A Chat with Chris Roberts - PAX AUS Transcript

VIDEO: https://www.youtube.com/edit?video_id=eE8T3E-rzVQ

A Chat With Chris Roberts, The Original Wing Commander - PAX AUS 2014

TRANSCRIPT / CLOSED CAPTIONS by KINGNEWBS

>> MODERATOR DANIEL HINDES: Please put your hands together for Chris Roberts.

[applause]

Also joining us today, to his left. Yes, that's a lot of hair but no it's not a man in a Kilrathi catsuit, it's Nathan Cocks. To his left it's our beloved wise old space mentor, Seamus Byrne. And finally to his left, the man most likely to have his Star Citizen ship revoked, Joab Gilroy. Space sims were something of a technical powerhouse back in the Nineties. We thought of them as this grand scale vision, the way we think of something like a Skyrim today. They've kind of dropped off the radar since then, but we are seeing a resurgence, thanks to people like Chris and games like Star Citizen. I wanna ask you, Chris, what is it about space as a setting that keeps you coming back?

>> CHRIS ROBERTS: The endless possibility. I think the idea that you can go anywhere and do anything, which I think also correlates very much to, sort of, if you're a PC gamer, that's sort of the way you think because you're can always make my machine better, or quicker, or faster. But yeah, for me it's just, ah, the idea that there's no boundaries, and whatever you imagine, pretty much you can do. So, and I think, in general, science fiction, space, represents optimism, um, which I think is a human feeling and primary urge, so...

>> HINDES: Optimism in the fact that we might actually get there in the first place one day?

>> ROBERTS: Uh, yeah, well just that the fact that you could do anything or anything could be there or there's something around the corner that could be great, or I mean, just, it's just the idea that there's a completely open universe that, ah, is there for the exploration and the adventure.

>> HINDES: There were limitations, though. One of the first games that you worked on in the space genre was Wing Commander. Nevertheless, Wing Commander was quite revolutionary and it defined what the space combat sim can be. Featured open pockets of space, complex mission objectives, branching storylines and animated briefings in between missions. Looking back on Wing Commander today, do you still feel that it is a solid foundation for what you envisioned a space sim could be?

>> ROBERTS: Oh, no, totally. I mean, Wing Commander is probably the one, the one game that I look back at -- there's a couple that are like this, but there's definitely the game I look back at and I would not change anything about how I made the game. I mean obviously it's much more, you know, much more primitive technology and computers and everything, but in terms of what I felt the game should feel and be when I was making it, um, that's what the game was, and so very rarely, I mean, games normally are much more of a sort of ordeal and a process and they're iterative, but in the case of Wing Commander it was a game, when I was making it, ah, the vision I had in my head sort of just happened, there was very little, um, drama to it? For instance, like you know, a good example is that normally when you build all the missions and you balance them, and sometimes this mission is too hard and you gotta change that, um, Wing Commander I, ever single mission in Wing Commander I was exactly the mission we designed on paper, so we didn't actually go in and tweak or change any of the numbers on the ships, on the missions... it was sort of all that came in first draft and it just, it just worked, and when I was making the game, people that were working on other games at Origin were playing Wing Commander in their spare time in these sort of alpha, beta stage and that's kind of when I knew, okay I think this, there's something here. But, uh, for me it's one of the few games that I look back at and I go "okay, for what I was doing, I wouldn't really change much".

>> HINDES: Is there an element of the fact that this is one of the first times an intense, cinematic space sim had been created to this degree, the fact that you didn't need to go back and change anything because there wasn't a bar to compare against?

>> ROBERTS: Uh, well I mean maybe, I think the biggest thing for me, I think this is true for a lot of the games that I do definitely what I'm gonna do, what I'm trying to do with Star Citizen is that, for me a game is sort of a feeling, it's an emotional, ah, experience or response, so when I make a game I sort of think about how I wanna feel when I'm playing it, and I picture this, I have this feeling in my head and I have this picture of what the game's gonna be like, and that pretty much drives most of the games I make, definitely Star Citizen is something that's like that, but that was with, that was with Wing Commander and so I think the thing that probably has helped, made Wing Commander feel different than others, is it was very much about the emotion of it, and how it would feel, like the feeling of sort of being this hero in this space war, and making a difference and, not so much about a high score or can you clear these missions, or can you kill these different aces and get to this level, it was just really about can you make it through to the end of the story and win the battle or win the war for the Confederation, and so I've focused very much on sort of the feeling of it, and the emotion of it, and I think that was different for games, like, games back then, especially these kind of games... I mean, say, the adventure games had been more of that, but sort of more action games or sim games didn't really focus on the emotional journey or the feeling that you would get as you were playing it, being in the world, how that would feel, and I think that's what sort of set, ah, Wing Commander apart back in the day.

>> HINDES: If we can cut back to the box art there, for a second. You're one of the few developers, along with I think Sid Meier and American McGee to have your name on the box. "A Chris Roberts Game" down on the bottom right corner. What does that do for you as a brand, like sort of attached to this kind of a game, how does that influence the way you work and the way you think the game is perceived?

>> ROBERTS: Ah, well I think it sort of, I mean in the old days it WAS a Chris Roberts game, like, there wasn't really anyone else working on the games, and then as time went along, there was a few... so Wing Commander I definitely it wasn't just me. But it was a relatively small team, so the very first year on Wing Commander was entirely me, and then Dennis Lee Bay, who was one of the artist that worked at Origin, did some of the prototyping out with me, and then in the last six months of it, I think we had three or four programmers help out and there was about three other artists, but it was a much smaller scale than you would do in today's world. Now, obviously, it's huge teams; Star Citizen has 280 people working on it, not all of them on staff, but um, it's a huge team, so I'm sort of more the leader, I mean, it's not, you know, there's definitely, you see great stuff in Star Citizen and it has a lot to do with the fact that I've got an incredibly talented team doing it. You know, I'm sort of providing direction and leadership, but you know, it's not me building the space ships, it's not me doing the sound effects and all the rest of the things, but I, so i think historically in the old days, it was much more a sort of solo artist kind of setup and definitely, you know, I was at Origin. Richard Garriott had the Lord British moniker, and it was a Lord British production, and so it sort of seemed the natural thing when there was less people and then it becomes a bit of a brand, ah, which isn't a bad thing because it sort of allows you to get to make the games you wanna make. And people go, well, okay you wanna do a space game, Chris? Okay, cool, because we like the ones you've done before. And so I think to some extent in today's world maybe it allowed me to be able to do what I did with Star Citizen whereas if I'd come up a little later on I'd be part of sort of a big publisher machine inside EA or Activision or somewhere where you don't necessarily, they don't focus so much on the individuals involved in it, and I probably wouldn't have been able to, uh, you know, have the enthusiastic support, which I think, there's a lot of people in this audience, that are part of that, so thank all of you out there by the way, or the ones of you that have backed Star Citizen.

[applause]

You know, to make the game that I love making, and I do think, I'm guessing that most of the people here love these kinds of games too, so uh...

>> HINDES: I would hope so or they're in the wrong place.

After Wing Commander I & II, you branched out into Wing Commander: Privateer. And this was the beginning of the Elite style influence, an open galaxy, and introduction of trading as one of the primary mechanics. Talk to me about how much Elite influenced what you wanted to do with the space sim and how that manifested in Privateer.

>> ROBERTS: Well, I'm a big Elite fan, I mean, I grew up in England so the very first Elite was on the BBC Macro which is where I made my first games, so I played Elite back in '84, I think my first -- I mean I had games around '82, '83 on the BBC and in '85, so I was sort of making games and that, and I was incredibly impressed by, ah, the scope and the scale that Ian Bell and David Braben managed to put into the very first Elite, so there's definitely that, I mean, before Elite I'll say there's a, and I used to be a big role player, and so I played Dungeons & Dragons and, uh, there was another game called Traveler which was a sort of science fiction version of, if you wanna call, Dungeons & Dragons, so I used to play that a lot and it had a whole bunch of the same aspects that, I think Traveler sort of influenced Elite, as well, and it's sort of all circular. Where I sort of saw those aspects and I thought, you know, yes, having this sense of an open world, and having to go around and trade and sort of not necessarily be so linear, and to be able to have this upgrade path, at your own pace, um, adds a lot more to the sense of sort of connections to the world, and so it's something I've sort of wanted to do. The first Privateer was a game that we built sort of in between Wing Commanders, and so I didn't get to do as much of the technology as I wanted to, didn't have the time to do it. Freelancer was going to be a game that had much more of the big vision that, I didn't... you know, a combination of technology changing, um, moving from software to hardware rendering, and, uh, you know, technology not being quite there sort of didn't allow Freelancer to get to the level that I kind of originally dreamed it was gonna get to, and then I also got slightly burned out dealing with the bigger corporate structures that, at that point in time I had to deal with... um, so for me, sort of, Star Citizen's finally getting to fulfill this living, breathing universe dream that I've had for, I dunno, ever since I saw STAR WARS as a kid. I was eight years old and i was like "I wanna live in that world". And so, thats, I would say, been a pretty big driver of the games I've made.

>> HINDES: Speaking of STAR WARS, let's move on and watch a little trailer from one of your next games.

[applause]

>> ROBERTS: We used to be very proud of that video playback compression scheme but not anymore I don't think.

>> HINDES: You went from the open expanse of the universe of Privateer back to attempting to tell a more cinematic story and you worked with a number of Hollywood actors, Mark Hamill, Malcom MacDowell, John Rys Davies, how does that change the way you produce a game like Wing Commander? What does it mean for a space sim and how do you convey to these Hollywood people what it is you're trying to do?

>> ROBERTS: Ah, well, you know it's fun, I mean, like... so, when you work with actors, there's a whole... normally in a computer game, if you're building something, you know, an artist... I mean, like "okay I wanna do this" and the artist comes in and they build a certain aspect, and a lot of times they'll add to what you've directed them to do, and the same is definitely true for actors. "Cause you sort of bring... you have your, you have the script, you have the story, you sort of tell them "okay, this is kind of where you are inside this, um, story arc", but really if they're a good actor, which, you know, we had some pretty good actors on Wing Commander III and IV, and just in general they are. They bring a whole 'nother level of sort of back story and emotion to the role. So it was a lot of fun for me. I mean, it was really great to sort of see people inhabit these roles that before we were just doing as 2D art, subtitled lines of dialogue on the bottom. And it felt to me, it was, we're not doing it for Star Citizen because the technology's changed now so we sort of feel like we can do stuff in engine that puts you in the world and connects you emotionally. But back in the day here, it felt like you were either gonna do something that was sort of Saturday Morning Cartoon, primitive animation level, or you could film with actors to bring a level of emotion to the gameplay, so I'm connecting back to emotion which is what I was talking about with Wing Commander, that you couldn't do otherwise. And that was kind of the reason to go with live action, to sort of have you connect to these different characters and, you know, I think anyway, people really responded to that.

>> HINDES: What happened to interactive movies the way you envisioned them? Where are they today, where have they moved to within the gaming space?

>> ROBERTS: Uh, well I think Naughty Dog are probably one of the prime proponents of the, from what I see as some of the best interactive sort of storytelling experiences. The Last of Us I think was probably the shining achievement of the last generation of consoles and sort of narrative. But for me, it's those kind of games, which I think we've now... people have moved from live action to motion capture, to performance capture of actors, but you know you're still getting actors to deliver the performance, I mean even if people are running around and just, the motion sets are all generated by actors. People are reading the lines of dialogue. But it's all in sort of, ah, support of creating characters in a world that you can sort of see yourself in, and you can relate to.

>> HINDES: We spoke briefly about Freelancer, but I just wanna go back over one particular aspect: what are some of the learnings that you took away from it, that you still feel apply to your work today?

>> ROBERTS: Ah, well, I guess, it's kind of hard to say, but on terms of the level of scale and ambition, I think that at the time I was trying to do something more than the technology was allowing?

>> HINDES: Your original vision for this was in 1997 if that's correct?

>> ROBERTS: Yes.

>> HINDES: This is about six years before EVE Online existed, before anything like World of Warcraft existed. I can understand how that would happen.

>> ROBERTS: Yeah, I think I actually saw on our forums someone dug out an old GDC speech from '97 where I talked about a persistent universe that would dynamically change and the players would affect it, and that was all stuff that I sort of could see what was happening with Ultima Online and I really wanted to try that idea of people playing in this sort of online universe and having actually a cause and effect on it. And, uh, it just, it was harder than I expected it to be, to achieve some of that stuff, and it's something that, ah, that was one of the big reasons why I sort of came back to games, to come and do Star Citizen, was I sort of finally felt like, "you know what, based on everything I can see and where the world is, I think I can deliver that experience I dreamed about, you know, whatever it is now, not quite twenty years, but seventeen years ago", so...

>> HINDES: Well that leads us nicely into Star Citizen itself.

[laughter]

I need you to explain to me what this game even is, because it's being released in such a fashion that I've never seen before. You have a number of modules that are separate but interconnected, and they are producing entirely different experiences within each of them. Give us the top level overview, how does Star Citizen work and how do these modules fit together?

>> ROBERTS: Well, I mean... I wish... there was actually a fan video which if I was thinking about it, we should have played it, actually. It did a more eloquent job of describing the idea of Star Citizen, which is essentially that you can sort of go anywhere in the universe, well, within the universe we're building, of course, not necessarily "anywhere" period. But, you can play, you can be who you wanna be, you can be a, you know, a mercenary, a merchant, you can be a pirate, you can be a bounty hunter, ah, you know, if you wanna just do salvage you can do that. If you wanted to take information from point to point you could do that. If you wanna be a miner you can do that. So, it's sort of a game that is based around the possibility of what you wanna do in this universe to sort of make a credit and get ahead, and you can travel between different planets, you can find missions or buy things on a planet, and take them, go to another planet and sell them, along the way you may encounter people who want to prevent you from getting there, take things from you, you'll have to fight 'em off. It's sort of a world that's dynamic and lives, and it's big and it's complicated and if I was gonna take a look at, you know, normal games I would say that we're probably packing about four or five, sort of, normal whatever you wanna call them, triple-A games into one because we have the space flight combat, which not only is sort of what you traditionally know which is sort of flying around, single seater, but what we call multi-crew, which is you and your friends can be manning bigger ships, someone flying, someone in the turret, someone on the communications station, someone down in the engine room.
So you have all that out in space, you can also sort of, E.V.A., go out of the -- since it's all in complete first person simulation, you can walk around the ship on foot, which generally has not really happened in any sort of space sim before. You can go outside, you can E.V.A. on to another ship, if you want to board them or take them out, you could blow open the airlock and go in there and take the ship out, so there's a sense of range you can do in space. And then the same down on the planet side, when you land you're wandering around in first person, you can meet people, get missions, buy, sell stuff, upgrade your ship, repair stuff, um, you know, get encounters with NPCs that maybe hostile to you, or, and it's sort of an open world so we -- and on top of all these things we have, which are, sort of, a first person, shooter, and a sort of space simulation, a trading 4X game, we also have a single player story which is, you know, a whole Wing Commander narrative arc which in some ways is bigger than pretty much anything we've done in Wing Commander before, that will sort of lead you into this universe if that's the path you wanna take. And, I sort of realized early on when we were developing the game, and the way we had such great early support for the game that the level and ambition of this game is not something that is something you can just say "okay, great, we've raised this money and I can come back in six months and you can now play it", and when we were doing the initial crowd-funding campaign the level of enthusiasm and support from everyone that backed it was really invigorating. And i was like, "okay, I've gotta find a way to constantly engage everyone that's backing this game so they can sort of see how it's going and, you know, themselves actually touch it, and give feedback, so originally we'd sort of pitched "okay, here's a game, we'll have a multiplayer dogfighting test bed for you to play and then you'll be playing the final game starting with like the alpha and the beta" and I realized there's gonna be some pretty big gaps between those milestones, and so we said "you know what, this game's pretty discreet, you've got the space area, you've got the stuff down on the ground, on planets, you've got the FPS stuff", and so we started to look at it and said "okay, well let's break this up into modules, like discreet bits of functionality that we can share with everyone that's backed the game and they can play and they can give us feedback and we can make it better and iterate it", because the most difficult thing of making games is you go and make a game, and you tend to make it in isolation, so you make it using all your instincts to say, okay I think this will be the best game. You know, you and your team work really hard to do that, but sometimes it can be a little myopic because you're kind of in your own little bubble, and so a lot of times you'll bring out a game and you hope everyone likes it, and when you see the, when it gets good reviews, that's great, and you sort of see some of the feedback, you can't really act on it until, if you're lucky enough to do a sequel. In the past, generally I've changed things on the sequel as well. In this situation, getting modules or sections of the game out early, people can play and give feedback and we can iterate it and make it better and so, that's kind of the vision on Star Citizen, which makes the development of it different than anything else I've done. And I would say it's different than a lot of other, you know, pretty much most things out there, where the community that's backed it participates and is involved in the development of the game in an exten-- you know, not necessarily like they're specifically programming things, or drawing the art, although we have some pretty talented people in the community that actually do a bunch of stuff for the game that I'm always surprised how resourceful and great everyone is on that. But they're able to voice issues or concerns or ideas to make things better, and we're able as a team to sort of take them on early, to constantly iterate, and I think ultimately that process will make a much better, more polished game. And we've got hundreds of thousands of people now, so when we launch I don't think we're gonna have the same issue that you see with other games where they're big multiplayer games and all of a sudden you launch and there's all these problems with the servers and the backend and it takes a while to fix out, because those are the things we are literally going through now. I mean, we are, every time we deliver a patch it's like we're launching a game. And it allows us to iterate, so for Star Citizen we're gonna have a patch that comes out a little later on, I guess I don't know whether it's early hours of the morning Saturday Australian time, it's coming out in the middle of the day American time, and that's our v0.9.2 patch for Arena Commander, and that has a whole bunch of flight control changes, and targeting changes, and a lot of that is based on people playing it and their feedback, and what's difficult, what's hard. And we've spent a lot of time taking on feedback from people and also our own sort of playing it to try and make the game feel as good as possible, and because we have this process that we're using, we're really able to sort of hone it in a way that I wouldn't have been able to hone it in the past. So I love that process and I think the team really likes that process, and so I kind of look at Star Citizen as a journey that people are taking now all the way, and so by the time we get version 1.0 of the full game (of course it's an online game so it's never really going to be done) I'm hoping that people who've backed it have really had a great time at sort of seeing how we're building it, hearing from us how we're building it, playing the various aspects that playing in the final game is like a bonus for them, and they feel like they've gotten their value for money just by getting to that point.
And I do think because Star Citizen in some ways is a shared dream, right? So it's a dream that I have, and it's a dream that, like, pretty much everyone that backs it has this idea of I wanna play this game that I can do all these different things, that is kind of fun to see the dream shape as you go along, and be involved in it, and so that's what I think makes Star Citizen special. And the ambition of it, right? I think that's the other thing, is that there's not many games that are quite that ambitious. I definitely know several people do say "you're a bit crazy to try and do all this stuff" but I kind of feel like you gotta try for it, I mean, if that's something you'd love to see happen, you should try and do it, which I think we will.

[applesauce]

[hey now!]

>> HINDES: Valve cracked the hat economy, and you seem to have cracked the internet space ships economy.

[laughter]

I want to know what goes in to creating the perfect space ship that sometimes you can't even fly yet.

>> ROBERTS: [laughs] I think it's, um... okay, so I don't particularly have any great science for it, but what I do think again is it's sort of, ah, space ships that represent the possibility of things that you can do is what people, yeah, respond to and love, it's what I do. So, in some ways we sort of focus on, and this is also part of the evolution of the game. So when I first started Star Citizen I had a much... you know, in the early days before we started the crowd fund and I had a sort of traditional narrow view of "okay well, it'll be these kind of players" and I was thinking it would be more combat-focused. And yes, we'd be trading and the other stuff... And as I got into it and as we were in the early stages of campaigning we started to talk to everyone who was backing the game, and we were doing sort of interactive polls to see where people were at, it was quite clear that straight out combat was not necessarily something that a large part of people backing the game were interested in. It was things like exploration, all sorts of more... people wanted to take a tanker and scoop up gas from a gas giant, and then go and sell it to other people who ran out of gas in space. People wanted to mine, and there's this sense of all these different things you can do in the universe, and the possibility of what you can do, and so for us that's one of the focuses on the ship size. It's like, okay, let's not really try do do these generic jack-of-all-trades ships, but this is the mining ship, this is the exploration ship, or this is the information runner where you're fast and you're stealthy and you're trying to get very valuable information from the outer reaches of the galaxy into the core worlds. And so I think that on the ship front it's ships that give this sense of a role and an idea that you can play that people can attach to. And then also the fact that they're rendered and built out in a detail that you feel like you can live and inhabit them and spend time on them. Because that's what I love, the aspect of being able to walk around a ship and use all the different aspe -- you know, sit down, and ultimately get a cup of coffee or take a shower, it creates that immersion, it makes you feel like you're there in the ship. And then if you're out in space you can sort of project yourself into this futuristic universe. I think the people out here are the best ones to ask to see what they respond to, but that's my personal response in terms of what I love about the various ships.

>> HINDES: We're now going to be cutting to a live gameplay demo which Chris will be walking us through.

Shortly afterwards we'll be taking questions from the audience so if you have a question or want to start thinking of one, do that now. We will have microphones going around soon, I'll let you know when that starts.

>> ROBERTS: Okay, so, probably a lot of you who already have the game have probably seen a lot of this, but this is, as you know, the very first module that we released, was the hangar module, which was the first stage where people could just load up the core engine and walk around and sort of see some of the ships that we'd finished and sort of add the detail and I think that was one of the aspects that started to make Star Citizen feel real. And obviously we've gone through a fair amount of upgrading, so this is much fancier-looking than the hangars did about a year ago. This is the asteroid hangar and we're using this rendering technology called PBR, which is Physically Based Rendering, so the materials react to light much more like they do in real life.

And then the next module we did, so I think Travis is gonna quickly get into Arena Commander, which is the multiplayer dogfighting or single-player dogfighting. And this was one of the original campaign promises that would allow you to do that, and really this is a great TEST bed for us to test out various things like balance controls schemes, how the ships systems gonna use, also on the backend technology, how many different players we can support in one instance, how we can optimize the net traffic. So, for us it's really great because you know when we deliver a new patch we have hundreds of thousands of people play it, download it, and we can really get a good idea of "in the field" results. And the idea with Arena Commander was we were going to make it a game within a game, we have a few jokes like Original Systems instead of Origin Systems, which is where I used to be a long time ago. So this is sort of like the game inside the game that you can play, to practice for when you finally play properly in the game. And I think we're flying around here in a Hornet. So, this is actually from our new v0.9.2, and has a whole bunch of new targeting methods, which I think we're getting some new enemies coming in so right now just targeted an incoming Vanduul. Vanduul are the bogeymen, the enemy of the United Empire of Earth, which is the Earth government and faction where you start inside of. And I think Travis [Day], who's one of our producers, who's playing in the background, is demonstrating flying on a joystick and a gamepad, where we put a lot of improvements into the control scheme. We have some pretty cool stuff that comes out later on today in terms of much better firing control as you're targeting people. He's also got head look mode that's on right now where you can focus on the target to follow it. So, if it moves you see the camera move with it a little bit, and then you fly to bring it around.

And the other big thing, this is really only pertinent for backers of the game already, but we changed the targeting system around so that you use lag pips instead of forward-looking prediction points. Lag pips are what modern military jets use. They show you where your bullets will land if you fire at this and where your target is, and so the nice thing about that is, as long as --

[laughter]

Travis is flying like me, Crash Roberts.

[audience laughter]

So, Trav do you wanna... oh, I was going to try and get Travis to do the zoom mode if he wants. Travis can you zoom, Travis? It's left trigger, D up and down on your target. There you go.

So this is sort of the head focus mode that keeps your -- I don't know if anyone out here played Strike Commander, but it was something I did a lot of the time in Strike Commander, it allows you to focus on your target while flying, so it gives you much better situational awareness. Especially if you're on a joystick or.. whereas, cause you don't have the same, like if you've got an Oculus Rift you can look around and do stuff like that.

But, anyway, he's blowing lots of people up.

>> HINDES: I think we'll start taking questions from the audience. If you have a question, please put your hand up and we will have a microphone come on over to you.

>> JOAB GILROY: Obviously there's a fictional space race going on right now between Star Citizen and Elite: Dangerous. Do you see yourself as the careful, considered USSR or the bold United States of America?

[audience laughter]

[applause]

>> ROBERTS: Ah... [laughter] I don't really view Elite as a... I'm a big fan of all space sims. I backed Elite and I actually encouraged a lot of Star Citizen, I mean I publicized it on our site when they had their crowdfunding campaign. For me, I feel like there's not been enough space games out there so I'm kind of just a big supporter of all of them. Elite's a little further along than we are, I think they're in, beta 3 or 4 or something, dropped recently a few days ago. They're more focused where they've got, they're not trying to go for all the walking around on foot and inside your ship just yet. I know they've talked about doing that long term, but they're more focused on the core Elite experience, whereas we're trying to do this slightly bigger, first person experience all around and stuff. I think the games inherently have different styles. They also approached the flight, and the pace of the combat is different, so I think they're both pretty interesting variable and cool games. I mean, I play around with Elite. Like I said I backed it. I don't know what the, you know it's the post cold war, before like Putin, basically, right? Like, everybody loves each other kind of thing, is where I would, is where I'd say in that stage of cold war analogy.

>> SEAMUS BYRNE: I have a question as well, just about the -- I guess how much, since, say Wing Commander, the original game... how your relationship with your audience has changed? I mean, back then we weren't online, we didn't have the capacity to communicate as well as we do now, and then moving past the, I guess, prime, evil piracy era to one now where people are able to say say "I want you to make this game, I'll give you money before you've even made it". How important that makes the audience, and I guess how responsible you feel, or how much more connected you are with the audience?

>> ROBERTS: I totally love it, I mean this is the most fun and invigorated I've had making games for pretty much ever. I mean, I would say maybe making Wing Commander was special because that was when everything first came together properly for the first time for me, but the sense of building something and the continual excitement and connection... cause you know in the past you basically were very disconnected. You're working with your publisher, and then you'd go to a trade show and you would show it to buyers and press and no offense on that cuz I know you guys like to play games too, but there's something great about really engaging and talking to people that they just love the same kind of game you love, and they're full of ideas and enthusiasm and there's not really a lot of cynicism which you tend to get in the business world. So I love it. I mean I think the team would probably tell you that they really like it too because the sort of excitement they see, or seeing fans take some assets they've built and put a fan made movie together with it, like totally excites the artists. They're passing around the YouTube links to that, like "oh this is really cool". So I think that level of connection that's happening now is something that's really special. I don't think it's still something that the game business is kind of getting to grips with, like how really to deal with it, but I'm super happy about the level of connection you can get to people who are actually playing the game. Cuz you sort of fell like, "okay, yes it's hard work and I'm doing all this stuff" but it really matters because I can literally release something and then five minutes later it can be seeing people play it on Twitch or seeing what people are thinking about it on the forums and so for anyone on a creative level it's really great to have that instant feedback.

>> NATHAN COCKS: Do you feel it's increased by the fact that there has been a lull in space simulators, like the core fan base, we've been hanging out for these games for a long time and they just haven't been there? Do you feel thats, um, I guess fired up that engagement? To bring it even higher, or? What's the nature of the beast?

>> ROBERTS: It's kind of hard to say, because this is the first time for me, but I definitely think that the group that Star Citizen matches up with, you know, PC Gamers tend to be more engaged and vocal, and the fact that this hasn't been there for a while so maybe that's also made people become more engaged because they sort of feel like "oh finally I've got something, I can get engaged". But I don't have any scientific proof of that, cuz obviously this isn't, there haven't been a lot of similar cases, [laughs] but I feel like there's a lot of people out there that said, there's a common refrain that's like "I've been waiting for this kind of game for ten years". So I think that Star Citizen or to another extent Elite, or the other space games that are coming around now, are having the benefit of this pent up longing for this style of game. And it's pretty awesome. I'm not complaining at all.

>> HINDES: So do we have questions from the audience? Do we have microphones set up, or...

Okay, we got two down in the front, I think you're gonna have to come and just line up and...

Okay.

>> QUESTION: With reference to how the genre kind of died out over the last decade, can you tell me what experience or reference you have to the games that were in the space, like the Egosoft games or EVE Online, what are the things from those games that you want to see in Star Citizen or that you're definitely going to avoid with Star Citizen?

>> ROBERTS: Well, okay, so on the EVE Online side it's something that I have off and on played around for quite a few years, even when I was off making movies. So there's some things I think EVE Online did really well, so I really love the way they sort of have the player and the community base create a lot of the drama and action that was happening in the universe, cause one of the problems with online games is you can't really generate enough content to outstrip what the audience that's playing it has an appetite for. So, making something that's very player-centric and player-drive I think is very critical for an online game and that's definitely something that's a core tenant of what we're doing with Star Citizen. On that level; on the other level EVE Online for me, I like a more visceral experience, I wanna be in the cockpit, like if you look at the first Wing Commander, the screenshot up there it's like you were looking at your hands on the joystick and feet in the cockpit which is almost sort of like precursor to the FPS games, just putting you in that place. So whenever it pulled back and was more slower paced, then that doesn't connect me on an emotional scale as much, so for me I kind of felt I wanted a living, breathing universe that was pretty player-influenced and driven, but more sort of visceral experience and that's kind of what Star Citizen is. The Egosoft stuff I haven't played that much of the X series. A little bit, I sort of found like maybe some of it was just, for my personal tastes anyway, perhaps a bit too... I had to know too much and were a bit too complicated for me? That's not to knock it, it's just that's just my personal gaming preference. But they had a lot of nice detail in how they did some of their economy and all the rest of the stuff, so those are two examples of two people that still sort of burn the space banner in what you would think would be the wilderness of space games, so hats off to them and yeah, I definitely look at everything, and it's not just space games, by the way. I look at all games. I mean, I play a lot of different kind of games and for me, you know, you need to do that because that provides inspiration, you take a look and say, "well, okay, I think this game did this really well" or "I think this game didn't do this well" and you can sort of use that to inform what you're doing on your own stuff.

>> HINDES: Just alternate between microphones, so this one next.

>> QUESTION: What aspects are you most excited about working on, where technology previously kept you from even being able to consider?

>> ROBERTS: I think it's just sort of the level of scale that we're trying to achieve in Star Citizen, so, you know, the fact that you can be flying a ship and, you know, a pretty big ship and have four of your friends or five of your friends or eight of your friends aboard the ship and you're all operating various aspects. While you're flying, while other people are flying other ships out in the same area of space and you're fighting with them and you can go down and land on the planet, step out of your ship and walk around the environment and, you know, go into a bar and find out if there's a mission you can have or go into a store and buy some personal weapons or arms for fending off someone that's boarding your ship. That level of fidelity of detail, um, in the level we're rendering in, in the level that we're gonna be able to have that all run over the network, is just something you couldn't have done even four or five years ago. And so, with today's PCs and the ubiquitousness of fast broadband it's possible, and so I think it's gonna create an experience hopefully with Star Citizen that will be very different than what people have experienced before in MMOs, and I think that will be pretty awesome.

>> QUESTION: Just kind of like what you saw in Freelancer, but much, much more dynamic.

>> ROBERTS: Well, much more dynamic, and much more, like a lot more fidelity, right? So if you're in Freelancer and you're flying your ship, you're basically just looking at your cockpit. And so yes, it could be a big or a small ship, you've got no sense of the real scale of the ship, other than cutting out to a third person camera. Whereas this, in Star Citizen you get a bigger ship, you're walking around it, it's got your own Captain's Quarters, and you really can sort of feel it, it feels more grounded because we have the ability to build stuff at that fidelity that we couldn't have done before.

>> HINDES: All right, over here.

>> QUESTION: Okay, Chris. I asked you during the 24 hour livestream before the funding finished originally, if we were gonna have cloaking devices, because we all know what happened with mods in Freelancer, because I would honestly love to stick a torpedo up Clegorn General's (?) tailpipe.

>> ROBERTS: Well, ah... so I think our approach on the cloaking devices is, so we're not gonna have any sort of Star Trek devices where you, like, disappear. But you basically will be able to manage your signature so that you'll essentially disappear in terms of any kind of scanning or radar, but there will still be, you know, there'll be a visual. You can see someone flying around. They may not necessarily be on your radar but you'll be able to see them visually. And of course you'll be able to paint your ship, so it could be mostly black and then at that point it'd be pretty hard to spot. But that's kind of where we're at on the technology. We're gonna have a lot more of that in v1.0 of Arena Commander, there's a whole push for the signature system, which is how the scanners and the radars and the missiles all work, and how are you gonna do that in the various ship systems that we've actually already sort of put in the base technology in the game, but it's not really utilized right now for the gameplay. That's all sort of the 1.0 push to have all these different systems, so if you want to, you can sort of "go dark", hide behind an asteroid, and someone flies by, they can't see you, you pop out behind and, you know, try and take them out. So, that's kind of the level of, I don't know what you wanna call it, "real world" cloaking? But that's what the current design is focused on. So I think if you manage that you'll be able to put a missile up someone's tailpipe. But anyway there you go.

[laughter]