THE CHRIS ROBERTS THEORY OF EVERYTHING

Last week, Gameranx wrote a massive article, The Chris Roberts Theory Of Everything. It chronicled previous patterns of conduct related to the handling of his projects. It’s an incredibly well sourced read.

A Swedish magazine, LEVEL, did a similar article back in July, and which, last we heard, was picked up by a leading English media outlet for re-publication; with the Swedish author doing the official translation. As that has been some months now, some are of the opinion that the article may have been bought and buried. But as these things go, there is an unofficial translation floating around from back in July.

SQUADRON 42 DELAYED (AGAIN)

Then, just a few days ago, it became official that Squadron 42 wasn’t going to be released in 2016 – as I have said in four previous blogs – it’s clear to see that neither of these games is likely to see the light of day. At least not in the form promised.

The latest fiasco started over the weekend with the #1 Shillizen media, Gamestar in Germany, posting an interview with croberts. Lots of arguments (1, 2) erupted over that one; forcing the writer to acknowledge his error and confirming basically what most of us already knew. SQ42, like Star Citizen, is not a 2016 release. In fact, someone translated the entire article.

Naturally, the media have started reporting (1, 2, 3, 4) the same thing, while using Gamestar as the source.

Here’s the thing with this. BOTH Star Citizen and SQ42 games were supposedly to be created with $6m as per the stretch goals for this project. He says so right here and here.

This is the SQ42 breakdown by itself.

$2m, 30 missions

$3m, 35 missions

$4m, 45 missions

$5m, 50 missions + pro voice over

$5.5m, pro mocap sessions

$6m, mission disk for all backers up to this funding point

Ignoring the year (2011) in which croberts claimed that the game was already in development prior to the Q4/2012 crowd-funding, that means, four years and $123 million (as of this writing) dollars later, they still can’t build a smaller game, for $6 million. A game for which they’ve not only removed some features (e.g. drop-in/drop-out co-op), but also in the aforementioned Gamestar interview, it is now revealed that croberts also increased the scope of SQ42; just like he did with Star Citizen proper.

Note that the website still says that SQ42 is coming in 2016. They didn’t announce any delay at the recent Gamescom event; and with CitizenCon 2016 barely a month away, he may or may not even discuss a release date. Sources already say that SQ42 doesn’t even exist as a game; and that they’re busy working on a presentation, similar to Gamescom2016 for the show. And if even croberts is quoting a Q1/Q2 2017 release date, it’s safe to assume that it probably won’t release until the end of 2017. If ever.

Not to mention that the likes of COD:IW, Titanfall2, Mass Effect: A etc, are all scheduled for Q4/16-Q1/17 release dates.

UPDATE: They gave PC Gamer a non-denial-denial.

GAMESCOM 2016 INTERVIEW (ITALIAN MEDIA)

While we’re at it, I want to share something else with you guys so that those of you who aren’t up to speed on this train-wreck can have another glimpse of the ridiculousness of this whole thing.

After the staged Gamecom 2016 presentation which was riddled with R&D (I wrote about that here), croberts did an interview with an Italian media.

And it’s mind-boggling. Truly.

Not only was he clearly lying, the whole time, but he was talking up tech (VR, 10 million multiplayer clients, procedural generation etc) which he clearly doesn’t even understand, and features (base building!, colonization!) which were never – ever – even part of the game’s original design. This amid the fact that, thus far, five years + $123 million later, they still don’t have 15% of the Star Citizen game done; let alone SQ42.

Below is a transcript (courtesy of Goons) of that interview.

Chris Roberts Interview Gamescom 2016 SCIC

26 Aug 2016

Q: Organisation 2.0. When will (it) arrive and what gameplay features can we expect?

CR:

Uhhh OK… so… CITIZENCON we’re gonna… we’re gonna SHOW and TALK about some STUFF. So… now is too early to talk about it, but we have… we have our WHOLE THING there I think everybody’s gonna like at CITIZENCON. It will be VERY COOL.

Q: Modding. What are the future plans for modders, have you envisioned any tool to support the community?

CR:

Ehhh no no we’re definitely gonna do TOOLS to allow people to like do CONTENT CREATION AND STUFF, so… again that’s sort of uh… the FIRST LEVEL is like our… we’re still building our TOOLS to like… like… build out like… the… like… PLANETS… and the STAR SYSTEMS… USING NEW TECHNOLOGY WE’RE USING… so eehhhh…. once… uh, we get… those WORKING then we sort of work on USABILITY AND STUFF and then… we’ll be able to… PUSH the tools out for everyone… so it’s NOT gonna be… you know… unfortunately in the next few months or in the next YEAR but uh… but after that it is… you know it is part of our PLANS, it’s like… we gotta get our internal tools at a level… uh… good enough for our guys to use and then… make them sort of more USER FRIENDLY and then the SYSTEM that we could like have people create STUFF and then we could CURATE it and put it in the main game or allow people to run sort of their own sort of limited version of the game.

But… I will say that… the LIMITED… the PRIVATE SERVER ones are, you know… they will not be able to do what the… like our FULL CLOUD THING will do cos… that’s got MULTIPLE MULTIPLE SERVERS running at… and we’re gonna have them MESHED TOGETHER so there can be lots of people in the same instance so… that part’s gone more… it’s become BIGGER since when… when… they first started it. So. But you know you should be able to have… you know… like a… like the way FREELANCER did, you can run a server, you can have A HUNDRED PEOPLE ON IT OR SOMETHING and you can go around… uh… you know… uh… eh…. AN AREA YOU DESIGN OR WHATEVER.

There you go.

Q: A lot of people want to know how Virtual Reality will be implemented, have you got any issue with the animations?

CR:

NNnnn….. NO ACTUALLY SO…. aahhhh…. on… on the VR front we’re… it’s pretty EASY for us cos we… we UNIFIED everything so we don’t have like you know, how a lot of games will have like first person view… but they’re not really first person right? But they… you know, it’s two hands floating in front of it… so we just have one… one animation, one character, one… RIG… that runs in first or third person… n-n-no cheating for it at all… ah… in the first person view we stabilise the view the same way that your brain stabilises the images coming from your eyes… yeah like you turn here it’s still UP and if you had a GOPRO on your head and you went like this it would actually go like that and we do all the… yeah we do all the same stuff like your EYE LIKE FOCUSSING ON SOMETHING and… ehrm… so… that’s actually… us for VR’s very eas… it’s like LOOKING OVER and you see, you know… the person you’re flying with DOING STUFF and you can actually see him and it’s all the right… and then if you’re in his point you can see it too so…

Yeah yeah and then also we’re building like all our displays, our UI… uhm… we’ve gotta REFACTOR the UI longer term but… the whole goal is everything’s (inaudible) in the world in 3D which again is more natural for VR… so we did have a VR… we had… early… before everyone changed their SDKs… and we just… like the ENGINE… like the ENGINE GROUP are the ones who would change it and they’re actually some of the guys that wrote uh… VR support for CRYENGINE before they… the guys who wrote the original engine they also did all the VR stuff… that IS in Cryengine now that they were using before they joined us but we just haven’t had time to implement to the most recent SDK and get it working… takes you know, maybe a MONTH’S time for someone? And they’re all very busy doing things like… the PLANETS and stuff like that which EVERYONE can experience.

Q: A game like No Man’s Sky is using procedural generation of planets, how will Star Citizen be different in that aspect?

CR:

EHHHH WELL because we’re not… we’re not… we… we have a TOTALLY DIFFERENT APPROACH… so uhhh… star… there… there’s like… I’m not interested in having a BILLION or a QUINTILLION or EIGHTEEN QUINTILLION star systems that are all RANDOMLY PUT TOGETHER so… all we do… so the PROCEDURAL… PROCEDURAL PLANETS is a BAD WORD FOR IT, what it is is… they are ARTIST AND DESIGN DRIVEN PLANETS THAT USES PROCEDURAL TECHNIQUES TO EHM LIKE BUILD OUT AREAS QUICKLY. So… but in terms of the planet like specify… like HOW YOU BUILD it… like where the mountains will be where the oceans will be where the desert will be where the forest will be… that’s all SPECIFIED by an artist at a higher level… and then they build, ehm… sort of TEMPLATES COMPONENTS where procedural tech can take all the higher level, uhm, like… kind of WORLD… and the WORLD HEIGHT MAP… and it applies the SETS of like ‘OK, here’s the… here’s like a FOREST BIOME or here’s a MOUNTAIN BIOME or here’s a DESERT BIOME’ and the it puts them, paints them in areas somewhere the artist has specified…

So what it really is, we’re using procedural tools to allow an artist to build something at a fidelity of CRYSIS but at a PLANETARY SCALE very quickly. And then they can… they can… DECIDE, ‘Oh, I’m making these areas like THIS’, or they can ZOOM IN to areas and change and edit them around to how they want.

So essentially we’re using the tools to allow artists to RAPIDLY GENERATE really interesting locations so all the locations we have, we’re not hitting a button that GENERATES RANDOM NUMBERS… Wow! That planet! Or that planet! So it’s completely different from NO MAN’S SKY which does it that way, which is also kind of the same way that ELITE does it too… so ours is specifically built to construct and design the worlds and we’re just making it so an artist with the right… with all the TEMPLATES DONE RIGHT can create a world IN LESS THAN A DAY… then… then it’s just a matter of how much time he wants to put, like, certain areas he sort of wants to really CRAFT or just leave it the sort of the way it was sort of done

And that’s what we use, that’s what we’re using the tools for… the IDEA and that’s I think the DIFFERENCE between like STAR CITIZEN and the OTHER GAMES is that like… you know I’ve always liked WORLDS and STORIES and that’s how you know WING COMMANDER sort of you know… felt GROUNDED and… you know the old ORIGIN MOTTO was WE CREATE WORLDS and so… uh… that’s important for me, we already read now that STAR CITIZEN’S got lots of LORE, we’ve been writing lore for it for FOUR YEARS, the systems are… you know… you know have a quite a lot of DETAIL, PLANETS have quite a lot of detail, we have LOCATIONS, CHARACTERS, all spread through our UNIVERSE that we’ve been working on, uh.. not… I mean you guys haven’t even seen a whole bunch of this stuff, but that’s so we can build out the world where it feels like it’s a… a REAL WORLD THAT YOU CAN EXIST IN and go out ADVENTURING

And it’s all gonna be in MULTIPLAYER and see a… you know DO THINGS TOGETHER and ADVENTURE TOGETHER and… you know… it’s… it’s… it’s… so… it’s quite… it’s quite a bit different that way.

But you know… we still gotta finish it so you know… they’re already shipping and out so… I mean I have to say that NO MAN’S SKY’s a pretty impressive technical achievement and… you know… so…

(CR is asked a question which is inaudible on the recording)

That’s… that’s… that’s… DIFFERENT from being a technical achievement… so I mean I’m just… you’re just… you’re… you’re… the ISSUE that you’re having is the general issue that you always get with procedural generation, because it”s… at some point you’re gonna see the patterns and it doesn’t seem to have a rhyme or a reason, uh, and… you know I think maybe… maybe one day? There could be some super formula that could move away from that, but it’s just HARD to do that so… technically it’s pretty impressive and it’s a pretty small team that did it, eh… so, you know, it’s pretty cool, but we’re going in a totally different path which is much more a constructed world with a much more level of detail but I mean, in MY OPINION, we’re gonna try to get the STANTON SYSTEM FOR EVERYONE AT THE END OF THE YEAR with a big release at the end of the year… and you know that’s got FOUR MAJOR PLANETS and a bunch MOONS and secondary areas like OUTPOSTS and stuff, like FORTY SPACE STATIONS and a HUGE AMOUNT OF AREA… and that I think is plenty… HUNDREDS OF HOURS OF GAMEPLAY going between… just because of the amount of DETAIL and… you know, the THINGS THAT YOU CAN DO versus otherwise… just go to STAR SYSTEM after STAR SYSTEM it’s just kind of the same thing again and again

So uh… so YEAH… I mean you’ll see we got… we got… we’re gonna… SHOW… a… like a little bit of a TEASER of some STUFF on Friday at the EVENT, ahhh… ahhhh… so ahhhh…. ahh… you’ll… kinda see a little bit of what I’m talking about and hopefully you guys will like it, sort of like the NEXT STEP, or the EVOLUTION.

Yeah it’s gonna be PRETTY COOL.

Q: How will gameplay differ from single player, from small sized organisations up to bigger ones?

CR:

Eh I think we’ll just… we’re… we’re… DEFINITELY… gonna be DESIGNING gameplay that’s like… SINGLE PLAYER STUFF or YOU AND A GROUP OF FRIENDS or you’re part of a BIG ORGANISATION… and it’s just DIFFERENT THINGS you can do so one of the nice things with the PROCEDURAL… tech, ah… the… that I was thinking… ah… that we wouldn’t be able to do for quite a while but now we’re PROBABLY gonna do is, we’re now gonna have a lot more sort of… PLAY AREAS and since we’re planning to put everyone in the SAME INSTANCES so they’ll just, there’ll DEFINITELY be a case where you and your organisation could like pull off… find a place you like on one of the planets and then bring in some HABITATS and build your own little BASE and then SHIELD, put a SHIELD so it can’t really be seen by other people and then give out LOCATIONS for them to JOIN YOU and then some OTHER ORGANISATION will be cruising around and will be scanning stuff and then will find your PLACE and there could be a BATTLE…

I mean that’s the kind of stuff that… because we’re now letting you go… it’s not… ‘Oh! There’s a planet and now I’m gonna do an automated landing to go down’, there’s just a whole bunch of more gameplay that opens up in terms of… TERRAIN that you can go on and you know whether it’s other players or… you know, AI ENCOUNTERS you can have, you know… whether there’s, you know… PIRATE CAMP spawned down on the planet and you go down and VISIT or there’s a pilot that STRANDED and you gotta go rescue him or whatever

There’s a whole OPTION of different sort of content and gameplay beyond sort of what you would normally be able to do just with SPACE

Q: So will we be able to colonise planets, asteroids, moons, and make our own little settlement?

CR:

Depending on where it is, YES.

So there… there… the… SO. With the tech that we’re DOING, uhm… that’s much more POSSIBLE now than it was before, and we’re also TRYING to have this MESH OF SERVERS so we can have a lot more people in the same instance, so it won’t be so INSTANCED as we were thinking before, so… uh.. the… the goal is… that we’re gonna have a lot of… that’s what I was… I mean if you think about like EARTH, there’s seven billion people on EARTH, there can be areas you can walk, you can walk and never see another person… and… you know… in our WORLD… if we have… TEN MILLION PLAYERS, ten million people that have bought STAR CITIZEN and will play it, then you’re likely to have about a million people concurrent, that’s sort of a TEN PERCENT… so that’d be amazing cos WORLD OF WARCRAFT has done that… ahh… but a MILLION PEOPLE and you’re spread out across hundreds of star systems which each will have multiple planets so you’re talking three, four, five, six hundred planets, the MOONS, there’s a HUGE, MASSIVE amount of TERRAIN so there’s… I think there’s an opportunity and plenty of places for people to sort of make their BASES or set up

So that’s kind of one of the COOL THINGS I’m set about because of the planet stuff that we’re doing… increase the… the PLAYSPACE, the PLAY AREA, now you have these worlds that you can go DOWN ON as well as SPACE.

So YEAH, we’re GONNA DO IT

End title:

A big thank you to Chris Roberts for his kind disposition and David Swofford for his professionality and all the rest of the great staff