Star Citizen’s development is already the stuff of legends and bardic tales, and it isn’t even close to being completed yet.
If your memory of the major milestones in the game’s journey is a little fuzzy or you are just now getting on board with the title, then you might want to check out this comprehensive recap of the history of Star Citizen to date. The timeline starts in October 2012 with the game’s crowdfunding campaigns, at which time Chris Roberts projected that Star Citizen would be complete and launched by November 2014. However, the influx of funds and expansion of the game’s feature sheet meant that a lot more development time would be needed, moving the launch date to the end of 2016.
“Obviously, the scope changed,” Roberts said in an interview with Kotaku. “It naturally follows that if you’re going to build a house and then someone says, ‘No, we want you to build a huge castle,’ even if you have a lot more money, it’s going to take more time to build the castle.”
The article notes that some current and former employees claim that Roberts’ ambition has led to “an abnormally high number of features added and scrapped,” including allegedly having to redo player skeleton animations seven times.
One former employee noted that the entire situation is complex and difficult to understand from the outside: “Time is [Cloud Imperium’s] enemy, and it’s hitting them hard because the community is ranting and raving about when the release of the game is coming out, rather than being understanding that this is a whole new experience. I think it’s going to fail multiple times before Chris Roberts and his team of Avengers get it right.”
