It’s been some time since we’ve heard a peep from Star Citizen’s Chris Roberts — the 10 for the Chairman video series has ended, and we haven’t had a roundtable Pillar Talk since April, though that’s likely more due to the pandemic than anything else. However, CIG’s big boss has recently emerged in a couple of forum replies to a thread about the game’s planned room atmosphere system.
In the first, Roberts explains that the system that determines room atmosphere has been in the game for quite some time, accounting for players suffocating in vaccuum, the game’s atmospheric flight model, and weather among other things. Furthermore, atmospheres are either mutable (able to shift from one state to another, as in opening a sealed spaceship to the vaccuum and suddenly having no atmosphere) and immutable (space has not atmosphere everywhere, planets do). The team is working on ways to refine that further for ships, but that will take some effort as they need to introduce some literal plumbing components.
The second post, however, is where things get zesty: Roberts responded to a reply from the OP in that same thread where he railed against issues with how people offer their complaints about Star Citizen’s dev cycle.
“My biggest disappointment with modern internet discourse is that there’s a significant amount of cynicism, especially in forum or Reddit debates, and a portion of people assume the worst. If a feature is missing, late or buggy it’s because the company or the developer lied and or / is incompetent as opposed to the fact that it just took longer and had more problems than the team thought it would when they originally set out to build it. Developers by their very nature are optimistic. You have to be to build things that haven’t ever been built before. Otherwise the sheer weight of what is needed to be done can crush you. But being optimistic or not foreseeing issues isn’t the same as lying or deliberately misleading people. Everyone at CIG is incredibly passionate about making Star Citizen the most immersive massively multiplayer first person universe sandbox, and everyone works very hard to deliver that. If we could deliver harder, faster, better we would. We get just as frustrated with the time things take.
“I sense from your reply to me that it’s the time taken and priorities that you’re frustrated with, as you feel like we’re focusing on the wrong things. I can see that point of view, but you’re looking at it from the outside without the full knowledge of exactly what it will take, and the order it needs to be done in to deliver the gameplay that will set Star Citizen above everything else. This is the game I’ve dreamed of my whole life. Now I am in a position to realize it, I am not willing to compromise it’s potential because it is taking longer than I originally envisioned.
“I can promise you the gameplay I described is not a pipe dream, nor will it take 10 to 20 years to deliver.”
