$400M and 10 Years Later, This Game is Still in Development
The end of all sci-fi games
In October 2012, a gaming industry veteran Chris Roberts announced a PC-based game called Star Citizen. It is a sci-fi game that allows players to participate in First Person Shooting, spaceship purchasing and upgrading, resource exploration and trading, and many other gaming formats. When first announced, the gaming community was astonished with its enormous worldview and various kinds of gaming formats. It was going to be the end of all sci-fi games.
Chris Roberts was involved in the production of a few hit games such as Starlancer, so he had extensive experience in game production. He was the product manager, CEO, fund-raiser, marketer, and designer of Star Citizen. However, Roberts was ambitious and wanted to produce a masterpiece, which meant his goals were hardly within reach with current technology, if not impossible all together. For example, he would require the development team to re-produce the game engine (one of the most fundamental tools in development), only to allow the footprint in the snow to look more realistic. There were many similar instances in Star Citizen.
Problematic development progress
Star Citizen broke many records in gaming history. It has raised over $400M in crowdfunding since 2012, and have been under development for more than 10 years. The producing company, Cloud Imperium Games (CIG), has pushed back the release date numerous times and faced a number of lawsuits from disgruntled fans. As of now, in Q2 2022, the game is still in alpha release, which means the features in the current release are subject to future changes, and there are many, MANY bugs.
Although facing enormous pressure, CIG has been updating its development roadmap since 2012. There are a huge number of features, contents, maps, etc. in the roadmap, and the corresponding timeline for each item. However, looking at the amount of items (55 categories, with 7–72 items in each category), it’s doubtful that CIG will be able to meet all the deadlines. So it is safe to say that Star Citizen still have a long way to go before any beta version is released.
New techs may not help
In the most recent release, CIG’s Engineering Director, Paul Reindell, mentioned two new technologies called streaming and server-mesh, which would help solving the serious lagging issue in the alpha version.
Because Star Citizen has a large amount of contents (planets, ships, cargo, personnel) in real time, using the traditional server structure to process the requests will lead to lags, which compromises player experience. Streaming solves the problem by load only the immediate environment of the player, hence reducing the total amount of data required when a player logs onto the server. Just like when we stream videos or audios, at any given point, the video or audio only loads a short amount ahead, hence reducing the amount of data required.
However, as the number of players increases, the total amount of data required would increase exponentially, thus putting pressure on the servers. In this case, server-meshing technology is used to alleviate the pressure on each server. By creating a replication layer into the servers, the changes made by players will only communicate with this layer. The replication layer then communicates with only one of the servers in the server-mesh, hence decreasing the total amount of computing power in the server-mesh.
Although I would very much love to see Star Citizen successfully released, my hope is not high. CIG is using numerous technologies to solve issues rose during development, but in the past 10 years, there have been many fundamental breakthroughs in the gaming industry. For example, the engine, CryEngine 3, was first introduced in 2002, almost 20 years ago. It is very likely that an engine with better performance will release before CIG completes Star Citizen, making it instantly lagging behind other games using the newer engine.
Star Citizen’s newest release, 3.17, was open for download last week. It was filled with bugs and crashes, making the experience unpleasant. The release included only minor fixes and updates, such as a coffee vendor in one of the starports, or a new river on one of the planets. These updates are not core technologies and should not be prioritized in development.
Star Citizen may look like a great game on paper, but it will not be a great game if CIG is never really able to complete development.
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