Muh Wingman

My feelings on the subject of Star Citizen are shrouded in more shades of grey than the murkiest Seattle skyline.  I’m a Golden Ticket holder, Imperator, High Admiral, and very nearly the first writer to report on the game as being a major movement in the gaming community.  If I wasn’t the first to point out how it’d shape the future of the industry, I was dang close.  Beyond seeing the historical impact this game was bound to have, I’m also a straight up fan.  I’ve been a fan of Chris Roberts and his games since senior developers were few enough that we actually knew most of their names.

Today, I’m going to walk through where a few of my conflicted feelings appear to be coming from in an attempt to analyze the current health of the Star Citizen project.  This is something very similar to what I did not long ago with another favorite project of mine, Shroud of the Avatar.  Even more so than with Shroud, I have a somewhat love/hate relationship with Star Citizen, so let’s get going and dig right into some of the more recent stuff.

Eric Peterson

Star Citizen may be Chris’s game, but it’s not stretching a bit to say that Eric Peterson made it.  Eric’s extensive experience with producing and developing games has been the ballast this rocking ship of a game has desperately needed, and his excitement and candor probably deserves more credit for the game’s success than even Chris Robert’s name.  Eric loves making video games with a passion that just makes you want to cheer every time you see him in his element.


Star Citizen, in many ways is the game Wingman built.

Eric has been the soul in Star Citizen’s development in so many ways that you can’t help but be rocked to the core at his recent announcement that he’s leaving the team.  I have a serious knot in my stomach at what his absence could mean for the eventual game.  There are still plenty of exceptional people involved with the project, but the recent exodus of several long-time members of the original team can’t help but raise hairs on the back of my neck.  While it doesn’t herald impending doom, this is the sort of thing that immediately raises red flags, and you have to step back and take a hard look at the situation.

There are indications that this isn’t as dire as it might appear, though.  As central as he is to the culture behind this massive project, Eric could have created serious waves on his way out.  However, in an unmitigated demonstration of class, Mr. Peterson has quietly left the building.  Not only did he refrain from blasting the situation that necessitated his departure, but he modestly expressed sincere faith in the future of the enterprise and his respect for everyone still working on it.  Ladies and gentlemen, I’ve never in my life seen a deed more nobly done.

Culture, the Darker Grey

No matter how smooth the exit, Wingman’s departure still concerns me, though.  In a lot of ways, it’s indicative of a larger issue with the emerging culture around this game, and that culture’s departure from the roots that it was founded on.  Spend a little time in chat or on the forums and you begin to note the slightly more juvenile influence fairly quickly.

The early days of struggling to make the crowdfunding goals were attended by a significantly different crowd.  A very large part of us were employed in technical fields like programming or engineering, and the conversations demonstrated that fact quite obviously as we debated various aspects of the game.  Earlier suggestions in the forums seemed to come with far more substantive and tenable concepts for expanding the game, and there was a great deal more tolerance for dissenting ideas.


Early fans of the game coordinated periodic food deliveries to CIG Austin.

How the change happened is pretty easy to spot, I think.  Due to many of the younger gamers not being as familiar with the space sim genre, it created a fairly mature core audience initially.  As the game got off the ground, the early backers were mostly composed of long-time space sim fans who were nostalgic for a taste of their youth.  Being a bit older, I think our voices tended to carry a modest amount of weight with those around us as we discussed games that interested us and why.  Our obvious excitement over this fantastic new project pulled in a wave of friends, which of course only helped to further fund the game.

With each successive generation of new fans created by the spreading excitement, the pool of technically-minded and more mature backers became increasingly diluted.  The project spread to younger demographics and wider audiences, and the natural result is what we see surrounding the game now.  That’s not to say it’s a bad thing, but rather that it’s no longer a different collective from what you’d find around any other popular MMO these days.  That’s a bit of a buzzkill for many of us who looked forward to something a little more niched, but there are some distinct advantages.

West Coast vs No Coast

Another problem I have with where the game is going is the shift away from Austin.  When the game initially funded, I threw myself into it with a great deal of excitement.  Not only was it an under-represented genre, but the core cadre behind its development would be in Austin.  I’m one of those guys who’ll pay a little more for a head of cabbage or ear of corn if I know it was sourced locally, and games are no different from produce when it comes to supporting the local economy.

Plus, being developed in Austin set Star Citizen apart from most other games, which tend to be developed on the East or West coasts of the US.  It meant hiring from the local pool, which promotes the technology field among kids who might not otherwise have considered it as a career, and it also created what I felt to be a unique development atmosphere that would translate to a better eventual game.


The LA office felt like a satellite office as it opened, but it’s become much more central to the development since.

With the core of the game’s development now being located in LA and pulling on many of the developers who have been involved in several other games, I kind of start to worry that there’s less chance of the cool ideas we might have had otherwise.  Do I expect that tenacious adherence to rugged individuality so common to Texans to be replaced in part by a somewhat more Californian desire to make sure no one acts too mean or finds too much success?  I’m not exactly worried about folks breaking down in folk song, but yeah a little bit.  I kind of am concerned about the cultural shift.  It’s not a totally rational fear, but it’s there in the back of my head and I can’t seem to get rid of it.

Of Proportion and Pellucidity

Somewhat related to each other, are the issues of scope and transparency.  As Star Citizen has grown steadily more complex, so I think they’ve started to stray away from two of their earlier promises to backers.  The first, and I think least likely resolved is the idea that players will be able to host their own servers with modified versions of the code.

The universe has grown massively compared to the hand-full of planets that were initially planned.  With the inclusion of a massive economic model supporting that expanded universe and the complexity behind the newly unveiled FPS system, I don’t think there’s much chance of any normal user being able to host out their own shard of the game for their friends.  The horse-power required to host something like that puts it too far out of reach, I think.

Additionally, I suspect that there’s a great deal of proprietary code in the outsourced components like Moon Collider’s AI system, and I’m not sure they’d take too kindly to it being turned over to the community for modification.  I’ve been told CIG owns the rights to the AI, but I’d be surprised if those rights allow them to make the source code publically available for modders to start carving into.


The size of the universe in Star Citizen has exploded past the initial planets originally planned for.

I also note that you don’t really hear the team talking about community-driven post-development like you did in the earlier days, and that’s how this relates to the second point of transparency.  It’s not a new point for me, as I’ve dinged CIG a number of times for failing to be as open with the community as I feel they should.  What you might find interesting about this time, is that I’m about to start defending them for it.

No, I don’t like it, and I’d really like to see it change.  I do understand it though, and that’s why this is the point in the article where I start swinging towards defending CIG and what they’re doing with Star Citizen.  I think the combination of the game’s expanding scope and expanding audience has required Chris and his team take a different track than they’d intended with the original funding campaign.  Not only is the audience larger, but it’s demographically different than what they’d started with.

The current audience is far less prepared to deal with the realities of game development than the one the team originally attracted.  It’s not a mark against them though, and really should be considered a plus as a testament to how diverse it’s become.  The original fan base, as I said, was far more technical.  That had its own appeal, but the current audience has a diversity that’s really more likely to aid in the creation of a richer and more sustainable game.

Defending the Decisions

If you’re one of those rabid fans who can’t stand anyone questioning your team, you’ve probably quit reading by now.  On the off chance you’re still around, let me tell you a bit about why I’m not as angry as it may sound.  The truth is, while I really am a little upset about some of the directions the game’s development has gone, it’s with the full realization that it’s due to Star Citizen’s dramatic success.

The game is far larger than it was ever intended to be, so the idea of crowdsourcing the later development is no longer needed.  It’s really actually better that they don’t, because the more professionally developed software will be far more sustainable in the long run.  The higher quality product will also attract a much larger crowd, as they’ve demonstrated, and that translates to a more interesting in-game experience with a better chance to stay current for a longer period of time.

It also means we’ll see more ships, more planets, more of everything, than we would have ever seen before, and it’s really hard to argue with any of that.  It’s still a bitter pill to swallow for those who’ve been around from the start, so you’ll just have to be understanding when we holders of the Golden Ticket lament our loss.  You see, there was a time when Star Citizen wasn’t Chris’s game, it was our game, but that’s not really true anymore.  I, and others, really need to learn to be okay with that.

These days, Star Citizen is bigger and in many ways better, and it’s probably time we stopped holding CIG to a standard they set for a game that no longer really exists.  Trying to hold them to a standard that’s no longer tenable isn’t helping the game, and it’s frankly more likely to hurt it.  That’s why I’m trying really hard to get past what I expected and appreciate what will be delivered.  After all, I’ve heard it said that if you love something, you have to let it go…

Good bye, Wingman.

Article By: Red Thomas - A veteran of the US Army, raging geek, and avid gamer, Red Thomas is that cool uncle all the kids in the family like to spend their summers with. Red lives in San Antonio with his wife where he runs his company and works with the city government to promote geek culture.
Created On: November 18, 2014