be able to do all those things. It’s pretty cool, especially if you allow the players to hire out and do stuff with each other. It’s not just the game hiring you. You can get paid missions from the game, but players themselves should be able to essentially do Craigslist listings inside. “I need a couple of tough mercenaries to fly on my wing, because I have to deliver this cargo over here and it’s pretty hairy.” If you put all that together in an open-world setting, it’d be pretty awesome.

RPS: That’s tremendously ambitious. It’s one of the more ambitious things I’ve heard for, um, games. Ever.

Roberts: Well, nobody ever accused me of not being ambitious.



RPS: Richard, who saw Star Citizen for us before you revealed it, was concerned that Squadron 42 seemed fairly inessential. He was worried that all this ambition would necessitate that you leave a few things on the chopping block, and a single-player component seemed like a pretty easy target.

Roberts: Yeah, but the way we’re structured, that probably won’t happen. The Squadron 42 element of it is in the content development plan at an earlier stage than the full Citizen universe. It’s scaled the way it is because the functionality I need for that is a subset of the functionality I need for the bigger universe. The space combat, flying around, the multiplayer side, all that. That’s the core functionality that will also go into Star Citizen. What Star Citizen puts on top of it is the persistent universe. It’s a meta-level.

The way I would view it is, think of Squadron 42 like World of Tanks or something like that. You can jump into battles and we have a single-player narrative. That level of stuff where it’s not necessarily persistent. Then the Star Citizen side is the persistent layer on top of that, making everything that’s happening make sense in a holistic universe. It’s a bit easier in a space setting, something like a Freelancer/Privateer setup, than if you were trying to do a World of Warcraft or a Rift or something like that.

The stuff that happens in the big universe, the persistent universe, on that level you don’t need that side of it to be so high-fidelity in real time. The realtime stuff is just flying around in space and the combat. The persistent universe, what it’s doing is the matchmaking. The persistent universe keeps track of where you are in the galaxy, how much money you’ve got, what ship you’ve got, which isn’t necessarily a realtime thing. If we wanted to, the persistent universe could be completely handled by a sort of boring web interface, but obviously that’s not the style of thing I like to do.



So the persistent universe side, what it does it the matchmaking. It’s figuring, okay, you’re flying from planet A to planet B. Ben over here is flying from planet C to planet D. You two are going to intersect. He’s a pirate and you’re a merchant, so you’re in conflict. It creates an instance, which is dynamic and isn’t permanent, and puts you into it to resolve your conflict. It will allow other players to drop into it. You’ll have slots saved so that if you have friends and you’re under attack, you can send out to your friends and say, “Hey, I’m under attack! Anyone close by, come help me out!” They see that message pop up when they’re flying around and they can hit it.

RPS: So you’re going to put all of that stuff on top of Squadron 42, then?

Roberts: My point is that the Squadron 42 world, the battle instance itself and all that, that is all Squadron 42. That’s all the same stuff. What Squadron 42 doesn’t have is the persistent database side. I guess what I’m trying to say is that the single-player is safe. First of all, because the Wing Commander side is very important to me. But second of all, it’s a subset of the bigger thing.

If someone was going to say, “Chris, can you get this all done?”, the question isn’t so much about getting the Squadron 42 stuff done. It’s more about getting the full big vision of the world going. That’s the biggest challenge. So the only thing I’ll say in counter to that is that I’ve built that open world a couple of times. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how to structure the persistent world and have the advantages that you get from building that kind of world in space. There’s a reason why EVE Online lets everyone be on the same server. They can’t do that in World of Warcraft. It’s the same reason I can do it in this one. As I was explaining, the persistent universe side of it is really just a matchmaking service and a stat-tracking service. It’s just dressed up in a way that makes it feel like it’s part of the world. We don’t ever worry about, “Okay, everyone in our universe can go to this specific point at the same time,” because it’s not set up to be that way. You could all say, “Let’s go to Earth” at a particular time, but when you’re on Earth, it’s not on a realtime basis. It’s just like being in a big chatroom that’s dressed up with some nice graphics.



RPS: What is the biggest group size that can be in a single spot? Is that decided by how many people can be in combat at once?

Roberts: Yeah. The biggest group that can be at one spot in space is decided by how many we can have in combat at once. It’s not fully determined. It’s going to be somewhere between 60 and 100-some people. Freelancer could manage about 128 people online, so I’m hoping we can do that. We have a high degree of fidelity, but then also the broadband is much better than it used to be. If you look at Battlefield on the PC, it can do I think 64 players at once in an instance. It’s going to be somewhere in there. We have the advantage over Battlefield, because they have to have the whole environment rendered. Most of this is in space, so you don’t have to worry about the background crumbling. What would happen is if, say, there’s 10,000 people in orbit around Earth, there would be 100 different instances of 100 people, basically, in orbit.

RPS: Say in your crime lord scenario from earlier, someone put out a hit on somebody. How would the person trying to carry out the hit navigate to the instance where the target is?

Roberts: Here’s the thing: We can have 10,000 people down on the same planet. It’s not that you would have 10,000 people sitting in the space bar, but the system knows that you’re on the planet. We do this dynamic matchmaking I’m talking about. If, for instance, you had a hit out on someone, and you took that job, the persistent universe server knows, “Okay, you’ve been hired to take Ben out over here.” It knows that and it’ll match you. Tagging Ben and you together. Unless you’re getting a job to take out 200 people all at the same time. We’re not going to let you do that.

Essentially what it does is, it matchmakes you with your friends. It knows who your friends list is, and it’s always trying to put you together. It also knows, if you’ve got missions against someone that’s a player, that it should try to put you together as well. It’s trying to dynamically match you up with people who are in opposition to you, too. It’s like a very sophisticated matchmaking service.

On the surface of it, as a player, it seems like you’re part of this massive universe and people you’re looking for just happen to show up. But there will never be a case like in EVE Online where you can have a thousand players show up for a massive stellar war. It’s not meant to be that way. It’s a different level of scope. It’s why it’s called Star Citizen, and not Earth and Empire or something. It’s about the individual point of view – not the overall political campaign or corporations or whatever.



RPS: OK, so say again that someone has a hit out on them, and that develops into a massive battle, and that fills up the instance. If someone else were also to want to join into that, what would happen? Would they just get a, “Sorry, you can’t join, this queue is full” message?

Roberts: The goal, hopefully, is not to be in that situation. The idea would be that we reserve slots for players to have their friends. I’m sure there will be some cases, because you can’t reserve five slots for every player in it, that there’ll be too many. What will probably happen is, if we can fit 100 people in one battle instance, we may allow 50 to 60 and then keep 40 slots open, thinking that will be plenty of slots for friends to join. There could be a case where all these people call their friends and 100 people could want to turn up, and then in that case that would be a problem.

But the goal is, in most cases… I don’t know if you realize when you fly, but the airlines all overbook their flights, because they know that 10 percent of people don’t show up. If they have 110 people on the plane, they’ll take 120 bookings for it, because most of the time they’ll be fine. That’s why you’ll occasionally show up and they’ll say, “Does anyone want to take a later flight?” You always have to do this trade-off of trying to have as many people in the battle instance so it’s cool, but also reserving enough slots so people can show up.

There will, I’m sure, be some instances that will break it where everyone who shows up has a lot of friends who can all come in. At that point, we’ll figure out a way to try and be as elegant about it as possible. That’s the one use case where I can see it breaking. We’re trying to do everything we can to make it, for most of the time, so that won’t happen. Most of the time, your experience should be, “You’re under attack, send out a distress call, you’ve got friends nearby, they show up.”

RPS: What kind of civilization do you hope players will ultimately create? EVE is known for all its corporations and its political dealings and things like that, but you’re obviously designing something very different.

Roberts: Well, if you think of World of Warcraft, it’s not really 2,000 people getting together to go off and figure out how to do something. It’s you and your group of buddies going on a dungeon run. I want it to be more on that level, where you’ve got three, four, five, six friends that you go and fly around in space with. You don’t have to, but you can work together to do trading runs and split the profits up. I view it as encouraging a group dynamic, but it’s a smaller group dynamic than EVE Online. I’m focusing more on half a dozen people or less. Not hundreds of thousands of people.



As far as the big meta-corporations, I could be wrong. There may be a situation where someone really works the system well and has hundreds of people working for them around the galaxy. But that will probably be more in a case of… they’re the ones issuing missions and putting them on boards. Their effects are felt through the galaxy, but there’s never a point where all their stuff happens in one moment. I think that would be cool, but I think that it’s not really set up for you to build up your corporation or group of followers to 2,000, 3,000 people. I could be wrong, but I think the missions and the action we’ll see will be on a smaller scale. They’ll be on a more personal scale.

RPS: You’ve been pretty adamant about planning for very consistent, frequent post-launch updates. But I got the impression that you meant that from the standpoint of everything – from new content to balancing and tweaks and stuff like that. How many people do you have working on this, and how many are you planning to have work on it in the long run?

Roberts: The group that put together the tech base and did all the research was less than 10 people. We’re going to ramp up to a much bigger group of people. I don’t want to have a ridiculous group of 300 or 400 people, but the core group will be about 40 or 50 developers, and then it will scale on the content side outside of that. Building content with this level of fidelity takes a lot of time. It’s much more complicated. You look at a fighter flying around, you see all the bits move. All the thrusters are articulating. When I’m moving my guns around, you can see all the wires. The missile bays. You can see my head there. The guns behind there are all tracking. There’s a huge amount of engineering that goes into it. It’s not just designing something that looks cool. You have to design something that works. You can fit inside the cockpit when you climb in. You have to figure out those ergonomics. The thrusters all have to balance where they’re put, because they’re actually generating force.

Obviously you don’t need wings in space, there is that, but the simulation of this and how it flies is 100 percent correct to how you would fly it around in space, the same way the lunar lander or whatever works. There’s a lot of work that goes into this. The way we’ve worked out a workflow is that you have the core team handling the programming and art integration and coordinating, but a lot of the assets are done in a scalable basis like you would for a film or something. At the height of it, we would probably have several hundred people working on all the assets, but you scale up and scale down as you need to.



Part of the concept is that we’re going to go live and it’s not all the content that we’ll want to have eventually. We’ll be bringing content online all the time. Not just once a year or anything like that. My theory is that’s going to make the universe feel more real. When we’re adding content we can be reacting to what’s happening. I gave you that scenario where someone could be playing the crime lord and hiring people to do nefarious stuff like hits on people. Running the game, we would see that, and we could start to… I mean, just little things. We’ll have news blasts about what’s happening in the galaxy. If you’re down at the bar, you can read about what’s happening. There will be reports of raids on a planet… “There seems to be something happening over here.” All that stuff, we want to feed back into it. When you’re in this universe, you feel like it’s alive and things other players are doing are becoming part of the fiction of the universe.

RPS: Right, you’re planning to turn player interactions into the lore of the universe. Another example you cited was, if someone discovers a new navigation route, it’s named after them. Do you have any other ideas for how you want to do that?

Roberts: The jump point’s probably the best example, because it’s a simple one to illustrate. Things like in today’s world, if you make a bunch of money, you can build a building and get your name on it. You go someplace and it’s the “whoever” building, that’s just someone who made a lot of money a long time ago and could buy a building and put their name on it. That’s a pretty simple illustration, but the later-stage stuff, when you’ve accumulated enough wealth, there is real estate you can buy in the game, on planets and such. That’s another example of the players becoming part of the lore.

We are actively going to update the galactic news briefs based on what’s happening with the players. We’re trying to find interesting events and use that as a source. We’ll have some NPC stuff to talk about, but part of the agenda is also to refer to things that are happening as the game’s operators see them. If there was a battle or a conflict or whatever, we’re trying to have that come across in the news items. You don’t have to do it all the time, but if you have this happen occasionally, it sells people. They see themselves there and think, “Wow, that’s cool. I’m notorious. I’m wanted in five systems!” That’s the kind of thing that should happen. If someone’s taking people out, they should be on the most-wanted list. It’ll be on the news briefs, the face is up on the Galacticolor vids and stuff. What you need to feel is like your actions have some impact on the world and other people can see that.

Check back tomorrow for part two, in which we discuss the story behind Star Citizen’s world, progression systems, flight sticks, crowdfunding, the modern state of PC gaming, and – most importantly – whether or not Roberts plans to ever actually visit space himself.

Though I doubt it, I hope that griefing is kept to a minimum or that it is only a problem in the fringe starsystems.

Yesterday, we brought you Chris Roberts. Well, we didn’t bring him to you physically (sadly, he refused our requests for a kidnapping), but we presented his thoughts, brain-o-genically frozen and served on a mostly-clean sandwich tray. And now, it’s time for a second helping. This time around, Roberts and I discuss space Romans, control schemes, the potentially disingenuous aspects of crowdfunding, the future of PC gaming, and spaaaaaaaace. Going there, that is. You’ll find all that and more after the break.


RPS: What’s the general backdrop of the universe that you’ve created? There are space Romans, right?

Roberts: Typically when I’ve made games, I always like to focus on a historical setting and then project it into the future. First of all, everyone instinctively understands it, because it’s part of their history. In this particular case, the era that we’ve chosen is the decline and the fall of the Roman empire, but instead of it being the Roman empire, it’s the empire of Earth. Dateline 2942, humanity has expanded across many planets. Mostly in a militaristic fashion, just like the Romans did. Now it’s almost overextended. It’s creaking from constantly trying to keep the empire together and keep its borders safe. But it’s so spread out.

On the western side, there’s a couple of alien races that are the equivalent of the Goths and the Vandals and stuff that are encroaching and raiding and causing havoc on the western side. On the eastern side, there’s a couple of more friendly alien races we’re trading with. There’s a schism between the eastern and western parts of the empire of Earth.

The two major planets in the empire are Earth, which is the historical capital we started from. Then there’s a planet called Terra, an Earth-like planet that was discovered a couple of hundred years into the expansion. The thing that Terra has, besides being bigger and nicer than Earth, it’s in a nexus of jump points. That star system has like 10 different ways in and out, going to different star systems. It’s very connected in terms of communication and trade, whereas Earth itself is not. It’s only got a couple of jump points in. It’s like if you were thinking about an interstellar highway, Earth is off on one of the side trunks, whereas Terra’s right in the network. Terra’s become more and more autonomous as time has gone on, so it’s the equivalent of Constantinople versus Rome. They’re much more focused on trade, because the neighbors of Terra on the eastern side are more advanced, they’re not necessarily so aggressive.

The Terran side of the empire of Earth is much more in favor of diplomacy and trade and less about showing up with your forces and conquering, which is how Earth originally expanded. So we start the game before there’s a proper split, but there will be a split between the two sides, and then we’ll have an in-game event that’s like the sack of Earth further on, like the sack of Rome.



It felt like that was an interesting setting. In an open-world setting, there’s different factions, different interests. You have war on one side where it’s pretty simple, fighting against the barbarian hordes much like the legions did towards the end of the Roman empire. But you’ve also got the opportunity for trade. One side wants to be about trade and diplomacy, the other side is more militaristic. It feels like there’s a lot of possibility and options. If you think about what happened during the decline and fall of the Roman empire, there were lots of things going on. Europe itself was created with all these different feudal countries when the Roman empire broke up. It felt like this was a good setting to pattern it after, to create an open-world galaxy that would have a lot of options to do what you wanted to do.

RPS: What is your focus for advancement and progression? Is it just getting parts for your ship and adding to that?

Roberts: It’s not an RPG in that I work my way up to level 80, I fire my proton gun at you, and I do +4 damage. The combat, there’s an element of skill, because you’re flying around. Really, your character is your ship. You beef up your ship and that’s your suit of armor and the magic weapons you’ve got, to use a fantasy role-playing analogy. Your progression rate is measured there.

It’s not so much that you become a level 5 pilot. The points you can earn in the game are more towards your citizenship status. You can do missions to increase that, and you’ll get some benefits from being a citizen, but they’re only really benefits if you want to be on a certain side of the law. If you want to be a criminal overlord, you probably don’t care much about being a citizen.

RPS: What sort of benefits are those exactly?

Roberts: Like getting afforded the protection of the empire. There will be certain areas at the center where they don’t want pirate attacks, and so they’ll enforce that. But there will be benefits to being a citizen in areas that don’t have the full force of the empire there. Maybe they’ll come to help you out, prioritize you higher. There will be certain things you can do as a citizen. You can vote as a citizen. I think of it as being a Roman citizen. Not everyone was a citizen, and the citizens had a different level of status. They were afforded protection and they had a say in what was happening, versus the ones who weren’t citizens. We have the same kind of idea here.

RPS: With that type of progression, if you choose to fight, you get a very tangible measure of what you’ve done. You feel good about the fact that your ship flies better, hits harder, etc. But what about if you’re just a trader?

Roberts: I think if you’re just a trader, your tangible result is the fact that you’re making a lot of money. It’s not necessarily what I would be doing, because I like the idea of combat and achievement there. But as I was saying, we’re going to let you have the ability to buy some real estate, whether it’s your own little penthouse on one of the planets, or your private club in the back of the bars to invite your friends to, or an asteroid base somewhere. All these things obviously cost a lot of money.



There will be some players, just like you see in certain games where all they do is craft or whatever, that will just try to make as much money as possible, and maybe hire other people to do the dirty work. It all depends. For me, the fun bit is getting out in space and flying around. There are people who just want to play the economic part of it. That’s the idea, though, that we can support it for them. As far as that goes, generally… I don’t know how we could reward someone other than with the fact that they have wealth and can buy and do lots of things.

I think being able to buy your own real estate and invite your friends to it is a pretty big deal. I was giving my crimelord example… You could have your asteroid base and so on, but you could also have a place, hire some people to protect it, people come and see them, like seeing Don Corleone in the beginning of The Godfather – you could do all that. I want to have that sense that you have the ability to do that in the game. I think it would be pretty cool.

RPS: You’ve mentioned very robust peripheral support, which is cool. Using a game pad, using a keyboard and mouse, using a flight stick… Could I use the super massive 320-million button Steel Battalion controller?

Roberts: I’d have to look at the Steel Battalion controller. You’re not talking about the Kinect thing, are you?

RPS: God no.

Roberts: I don’t know. There was that device where you could that can track your finger motions really accurately. I think it’s not out just yet, but they were going to prototype it. It’s going to go in front of your monitor, and the idea is that you can do this in front and it’s super pixel-accurate. So not like Kinect, which is completely inaccurate. If we get that, that would be another thing to support.

It’s not really working yet, but you can see here, this HUD [motions toward cockpit view in Star Citizen], if I look around it’s in proper 3D. It floats in front of your eyes in stereoscopic. That’s kind of like the Iron Man-style HUD tagging. The HUD doesn’t function properly yet, but what happens is that it’ll tag stuff like you see in Iron Man. It’s going to be set up in that style. I can have my weapons display here, and then sweep it onto my HUD, like a Minority Report type of thing. In this version you’ll be doing it like this, which isn’t as cool. If they have that finger-thing I was talking about… If Kinect was half decent I would support that. But the idea would be, you’d still fly with a joystick, but you should be able to like that and you’d see… My hand comes off the joystick and goes like that. The idea is, everything I do in the cockpit, like if I switch something on…

RPS: …you’ll see the corresponding movement from the pilot.

Roberts: Yeah. I’m switching weapons here and hitting the buttons.



RPS: That’s what made me think of the Steel Battalion joke, actually. It’s this big, robust control mechanism where everything corresponds to everything.

Roberts: That’s kind of the idea. I think I saw a few comments online about how the joystick in the setup looks like the Saitek X52. That’s because it’s patterned after it. The idea is, the buttons you press on that would correspond. I wanted it to feel like the VR thing. The more you can feel immersed in it, the better.

If there’s a cool peripheral that makes sense, we’ll do it. Because it’s not that difficult to support them. It’s actually pretty simple to support a bunch of stuff. And the engine that we’re building on top of CryEngine already has support for most of this stuff. You just have to map it, and we’re going to do that. Part of the whole philosophy we’re building here is that we’re building a high-end PC game. We want to get back to the roots of Wing Commander. There was a lot of Sound Blaster cards sold because of Wing Commander II, and people wanted CD-ROMs to play Wing Commander III, or upgraded to a 386 or 486. We want to embrace a little bit of that.

RPS: At this point, do the enemy ships have actual AI, or is this a pre-programmed sequence?

Roberts: No, they have AI. They’re attacking the carrier right now. It’s not nearly close to the sophisticated AI we’ll be finishing with, but they have the basic workings. They’re currently all making passes and trying to blow up the turrets. The HUD stuff doesn’t have any of the lead targeting yet, so it’s really hard to hit anything. I was hoping to have a bit more of it done for the demos, but what I thought I could program and how long it would took, there was a bit of a disconnect there. But it’s fun to see them flying around. The turrets all track and try to fire on them. This carrier is pretty crazy. It’s got something like 115 turrets on it. In the demo, we tuned the turrets down, because what happened at the very beginning when we turned it on was that without the turrets having some level of inaccuracy, the enemy ships started attacking and were blasted out of the sky in a few seconds.

RPS: You’re planning to release a version of Star Citizen that lets players run their own servers, right?

Roberts: Yeah. We want to embrace the whole Freelancer style of stuff, where you can mod it. Skyrim does a nice job where you can mod and run your own server. Running your own server, you can do what you want to do. I want to also try and get some user-generated content into the game itself, but you have to curate that to a certain extent. You can’t just let people do whatever they want to do.



People could design a spaceship, they could submit it, and if it’s cool enough, we could add it to the things you can buy in the ship store, and then people could get money from that in the big game. If they want to create their own thing and do some of their own content, we give them a lot of the same tools that we use for building the content.

RPS: That sort of feeds back into integrating player action into the world’s lore. Like, what if one of the most popular ship types ends up being player-designed?

Roberts: That’s kind of the idea. If you sell a ship, you should almost become a spaceship manufacturer in here. You’d have the equivalent of the Roberts Space Industries, but it’d be yours. And if you managed to design and balance a really cool ship, part of the idea would be that people would buy and use that.

RPS: You actually loaded your crowdfunding page with useful information. One of the things I’ve noticed with Kickstarter lately is that people will make a very vague announcement and then slowly roll out information to entice more people to buy in. But the problem there is that you’re essentially asking the first group of people, who are already going to be spending money on something that may never come out, to spend money without knowing anything. It always seems a bit sketchy to me.

Roberts: Yeah. From my standpoint, the reason why I did it is because, if you’re doing a smaller, indie-style thing, like what Tim Schafer is doing with his graphical adventure, they’re much smaller in scope. They’re not saying this is looking better than a triple-A game. I’m actually talking about something that’s pretty ambitious, and even on the crowdfunding side, the crowdfunding money isn’t enough money. Theoretically, if we raised $10 million dollars, it would be enough, but nobody’s ever done that much.

We did a deal with investors that we already have lined up. To prove to them that there are people who want to play a high-end PC and want to play a space game, the deal we did is that we’d make at least $2 million and it’s all closed. The setup for that was, we knew that we were asking for a lot. You can rely a bit on the nostalgia of, “Hey, you played my games, I’m famous, so trust me to make another game,” which is what most people have done on Kickstarter.

So part of the key on my side was, I felt like it would be better if I spent time and invested my own money. With a lot of people, you throw it up, see if some people give you money, and then you go and do something. I put my money where my mouth is. The idea was, it’s pretty ambitious, so I want to show people what I’m thinking about at a certain level. This is what it’s going to look like. Really talk it through.



Yes, it’s still going on a certain amount of faith that I’m going to deliver this and do all the rest, but they have a lot more information to go on than in a lot of these other cases. That was part of the other aspect of it, to try and treat it much more like an old-school product launch. If I were doing this in a traditional publishing manner, I’d probably work for another year on this and then we would go to E3 and unveil it. I’d do a whole press tour a year before the game came out to get everyone excited and talking about it. So I did it a year earlier than I would have done, because we’re saying, “We would like to get the really excited core fans to be part of this early. We want to have you help back it because it’s going to unlock financing, but you can also be part of the community. You can play stuff early as an alpha tester. You’ll be part of the sounding board to help make decisions.”

RPS: You’re going PC only, which is really awesome. And honestly, at this point, I don’t think the PC has really ever been healthier as a gaming platform.

Roberts: I totally agree.

RPS: But there are some things on the horizon that are a bit worrisome, like Windows 8 and how closed it’s going to be. Meanwhile, things like tablets and mobile are becoming the big standards in computing. They’re also closed platforms. Are you worried at all about the PC’s future as a platform that allows for this kind of scope and creativity and ambition and openness?

Roberts: I chose the PC because it enables that. The game I want to build and the community I want to build, I could not do it on a PlayStation or an Xbox right now. The terms of service would prevent me. The only platform I can do it properly with is the PC. I guess my answer would be, if there are other platforms coming along that let me deliver this experience, then I would do it. Even the next-gen consoles, which technically will be able to handle this if they change it around. I would certainly consider supporting it. But it’s the open platform aspect that’s the most important for me, to let you integrate with the community. Even on the tablet basis, if the tech comes to a level that lets you do that, I would certainly consider supporting it.

There’s a bit of worry. I feel like the Windows 8 thing is worrying. Although the issue is more the way they’ve set it up. They still have the same stuff you have in Windows 7, it’s just that they’ve tried to build this Mac type of [infrastructure] because that’s all they want to do, right? Microsoft wants to control an App Store-style thing. Star Citizen isn’t going to be a Metro application. This is going to be an actual client type of game.



We’ll have to see what happens. I think it’s a bit of a bummer, because Windows 7 is actually the best Windows we’ve ever worked with. It’s really rock-solid. My wife’s a Mac person, but her Mac is awful. You plug things in and it doesn’t configure. You have to install drivers. It used to be much better than Windows, and now I plug anything into my Windows 7, it automatically detects it. It’s robust. Developing stuff on it, I’m crashing all the time, but I never have to reboot Windows. I’m amazed at how good it is. Vista sucked, but Windows 7 has been really good. Especially the Ultimate with all the memory and everything. It is a bit worrying that Microsoft may be doing the whole Apple thing and trying to control it.

They finally got it right after all these years. It took them 20 years, and now they’re going to take a step back?

RPS: You’re obviously someone who’s head-over-heels in love with space. Would you ever pull a Richard Garriott and go into orbit?

Roberts: I think I told Richard that I’d go up. Carmack’s got his little rocket thing that he built. It’ll be much cheaper. I’m not going to spend $30 million dollars like Richard did to go into space. But yeah, I’d be interested in going up.

It’s a bit ironic, because Richard builds fantasy games, but he’s obsessed with going to space. I build space games and [I haven't done it yet]. All that stuff’s pretty cool. I’ve known Richard forever, because we were together at Origin. David here, who’s helped me out and helps Richard out… We’re all friends. We’re using their conference room and all the rest [laughs].

But yeah, I do remember when I was first working on my stuff at Origin, I helped Richard out on Ultima IV. I was writing a bunch of the conversations with him. He was telling me about how he wanted to go space, even back then. It was a long time ago. I was thinking, that’s a great dream, but are you really going to be able to? I wasn’t necessarily telling Richard that… But then he did it. I have to give him kudos. It’s what he wanted to do. When I was 19, I was helping him do this stuff, and how old was Richard then? He was probably, what, 20? It was 1986, 1987, so maybe 24-25. This is back when none of this stuff was happening. It was only the province of major governments. There was still a Soviet Union. But he did it, so complete hats off to him. Anyway, I agreed to go up in the thing that Carmack’s working on. It’s going to be $80,000 dollars instead of $30 million.



If Star Citizen does well, maybe I’ll be able to afford it. That’s not really why I’m making Star Citizen. I’m making it because it’s the game I wanted to play forever. It’s my dream. There’s a lot of things I wanted to do in my past games, whether it was Freelancer or Privateer or Wing Commander, that I couldn’t because of the tech at the time. I feel like you can do it now. The geek in me wants to build that and realize it that way. I think that’s completely fascinating. The ability to create a virtual world in a computer is awesome.

RPS: So we’re not in any danger of losing you as a game designer to a life of space crime.

Roberts: No, not yet. I’m back in games. I took my break and I’m quite happy to be back. I’m enjoying it. I haven’t done a lot of programming since I built Strike Commander. In the old days I used to write all the engines for the stuff we did. As the projects got bigger, I was ending up spending all the time directing and managing. In the old days, once Wing Commander became successful, it was always like, “We need it this year! We need to drive the revenue!” You’re under a lot of pressure.

With this one, since nobody was expecting it, I could spend a year and put a small team together and just play with ideas and do some programming myself. I had a lot of fun. To a certain extent, when you’re programming a world like this, you’re kind of a god. You make the rules up. You decide. It’s fun when you don’t have the pressure of 100 people that are on a team waiting to find out what’s happening. That’s what’s happening with a big publisher. You have a group of people and you roll from one project to another.

Of course, you don’t need 100 people on day one, but you do need 100 people at the end of it. Since everyone’s on salary, you can’t just say, “Okay, we’re not paying you now, but we’ll pay you in a year’s time.” You basically have your full team from the very beginning. So you have this pressure to come up with answers for people, to give them stuff to do. Sometimes it prevents you from really thinking things through and getting stuff to work. It was fun, before the announcement, to spend the time working and not have that pressure. I’m having fun coming back and doing this stuff.

RPS: Thank you for your time.

Recruit your friends, win prizes and give them an opportunity to win too!

Hello pilots! America has voted and we’re celebrating with some cool new pledge features.

Deep space is a cold, lonely place with an infinite set of dangers, from greedy pirates to deadly asteroid fields to lethal, ruthless, savage Vanduul raiders. It stands to reason then, that you’ll want someone to watch your back. And why settle for an AI wingman when you could form a squadron made up of your real world friends? We want to encourage you to bring your friends to the Star Citizen universe and we’ve come up with a new recruiting system that will reward you for convincing them to join you in the fight… and give them a chance at a prize, too!

Simply encourage your friends to pledge through a custom URL found on your My Account page and they’ll be marked on your account when they do. If they don’t use this link, they can also enter your username or email in and you will be credited with the recruit.

We’re not the only ones that believe in high end PC gaming: our friends at Alienware, Logitech, NVIDIA and Oculus are just excited about Star Citizen as you and have generously donated some great hardware for this pledge drive! We developed this recruiting system because it seemed like a fair and fun way to give everyone a shot at these prizes. Instead of offering the computer to whoever bids the most money, this gives everyone an equal chance, whether they’ve pledged $30 or $10,000… all while helping us reach those stretch goals. And who doesn’t love a competition?

The pilot who recruits the most wingmen in the next two weeks will win an Alienware Aurora Desktop that will be perfect for playing Star Citizen. Runners up can win prizes from a selection of NVIDIA GTX680 and GTX670 video cards, Logitech F710 Game Pads, Extreme 3D Pro Joysticks and even some in-game items like the Anvil Gladiator. Each one of your friends that you convince to join the fight will also get a small bonus of 250 in game galactic credits and be in the running to win some prizes themselves!

For more details please refer to the details on the Get out the Pledge competition page.

We’re also taking the election theme to heart and offering you our own form of voting if you want to help push us towards our stretch goals. Which part of the game are you most looking forward to… the intense single-player action of Squadron 42 or the vast and complex open world of Star Citizen? Cast your vote in the form of a limited edition fighter skin. $5 will get you a set of military markings for your ship designating your allegiance with Squadron 42…

Or the same amount will get you an explorer skin, outfitted with the Star Citizen jump point logo. Unlike a real election, you’re welcome to vote twice!

So get out there, pick a skin and start recruiting your friends to call the Star Citizen world home!

Hi everyone!

Three million dollars! It’s hard to believe we’re already here, far above our initial objective and well into some of the stretch goals, with still 10 days left in the campaign. It’s all thanks to you, our incredible fans. I am impressed every single day when I see the dedication you have already given this project, spreading the word and building a great and supporting community. It’s going to be a daunting—and rewarding—task for the team to continue to build the game knowing how much this community believes in us. And it’s a task I’m proud to say we’re up to.

Sorry to have been quiet for the past few days. I just got back from Montreal, Canada, which is likely to be one of the locations where we will build Star Citizen, along with Austin, Texas and Los Angeles, California. It may seem inefficient to have the team spread out but I’m actually a big fan of distributed development. The tech prototype was built by a small team spread out between Austin, Frankfurt (Germany), Los Angeles, Montreal, Monterey (Mexico) and San Francisco

The concept is to focus on where the talent is and not try to fit the talent to the location. So a lot of my old Origin and Digital Anvil compatriots will be based in Austin, in LA the focus will be some of the high end conceptual design (leaning heavily on the deep pool of talent from film like Ryan Church and Jim Martin) and some engineering. In Montreal we’re likely to be building some of the backend persistent server infrastructure and web front end. I’ll be spending time in each location and heavily using Skype! The idea is to break the various components of Star Citizen into discrete parts that are the responsibility of focused “tiger” teams – dogfighting, shipboard FPS, planet side buying / selling / chatting / mission acquisition, persistent server backend and so on. This way it keeps the various elements of the project manageable and the responsibility of small, tight teams. It’s always been my experience that small teams tend to be the most effective, so the idea is to utilize the small team concept in such a way that it can scale for a project with the ambition of Star Citizen. Think of it as taking the multi-core / threading approach to development as opposed to the old way of just increasing the speed and size of one big processor.

Enlist your Friends Update

There have been a few updates while I’ve been off working on the development and hiring plan. And a couple of them have caused some discussion amongst you, so I wanted to set the record straight.

The pledge referral program was actually something that was part of the spec of the custom crowd funding plug in we built and was meant to launch day 1. Unfortunately, due to our launch issues it was never deployed and it has taken this long to get up and running.

Before we started the campaign we had talked to Alienware, NVIDIA and Logitech, who were all very excited by what Star Citizen represented for PC gaming and were eager to help out with some free swag to give away with some of the pledge tiers. We thought it would be much more fun, and allow a wider range of the community to participate if everyone had the chance of winning the bad *** Alienware gaming rig, rather than bundling it with some custom $15,000 pledge level. So we thought that tying it to rounding up as many friends to play with you would be a great way, especially as we want to encourage co-op play and building up your squadron (which is another feature we will roll out once vBulletin is active)

We know that a lot of you are concerned that you won’t be credited for everyone you encouraged to join the fight for high end PC gaming and space sims. Don’t worry! We’re building a referral input to the My Account screen on the RSI site that will give you the ability to retroactively specify if someone has referred you, so everyone can get credit even from the very beginning of the campaign.

We hope you like it. It was designed for fun, and to give everyone a chance to win some cool swag (who doesn’t want an Alienware desktop, Oculus Rift or a GTX680?).

I’ve also had a few questions about the contests we’ve run previously. For legal reasons we’re not allowed to identify the winners unless they give us permission… but if you won a signed Wing Commander or an Anvil Gladiator bomber, you have been contacted by our staff, so make sure to check your spam filters in case there’s a surprise stuck out of view!

Ship Concept Art

We know this high on everyone’s list. Both Ryan Church and Jim Martin are working away on this and have been for many weeks. I hope to have the first set, which will be Ryan’s RSI Constellation work, be in a state to share by the start of next week. When you see the work you will understand why it is not something that can be done in a day. All Star Citizen ships are designed to a level of detail, ergonomics and functionality that no one has ever attempted before in a space game. It’s not just about a pretty drawing – if it was I could have shared something weeks ago. It’s about fully designing the interior and exterior, how weapons and missiles are deployed, where the engines and various thrusters are located, how they articulate, where you would sleep, how the P52 fighter launches and re-docks, where you eat your meal and where you shower. The plan is to share a full RSI brochure on each ship, with exterior and interior renderings, not unlike you would see from Boeing or Lockheed Martin in today’s world. I can tell you the work in progress is very cool and I think you will all be excited once you see the first set. But please bear with us all five ships can’t be done in the next two weeks – it is a multi-month process. But that’s part of the fun of backing Star Citizen; you’re going to take the journey with the development team, see work as it happens and be constantly engaged. It’s not just about the initial campaign – we will be updating and sharing during the whole development process.

Stretch Goals

We’ve just hit $1,000,000 and the Corvette on Kickstarter and $3,000,000 on the main site. I can’t begin to tell you how excited this makes me… but I really want to get to at least $4,000,000 overall as this will allow us to do more sooner, especially on things like the modding tools. It may seem like a stretch but if you look at other Kickstarter’s they all had a huge surge in the last few days. When it comes to game projects, we’re definitely the leader in amount of dollars pledged per backer, thanks to you. Some of the stretch goals can be covered by upgrading, but we need to also get new backers in. I know you’ve all been spreading the word. Keep it up and we can get there!

Future Updates

We’ve already given you a preview of the base Citizen Card and will be sharing the others over the coming days. I also plan to do a few write ups for you – I always get a lot of questions about instancing, so I’m going to try and describe the process in one concise update. There will be some more video from the prototype in the near future… And of course a ship brochure!