Former employees speak out about Star Citizen and say that Chris Roberts sets impossible demands.
The UK edition of Kotaku has published a lengthy report on Star Citizen and its development history. Former employees accuse Chris Roberts of having completely unrealistic expectations. For instance, he had played The Order:1886 and then told the CIG department that the character models in Star Citizen should be at the level of this single-player shooter.
They couldn’t comprehend this. Everyone knows that you can’t expect that from an MMO or an open-world game. Anyone who has worked on video games knows that.
In another instance, Roberts had played Kingdom Come: Deliverance and liked the inventory system so much that he said, “We need this for ourselves.”
According to Kotaku, those developers at Star Citizen who were responsible for the inventory said, “Yes, that works for them, but not for us.” They then spent four months proving to Roberts that it really doesn’t work.
Roberts himself says about these stories that while they did happen, he sees his role quite differently. Because all the changes he proposed are indeed feasible. By now, CIG has the same or even higher quality than The Order. The new inventory was introduced with patch 2.4.
For Roberts, the people who constantly say, “No, that won’t work,” are exactly the problem. He can’t deal with them, and those are also the people who don’t stay long in his company. Roberts continued: If he is allowed to use a cliché, he wants Americans, not “Amerikannichts.”
For Roberts, something great can only emerge if one is willing to push the limits. Even if it is difficult. He compares it to the moon landing and JFK’s statement. You don’t do it because it’s easy, but because it’s hard.
No one said it’s easy to work for a visionary…
Mein MMO says: It’s quite a great anecdote that also shows how exhausting it must be to deal with a visionary who has high demands on everyone else in everyday life. He plays something new, sees something he likes, and then says: I want it that way. Do it.
Employees also accuse Roberts of “overscoping,” continuously adding more features and ambitions, so the game never gets finished. But on the other hand, Roberts seems at peace with himself and leads his project the way he sees fit.
The passage is just a small excerpt from the huge Kotaku report on the development history of Star Citizen. Here is the original Kotaku story.
