Part of the story around Star Citizen is the sheer volume of the undertaking. Roberts started his endeavour by saying he wanted to make “the best damn space sim ever”, but to even contemplate building the game he has envisaged requires several incredible achievements – and it bears singling them out.

The large world system is one. CryEngine previously only allowed only eight square kilometres of space before the computational positional math went all wobbly. Now it can have spaces as big as 8 billion kilometres.

Then there’s the merging of first- and third-person action (the fabled FPS component of Star Citizen), which enables players to not only participate together but allows them to actually see what they are all doing in the moment (unlike other multiplayer games where everything is super janky and fudged, Star Citizen is aiming for the holy grail of 1:1 realism).