Star Citizen © Roberts Space Industries

‘Ambitious’ is a word that we throw around a lot. You want to build a 90s-style, top-down RPG spiritual sequel to Fallout? ‘Pah!’ say the naysayers. A point-and-click adventure game for the next console generation? ‘Get with the times, dweeb,’ scoff the triple-A jocks. An Alien game that doesn’t suck? Pfft. You’re out of your collective mind, the lot of you.

Yet, despite the steady homogenising spread of big-budget game development, all of the above happened. But while the past couple of years have, thanks in no small part to the good ship Kickstarter , washed up all sorts of treasures that seemed too ‘ambitious’ for the mainstream, it does leave us in a pickle when it’s time to talk about Star Citizen. InXile raked in around $2.9 million with its Wasteland 2 crowdfunding campaign. Double Fine pulled down a cool $3.3 million. Alien Isolation spent five years in development.

Star Citizen, a first-person-shooter-meets-star-fighter-meets-galactic-trading-simulator has made $68.5 million in backing. And it is, in part, playable right now.

“I’ve always wanted to have the ability to in first-person wander around the planets and get aboard your ship and fly around,” says the game’s creative director, Chris Roberts. “It’s specifically built on a first-person engine [CryEngine]. You’re inside the ship. It’s not the way the old Wing Commanders or Freelancers would work. Our goal is to make [the FPS] aspect of it as good as anything out there.”

That’s the problem when talking about Star Citizen: it’s ambition on a level that’s difficult to get your head around. Not only is the game promising a massive open universe for its players to explore, as in Elite: Dangerous or EVE: Valkyrie , but it’s also a multiplayer shooter, a singleplayer adventure and an economy simulator. So one moment you might be buzzing around a star system dropping off a shipment of missiles you and your crew have carried from a distant factory, and the next you might be repelling a boarding party of pirates down the iron sights of your space machine gun. After years of having to pick between games offering each experience individually, the scope of what Star Citizen is promising just doesn’t compute.

“What can I say, it’s the game I wanted to make,” Roberts says, when we ask him how he feels about inevitably being compared to both space simulators and the big-budget FPSs. “The experience of being able to seamlessly get out of your ship, run around in first-person, shoot people, solve puzzles, get back into the ship, take off, is incredibly liberating. The feeling of freedom is a big thing. We’re coining a phrase internally: it’s a ‘first-person universe’.”

Star Citizen © Roberts Space Industries

The huge success of its crowdfunding campaign also means that Roberts and his team (the studio, Cloud Imperium Games, currently comprises around 180 people, with another hundred or so brought in as contractors on Star Citizen) are promising an unprecedented level of detail. Building just one of the game’s ships, for example, can take anywhere from six months to a year, with each vessel concepted, white-boxed and built in the same way you’d build a real-world car or a plane. It’s just one small part of a larger whole, but representative of the time and care that the team can take with the game without being tied to a publisher’s schedule.

“In the old games, you just had to make a ship look good from the outside and possibly you’d have a point-of-view cockpit, but you could fake everything [else],” says Roberts. “In [Star Citizen] the landing gear have to fold up, so you have to have a space for the landing gear to fold up.”

Naturally, this opens up options for how pilots can duke it out with others. Each component on an enemy ship can be targeted for damage, meaning that larger vessels will have to watch for nippier fighters going after their life support systems or engines. Deal enough damage to certain systems and you may not have to destroy an enemy at all – just leave them drifting defenceless, before you board them and pinch all their stuff.

Not that Star Citizen has to be played as a combat game, mind. If you’re less of a Han Solo or Malcolm Reynolds type, there are plenty of other roles that you can fulfil in Roberts’ universe, from trader to miner to a kind of futuristic space lifeboat service.

“It’s interesting for us,” says Roberts about the behaviours the team has observed in its early-access backer players, “for example, there are a lot of people who don’t want to do combat – they want to do exploration or mining or trading. Or just be someone who goes out there when someone runs out of fuel and fuel them up. It’s interesting to see all the people who want to play the game and what kind of playstyles they want to engage in this early in the process because it helps us decide where we focus, where we put our resources.

“We sort of have three playstyles we’re anticipating: one is the sort of privateer or freelancer, where they go from Planet A to Planet B to make some money, or go after a bounty, not really working with anyone else. Those missions they can be generated by AI in the world, or even by other players or organisations – but [it’s] much more that solo experience. The next tier is the small-group-of-friends-experience. Our version of that is, ‘OK, me and three of my friends are in a small constellation and I’m flying [an exploration ship] and two of my friends are flying escorts so I don’t get attacked by pirates .”

Star Citizen © Roberts Space Industries

“The last level is the big organisation level, which is probably more akin to EVE. That’s where hundreds of thousands of people work together. We have things especially in the outer areas of the universe that we provide especially for that: a space station or an asteroid base that is player controllable, so the idea is that players or groups or organisations will fight over that area of space, and they’ll be creating missions for [other players] because maybe they need munitions or raw materials.”

By bringing Star Citizen’s thousands of backers into the development process, Roberts and the development team have essentially created an army of beta testers available to provide feedback right from the start of development. For Roberts, the advantages of this kind of open development are two-fold: on the one hand, the team can tailor the game precisely to the feedback it receives, rather than having to invest years of development on what they only expect players will want. Secondly, being open with the people paying for the game builds trust – if something bugs out or doesn’t seem balanced, the players don’t feel cheated.

“We’re sharing with the community, and we’re also iterating, so they’re giving us feedback and we’re fixing and making things better based partly on their feedback and us watching them play the game. In a traditional publisher set-up, it’s just not open. You work in isolation for three years. You’re not showing [your game] to the public, you’re not getting the opinions of the people who’ve been playing the game. [By the time you announce the game] it’s too late to get any real impact on the game itself.

“[With open development] people sort of go, ‘I get to see it as it builds, and OK it’s buggy now, and the servers have issues, but I know that because I’m getting it super early and it’s all going to make a better game’. Whereas in the traditional publisher set-up, when you have a launch like Assassin’s Creed: Unity, or Halo [The Master Chief Collection], the contract is different. People are like, ‘you’re selling me a final game, how come this game is completely broken and buggy and how come I’ve already paid you for it, and it’s two months later and you’re still fixing the thing’.”

Star Citizen © Roberts Space Industries

Roberts’ history within the games industry proper (before Star Citizen, his most famous project was the genre-defining Wing Commander series) gives him a uniquely privileged viewpoint on the state of modern game development. The level of funding aside (Roberts estimates that, given the perception of space sims as a ‘niche’ market, a big publisher might put in only a third of what Star Citizen has raised from its backers), Star Citizen’s greatest boon is its team’s artistic freedom in deciding what will and will not be popular with its players.

“The industry kind of chases itself,” he says. “Call of Duty becomes a big hit and suddenly everyone wants to do big military shooters, and does umpteen versions of that. I think the publishers were all very focused on games that could sell five million, or 10-plus million units. Making [this] game is all about what I and the other key creatives on the project think will best suit the people who want to play the game. We’re not worried about [things like] ‘this other game sold X million copies and has this feature, so if you don’t have this feature you won’t sell the game’.

“A good example in the last few years is that pretty much every game has multiplayer shoehorned into it, even if it doesn’t make sense. So for instance: the Uncharted series. I love it, but it’s essentially a single-player, action narrative adventure game, but they’ve tacked on this multiplayer because everyone goes, ‘well, the reason why Call of Duty sells so much isn’t because of the single-player, but because people can play against each other in the multiplayer’. So everyone was putting multiplayer in because they thought that would stop people trading the game back in. But it only makes sense on a game that’s about multiplayer – Call of Duty is more about multiplayer, but I don’t think Uncharted is. So they spent a lot of money and time to make the [Uncharted] multiplayer good – and of course it’s Naughty Dog and they do fantastic work, so it’s not as if the multiplayer sucks – but every Uncharted I’ve played, I’ve never played the multiplayer, because that’s not why I bought it.”

Star Citizen © Roberts Space Industries

Statements like that inevitably set the bar for Star Citizen’s success pretty high. On the one hand, you can’t have a space sim without your Star Wars or Battlestar-style dogfights. On the other, there are the corridor shooting mechanics that Roberts’ team showed off last November at PAX Australia – Battlefield with less gravity. Finally, for the EVE fans, the universe and its economy have to feel alive and responsive – as Roberts says, players need to feel like they’re having an impact if they band together to blockade a planet, but not so in control that they crash the in-game economy completely. Finally, there’s the singleplayer campaign, Squadron 42, which Roberts is promising will be an emotional, character-driven space opera that’s “Gladiator meets The Ninth Legion meets Heart of Darkness.”