Breathing New Life Into PC Games & Space Sims podcast - Chris Roberts - SxSW 2013

9 April 201300:43:401,224 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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so hi everyone I'm Chris Roberts uh you may have known my past games like Wing commander and freelancer and I used to actually be here based in Austin with origin systems and made the wing commanders here and then left Electronic Arts origin in '96 and started digital Anvil which we built freelancer and a lot of other pretty cool games and then in 2001 I took a break and now I'm back uh with staris I'm going to talk to you a little bit about my [Music] experiences I kind of funly look back in the uh time between about 1998 and 2001 sort of the golden era of PC games it was pretty crazy which is why there's the the Gold
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Rush footage there there was a huge amount of game Publishers there was a huge amount of developers felt like there was a lot of creativity there wasn't a huge amount of cost in terms of developing a marketing and bringing games to the marketplace so I think you know there was a lot of great stuff that happened back then and that was something that created things like the wink maners or the ultimas or a lot of other great games that you guys I think hopefully remember PC gaming gave us some great graphic Adventures flight simulators role playing games real-time strategy firstperson Shooters and of course space sims and I'd like to you know if you take a look at the current core gaming Market even on the consoles you can trace most of the major games back to the PC so you wouldn't have Call of Duty on a console if it wasn't for a PC and you know there's a whole you know most of the genres especially involving
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anything involving 3D first came on the on the PC side around about 2000 things started to change that was the first time that the consoles came out and their actual graphical power was capable with the PC and in some cases slightly ahead of the PC at the time of release they were smaller and cheaper that always helps and obviously there were two very big companies Sony and Microsoft willing to subsidize the initial cost of the hardware so they're willing to take they're willing to write a couple of billion dollars off that's one of the reasons why you can get a console for $300 or $400 and the user experience was streamlined and you know you didn't have to deal with all the crazy dos issues with the config files and a few other things that you probably had to struggle with back with win Commander or some other games and so there was a shift definitely towards consoles and in fact on my side that was actually one of the reasons why when I
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sold digital Anvil to Microsoft I uh I sort of took a break because Microsoft was starting to focus on the Xbox and it was a very different sort of world they were very they were wanting to focus on fewer bigger titles and I could see that the whole business was starting to kind of homogenize and and and some of the fun and Independence and the crazy sense of a land rush that you got with the PC was going away now the last couple years and you've probably been seeing it for the last 10 years people have been saying PC gaming is dead PC gaming is done or rather quote unquote serious PC gaming is done web-based diversions like MMOs and whatever zinga's latest contribution is have a bright future yet but everything else not so much first-person shooters have pretty much migrated fully to the consoles and by Next Generation everyone will have some variation of a pointer controller and
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PCs won't have the tangential superiority of the keyboard and mouse even anymore to hold on to point-and-click Adventures yeah there's actually been a Revival of those on the Wii beyond that you're running out of the somewhat small number of genres that PCS could claim innate dominance in if it's pretty much down to just Civ style God games and flight simulators at this point if we're being honest and at least one of those is probably going to make the transition to an online portable social model within the next Generation well that was from 2010 that just goes to show how smart the experts are in terms of predicting what's happening in the future but this was kind of the way I was feeling when I started Star Citizen I'm was mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore
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the all but yeah those are all ingame assets and that's actually kind of what it looks like when you fly around but my opinion is the PC is very much alive and I think one of the the key things that always gets missed out in the industry is that everybody is so fixated on whatever the
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next big thing is they just forget the industry is getting bigger and bigger and bigger and there are plenty of opportunities there is room for PC games there's room for console games there's room for mobile games there's even room for social games games and I think that you the way you should look in gaming is is very much along those lines and I think the PC itself is a very viable Market it's not going to be necessarily the biggest Market but I think it's a very good one to focus on I mean there's you know over 50 million steam users I mean there's 7 million concurrent sometimes on the steam stuff which is an indication of how many people are playing PC games at one time there was 12 million copies of Diablo 3 sold on the PC I mean those are console numbers there's 10 you know 10 million I think right now there's slightly under 10 million subscribers of world of Warcraft and have been for the last 6 s years and there's 32 million active players of League of Legends which is a PC game and
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there was about 45 million registrations on world ATT tank so those are all PC games and those are all numbers that no one should ever sniff at I'm hoping that fair number of you know who I am but I created the wing Commander franchise back in 1990 there was five and a half iterations and I did the first four I was a partner in origin systems where we created games like Ultima and win commander and ultim underworld and a bunch of other really great stuff and we were acquired by origin in 1992 in 96 when my employment contract was up with EA because I'm not a big fan of uh being part of big companies I left and found a digital Anvil uh which we partnered with Microsoft to make games and freelancer and starlancer were two of the games that came out of that studio and in early 2001 I sold it to Microsoft and as I said I'm not that interested in being part of very big corporate organizations
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and so I took a break from the the gaming business I went to Hollywood to make films for a while which was if you've played my games you know I'm very interested in narrative but the film business is actually getting a lot more like the way the game business is now in terms of there's only a few big event movies that the studios want to make they don't want to make anything other than $200 million movies and even the small interesting art movies that you see are not financed by the studios they're made with private money for almost no money at all and then maybe if you're that lucky one or two out of two 3 4,000 movies that get made you may get picked up and have a little bit of an askar run so in terms of actually doing interesting things nowadays I actually think the movie business isn't that great at all for it and uh I think the game business is more interesting because of some of the things that have been happening that I'll be talking
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about later in this speech having a good run doing movies I was feeling the itch toh come back and make a game again so I founded Cloud Imperium in the end of 2011 and started and was a result of it so those are some of the games that I've been involved in there's quite a few more but these are specifically more the Sci-Fi space games those are a few of the film that I did Outlander actually think is actually quite a fun film I don't know if any of you seen it and Lord of War is probably the one I'm the most proud of of the movies I I worked on the takeaways for me from both games and films is that I think the current game publisher financing models broken it's one of the reasons why I I went to the crowdfunding model I think that there's a things that I learned in terms of Film Production and discipline and production process and some specialization that happens means to a sort of better production quality so
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there was a lot lot of takeaways I had when I was actually making films I definitely think the industry needs to recognize and acknowledge the team member Talent on the game side all the games I've made except for the very first one when it was all just me doing it are good because I also had really good people work with me and they work really hard and they had great stuff my sort of feeling doing a lot of film and games and seeing the technology changes I sort of feel that games ultimately will be the most immersive experience you can get mainly just because you sort of put yourself in this world so the the difficulty with a movie whenever you try and make a movie is that you have to get the audience to care about the protagonist and that's always actually kind of a bit of a stumbling block in terms of emersion great movies and I think in a game or in an interactive environment the thing that you're going to get is that you don't have that
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barrier because you're playing you're basically the protagonist so the challenge then is more about creating a believable world and creating believable other secondary characters that you interact with and the game business isn't there yet but I can see the potential down the road when it gets there I think the experiences that can be crafted in game will be pretty powerful so for me when I was feeling this looking at it I was thinking what do I like PC games uh and I actually think there's hardly any competition in the PC space right now most of the big Publishers are all focused on the console they're focused on doing iterations on very well-known Brands and you know you can take a look in the PC side and you can sort of see there's there's not a lot but the ones that are specific like Eve online I mean they've got they've you know they've just gone over half million subscribers they're 10 years in that's a pretty dedicated base that's giving them $15 a month League of
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Legends has millions and millions of people playing I mean 32 million active players is not something to be sniffed at World of Tanks has a huge amount of registrations so but the key thing to to notice about all three of these is they sort of bypass traditional publish model instead went directly to the core gaming audience and that's actually the thing that I find really interesting is the opportunity for the direct connection the online side so the PC I think is a bigger platform that people give it credit for the business model is good because you don't have to pay a lot of money it's an open platform essentially so the problem with Microsoft or Sony is it's a closed platform they curate it you have to pay them licensing fees and the issue with that is mainly just if you want to break into it and you want to keep your cost low it's an expensive proposition it's one of the reasons why only the big Publishers can really play
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in the console space and the other thing that's great about the PC is there's a lot of options for distribution you know there's you know I things like Steam and you can also go direct yourself the thing that sort of happened last year you know I find really interesting and compelling is crowdfunding sort of became popular and became on the radar largely thanks to what Tim schaer did with his double fine Adventure everybody wanted a back a graphical adventure and he got 3.3 million when he was actually only looking for about 400,000 and what that really sort of showed was that there is a demand for certain types of games and certain genres of games that aren't being serviced by the big publishers I mean the problem with the big publisher model is that is if you're on a console I mean the breakdown of the numbers are um if I'm building a AAA game in a in a in a big publisher it'll cost me about $30 million minimum to
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make that game maybe even more partly because the big big Publishers have big overheads they're in fairly expensive areas so you're already 30 so let's say we're making a cheap one it's $30 million just to make it then you got to Market it so on that kind of spend you'll probably spend $15 million in marketing min maybe more like 20 but that sort of depends let's just say it's $15 million you're spending on marketing then at that point you're already in for $45 million do you have costs of goods and everything so you're only really netting maybe after you've taken everything out about $35 or so you've got to be selling quite a few million copies just to break even and then of course say you want to sell 3 million copies to break even you've got to go and pre-order those copies from Sony and Microsoft each one of those copies will
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cost you $10 give or take a little bit so you now you're about $30 million into the cost of goods so you add it all up and you're $75 million in before you've sold a unit and in a lot of cases it's at least $100 million in that isn't the realm that makes any sense for a smaller developer and it also is a realm that doesn't make any sense if you can only sell 500,000 or a million copies which by the way used to be great numbers five or 10 years ago I mean that people would make a lot of money in that business that essentially is the problem with the console business and that's why you sort of see people go for Assassin's Creed and they go for Call of Duty and they go for Madden and they go for Battlefield because they know they can sell 5 million plus copies but if you get rid of all that and you're going direct to the public and the the fans that like the games are backing it then you you you don't need to sell those numbers you
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can you know with even couple hundred thousand units you can do quite well when we started out with Star Citizen we decided to to you know I actually lined up some private investors and one of the things I told them was like and they were sort of skeptical of whether people wanted a PC game or whether people wanted a space Sim and I so I sort of made a deal with them that I was going to prove the demand by going the crowdfunding route I didn't expect to do nearly as well as as we did you know we're 8.35 I think now in funds raised we had a campaign that ran on our own site as well as a Kickstarter campaign we continue to sort of manage and run our site and it's still every day we're bringing in anywhere from $5 to $110,000 which is great cuz my actual goal with Star Citizen is to try and make it a completely Community funded and driven game and I'm actually now backing off on
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some of the investors that had sort of committed before because the problem with investors or the problem with Publishers is their motivations are slightly different than than M my motivation is I want to make the best game possible an investor thinks a good game is good because you're going to make profit and then at some point he can take his investment out and and uh you know double it or triple it or quadruple it a publisher wants to get a good game because he thinks he'll sell a lot of copy to make a profit what you guys care about is a good game which is what I care about if you take a look at every single small cool developer that gets bought by any one of the big Publishers and track it about three or four years on you will see that every single one of them the key people leave and the projects themselves suddenly start to lose that edge that's just what happens I mean it's not it's not necessarily a bad thing because if I'm a big publisher I've got public
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shareholders and i' I've got a answer to them and they want me to make a profit so they motivations are slightly different but I love the idea of having a direct connection to the community because your guys motivation is awesome game to play my motivation is building an awesome game and and playing it with you guys here's some stats that may be interesting for you guys we have over 100,000 people part of our community I think about 120 30,000 registered on our site of that we did a survey I think we had about 12,000 people reply so this is a fairly good statistical sample of it 69% of our backers are over 25 so it's not a kitty game let me put it that way 89% of our backers game on a desktop versus a laptop and the one thing that really blew me away was 81% of the backers built their own PC uh 94% of them running 64-bit version of Windows
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75% had more than 8 gigs or more not surprisingly kind of like the same way I was 58% of them also own at least one console there's also a fair amount that have ssds and really good internet collections so I mean I guess that sort of indicates that I think maybe one thing that you get in the PC arena is that you get older people that probably have jobs so they can afford to have nicer equipment better internet connections and so you know what sometimes maybe you should make games for that audience because I think too many people are trying to make games that work on a browser and a really basic experiences 29% of the people responded to the uh survey told they intended to use the Oculus Rift when it was available for the game which I think is pretty interesting and it's a pretty good sign for the Oculus guys cuz uh you know that's kind of a bit of a canary in the coal mine thing though there 66% of
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our backers backed because they wanted to support a game made specifically for PC and they sort of feel like they've been overlooked so when someone's supporting them then they come out in kind one of the things that changes though that when we do in the uh crowdfunded model is instead of being all inside the publisher we're now completely transparent which I actually think is a great thing there isn't anything super super secret about what we do and I think that if you're committed enough and you're interested enough in a game or a genre and you're going to put your money up I think you deserve to see how things are going and and uh it's actually kind of fun and by the way on the team that's making the game it's fun too because they get to expose their work to a pretty wide community and get feedback and recognition for it from my standpoint it makes a better game because we very
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early in the process now are essentially seeing what is important for people or what isn't important for people and a lot of times I've made games in the past where we've just sort of gone off in a cave for 3 years and then release the game and it's come out and we're like oh wow if we knew people would like not going here that feature that we spent 6 months on and they were doing this stuff over here which we spent like a week on I think we would have changed our priorities around every time we put out like here's a game mechanic the crowds think through every single iteration much quicker than we can internally on a team and it's a really good thing in the old days the developer would make the game and a lot of times we I mean you know I always used to build my own Tech and production tools which also cost money and took time then we had the publisher in the way then we're doing publishing free marketing then there was a sales rep and then there's a retail buyer and the retail staff and then
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finally gets down to the consumer that's a lot of people along the way that's a lot of people that take money off the table as it goes along the way it's also a lot of people that get in the way of the direct communication with the people that really count the people that are playing the games the people that love the games now in the sort of direct to Consumer model that is really crowdfunding there isn't any of that I mean you're just bam plugged right in and it's pretty it's pretty great to give you an example of also why this is really good is that if you take a look at the traditional model essentially by the end of the day you know you really got down to about a 20% royalty to developer which was about $12 a unit in the direct model the only money that's getting spent is the money you got to pay for your fees for the payment providers and whatever you spend on marketing down the road you essentially are getting four times as much money coming back against the development and so what's important about that is it
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means that you don't need to sell as many copies which is good for everyone because that means that you can have smaller more Niche genres more interesting stuff become economically viable then whenever your Footprints smaller it will allow people to innovate more or do more interesting things and not always try and iterate on like the past sequel or brand I think that's as good for the consumer as well as it is for the developer the traditional development is pretty much you just go off you know a dark office for 2 3 years work on the game finish it and then maybe at the end you take it out for a beta test the beauty of an online game for my perspective is that I don't have the fear anymore of it gets put in a box and then it goes out the door and I can't update it or change it I think that's positive for everyone and so we're taking that to heart what we're doing on cloud Imperium in terms of the
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development of star citizens so yes the game is coming out in 2 years time but we're going to be releasing modules of functionality of the game uh over the next two years the idea is that you've battl tested a lot of the functionality you've taken a lot of your community's feedback to make the game better and uh I'm hoping that will make the game a much better experience when it's fully finished we're also doing something else with sort of Distributing development teams around I'm sort of a big believer in having small focus groups and each one of the groups is sort of working on key features so here in Austin we're working on the sort of dog fighting side and the hanger side and some of the MMO stuff in La we're doing some of the high-end creative and some of the general overall engine structuring and it's also where we're sort of handling our sort of publishing aspects out we're doing the web right now in Montreal and
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we're going to be doing probably Planet Side stuff and some of the first person shooter stuff on the boarding stuff it's sort of the agile scrum model but it's sort of in forc because the problem is when you have agile and scrum and you've got 100 people in one building everyone TS to slide on a lot of the things you going to be doing on agile agile and scrum whereas if you put people in separate areas they're forced to do smaller Sprints and communicate with each other and tell each other what they're doing and the other thing that's interesting about doing the crowdfunded side is you have a very sort of fan approach to how you handle press my sort of developer breath and always like hey I'm going to be in gamasutra or I'm going to be in game industry. Biz and what I care about is being in the press the web Outlets that the The Gamers read uh and I think it's kind of uh refreshing and liberating and I hope for the people on the other side it's
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something that they appreciate that they you know enjoy seeing stuff as it's going along and find it pretty interesting this is uh What uh stuff looked like back in 90 91 and ' 90 so one thing I think you'll all be very excited about is the level of Fidelity in Space the graphical detail and the immersion cuz it's to a level that I've never been able to achieve before I'm trying to build a world that it's so detailed and has such great texture that you forget that it's a game which is always my goal when I'm building games we showed off our uh character I think on Friday but that's the look of the Marine some of the helmet options although I think I'm going to go for number three here's a little more in depth of the vanel which we'll be showing you guys we're sort of approaching character design the costume design the creature design like we would in a high-end movie and that's also one
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of the things to note is that the process and the workflow of how we're building the universe and world is sort of taking some of the best people we can find in whatever role so you know we have literally the top science fiction conceptual artists that work on every single you know you name the $200 million movie they' worked on Avatar they' worked on any of the last three Star Wars they've worked on the Star Treks then here's a few of the Planet Side environments this is a sort of sort of 3D and the stuff that will be happening in the environment so the environment to the left is teror which is the new Earth so to speak and the environment to the right is Moscow on Earth I'm pretty excited by it I I'm really enjoying the process I thank everyone in here that has backed and if people haven't and you're interested you should go check it out uh I throw the floor open as some questions I don't um so I guess this is more of a statement
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the question I just I would like to thank you for developing this for the PC only um I um have been playing PC games for probably 25 years now um and the greatest memories I've had have been probably the mid to early 90s um like when the original XCOM came out and definitely all the wing commander games um and I feel like that PC gaming has been very profoundly negatively impacted by console gaming console Publishers um to the point where a lot of the experiences are watered down like I I I am confused why everybody's so excited about the latest XCOM game that came out I felt like it was nowhere near as good as as the the the old one um so thank you I appreciate it I'm really looking forward to it Oh no you're welcome you're welcome thank you you thank you for being a PC Gamer so my question is uh you know we we've seen the the ships that are going to be available with Star Citizen and uh
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there's a a pretty big precedent whether There Was You know the first mod for freelancer or you see in like Eve where people go for the big Capital ships we've seen all the way up to the bangal charact carrier is there going to be anything more than that oh bigger than Bengal no I don't think there's going to be anything bigger than Bengal there'll be a couple of ships that will be about the same size as it I mean the Vandal is going to have its version the Jean will have their version and there will definitely be a battleship which Cana will be about the size of the Bengal maybe slightly smaller um but I mean there's a lot of ships to go I mean we we've got uh I think um I have to go take a look but on you know on the on the capital ship size uh we've got at least 12 or so that we're building so there there's going to be I mean basically there's going to be a huge amount of VAR on all all levels um but
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you know generally it's a first- person game right so you're not going to have five Bengals all jumping into the same area going Toe to Toe I mean it would be cool but but I don't think the there you know even something with uh three tiems in uh and in Tri SLI uh maybe not be able to handle that just yet but we'll see thank you hi um I'm a former uh I'm a former Eve player and I definitely understand the uh that that kind like kind of you know direct to Consumer bases um have a bunch of dedicated fans to them um now a big thing with Eve was the fact that um and personally this is what got me into it um the fact that you know the the massive scale of um of of battles just you know you'd see 1,000 to 2,000 people in a single system Alone um and kind of
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the geopolitical aspect of it you know you and your clan or whoever you you know wanted to align with would control you know a piece of space um I know it might probably be you know far way further down the road if it if ever at all um but do you think you'd ever include any sort of um player driven political aspect or anything like that no no we we we definitely have a player D I mean so the I mean the difference between us and Eve is that because we're sort of first person and we got a lot more sort of Fidelity in the the ships and the action we can't have so many people in the same instance just CU it it it we with have bandwidth issues and performance issues uh but in terms of uh the uh you know groups uh running a businesses running an Enterprise who you're all that the players gener I mean I'm really you know Eve I thought did a
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really good job of uh letting the players themselves sort of create a lot of the content for the game itself so that's a big thing that we're focusing on uh it's just that you know you may you know you're you know whether you call it a clan or a squadron it just think of it being more like you and 10 people instead of you and 100 people but it there's going to be a lot of the same dynamics that are going on in terms of uh getting people together and you know we've got a big emphasis um on the ability to support cooperative play between players to achieve things so if you're flying a bigger ship it's better for you to have some friends Manning it as well uh we still we still very much support the single player like Privateer experience it's just if you have that don't fly the bigger ship I mean but everything in our universe is like is got there's it's swings and roundabouts there's no particular like there are if even you have a bigger ship that will
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have some weaknesses over a smaller Nimble ship and you know vice versa so uh but but we're definitely we there's it's h too long of an answer here uh we'll go in I'll go into it down the road but we've got some really great stuff in terms of uh organizations and even just the ability to run a business if you want all right thank you hi Chris this is a space Sim design question um I think a lot of uh Gamers when they think about space sims they often say uh you know we want more uh realtime travel we want want to you know fly from Hoth to DEA in real time and game designers are like no you don't that's boring and what we end up with a lot is like you know you are orbiting a planet or you're in an asteroid field and they're like hyper Gates connecting these nodes and you know the rest is you
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kind of drifting through the void around those uh nexuses um uh and uh I was wondering or or like Mass Effect which has like its uh Fisher Price mini map where you're going around in the uh whatever that the Normandy um I was wondering if Star Citizen maybe tries to tackle this and make travel a more visceral experience or what your thoughts are so uh we're going to be somewhere between the two so we are the the systems themselves are going to be large areas that you can fly between point and point it will not be um it will not be accurate in terms of actual like what the actual system distances would be because uh we you start to run into into I mean for a start that would be not that much fun but also you start to run into the issues of floating point
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on scale that big uh but you certainly are going to be able to you you'll be able to navigate to a nav point and autopilot or fly that distance does that mean if I were like in the soul system I'd be able to fly from like Earth to Neptune without any like zones going on yes yeah yeah yeah there's there there there's a there's there's a special there's some anyway there's some tech that is sort of streams in areas in real time anyway it's a it's a sort of more technical thing to go into but that that that's sort of what we're going to be running and and uh the thing to to the the takeaway that's fun about it is you know exploring is something that everyone has you know like we run our polls I think by far I think 68% of the people said they wanted to be exploring or maybe even higher and have to take a look at that um but it was by far the number one and so we're going to have a
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lot in say the systems themselves that will have uh certain areas that are mapped on your navigation map but other areas will be unmapped and so and you will not be able to navigate to it because it won't be on your map so you'll actually have to fly in real time so it'll allow people to sort of maybe discover an asteroid field that has a rich seam of minerals in that you can go mine so I I could see a lot of players just sort of flying around some parts of systems and mapping it as well as discovering jump points and doing that that sounds fantastic thank you I was uh wondering how many Admirals did you end up with uh oh you mean which well this we have lots we have Vice Admirals rear Admirals high high Admirals I'm a real Admiral I was just wondering how many people were on that admiralty level uh I'll tell you right now hang on that's I'll I'll pull it up it was one of it was actually one of the
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you can tell it's one it was one of the stats if I pull up the ship stat I'll tell you uh see that's good yeah I don't even need to ask uh hang on a sec where I yeah here we are let just you'll be on the screen big for you so yeah basically there you are so um uh well actually well I think it's 250 is the Admiral so um it's probably uh I would say my guess is uh something like 5,000 maybe maybe a little less um are the 250 or above level there you go
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why did you choose cry engine uh why did I choose cry engine uh a couple of reasons um I was uh work I actually had both I'm I was working with unreal 4 and cry engine uh they're both really great pieces of Technology uh unreal 4 is just early in the early in the process and uh I was making a lot of uh I first of all done a lot of the prototyping work in Cay engine and then I'm promising to deliver this pretty ambitious game and I was starting to get a bit nervous on the unreal four side because I was seeing the the builds and there was refactoring going on and and I think it's going to be a great piece of Kit I mean it's really well built and engineered but uh I think it's not mature yet so it you know like when epic shipped the first thing with unreal 4
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then I think it's different so the irony was it used to be people didn't think cry engine was mature and so they went with with unreal 3 I didn't want to go with unreal 3 because it was going to be dead technology so I was either going do Onre 4 or cry uh and so that's that's kind of the way and then the the only other thing is that there's a cry has a certain rendering uh style that's slightly more sort of photo realistic whereas um unreal's a bit more sort of you know it works well for the Gears of War they they've gone for a certain style uh and I sort of felt like the cry engine style matched up more for that look of Star Wars I kind of wanted and do you um plan to do any mod tools oh yeah no we're definitely doing mod tools so yeah I that's part I mean that was part from day one where we're we're going to have uh mod tools like freelancer did actually probably more more sophisticated mod tools too so um
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and uh so if you play around with uh cry the free SDK then you'll you know you'll probably feel pretty familiar with uh what will happen on freelance stes and not freelancer thank 10 years 10 years behind at the moment thank you Chris how do you reconcile the persistent World sandbox player-driven content side with the sort of the high bar you had with structured storytelling and Wing commander and freelancer uh well so so we know we have Squadron 42 that's in the game which is essentially the win Commander experience and what happens is you sign up when you first play the game you sign up so uh and you play it and since you're in the military you kind of go where the military tells you to do I mean that's what happens in in in real life uh so the Squadron 42 campaign is very much
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like uh the wi Commander campaigns where it has branching good good bad path uh and uh relationships you'll manage with your wingman I mean it's going to be very much the spiritual success if I was building a wing Commander today uh Squadron 42 is what the what that will be um and then uh you know sort of in the uh in the bigger sort of sandboxy game we're going to have sort of shorter story arcs uh so we're going to have player driven stuff and then we're also going to have some scripted stuff that will be sort of adding flavor uh but that will be more in the sort of free uh you know Privateer uh Val uh so there won't be an overarching story in in the open persistent world the kind of concept is we have a sort of timeline that we think the universe is going to go along in terms of certain events we're sort of patting it after um kind of the the decline and fall of the
00:34:42
Roman Empire uh and so so yeah so there will be a point when Earth will be sacked um by the Vandal but um there will be other events that will be completely we're going to try and make player driven so we're going to sort of the the idea we have these constant content updates and we'll hopefully be dropping stuff like literally weekly and we'll be looking at seeing what the players are doing in the universe and and pulling some of hopefully that back into some of our news updates and stories or maybe play off it and and see so I sort of view the uh persistent Universe stuff is kind of like um a DND D campaign and we're sort of dungeon Masters and we're sort of you know we're riffing off what the players are doing we've kind of given them sort of areas to play in and then we've got to work quickly on our feet so rather than having them mutually exclusive you're kind of just doing both
00:35:31
and they yeah yeah yeah you're G to do both I mean we actually uh you know the we're probably uh we were thinking about in Squadron 42 maybe getting some story reports like when you get news reports some of it is like driven from what's happening in the persistent universe and stuff like that but the idea should feel like you're in the persistent Universe you go off in the military campaign which is very structured and then when you muster out you're back into the open sandbox um thank game so first of all I just wanted to say thank you for freelancer it was a fantastic experience um and when I was playing that game I I thought you the thing I wanted the absolute most was to be able to do first person while you're on the planet first- person shooter so I just wanted to ask um were there any what were the challenges combining firstperson shooter and space in ler in uh Star Citizen uh it's you know it's that was actually one of the easiest
00:36:19
things cuz uh uh you know I mean essentially Star Citizen is a first person I mean basically it's a first- person shooter and it just has heavy emphasis on vehicle combat so the you know the way the the way cry engine works anyway is it's a firstperson uh shooter engine uh that does has good vehicle support so uh I mean it's kind of all the first person shooter aspect is kind of out of the box I mean even in I never showed it off in the Prototype but you know I could run around with guns and shoot up uh other AI or shoot up my ship or uh do all that sort of stuff so uh so what was the the bigger challenge was sort of layering on higher level of vehicle uh simulation and control because uh cry engine and even all the other firstperson Shooters have much more basic sort of Vehicle Systems in them and don't do nearly as much
00:37:07
simulation and have as many features so most of the work was actually not really on the first person because that's kind of already there it was really building all the other stuff on top uh to sort of be able to have a a greater range of scale right because normally on foot you know you only worry about a kilometer or so each Direction whereas we're flying in space so we have like hundreds of thousands of kilometers so you have to deal with the scale issues and all that sort of stuff um so I would say the challenge was more making the the the space bit than than the the the first person shooter stuff I don't know if that helps you out but yeah it's great cool thank you hey Chris um so I've been a fan since the wing Commander days and uh all through um digital anal times and I've been dreaming of this since traveler back in 78 yes travel is a great game I mean that's actually one of The
00:37:54
Inspirations of uh of privateer traveler and so uh and I think also Elite was pretty much inspired by traveler too so okay well I had a question regarding some of the the newer Technologies like Oculus Rift if you could comment on uh you how it fits into your plans for the game also uh where to new uh user interface modalities like uh natural language processing or gesture input from things like leap or um you know the nextg version of connect and things like that fit into your well they're all I mean they're all things that we're we're going to do we're working on I mean so so for me you know one of the great things about the PC is uh you know yes okay so it costs a bit more money and yes it can occasionally be a configuration nightmare but you can like configure it to do a whole bunch of different things and try new things out
00:38:41
and it's much easier to deploy new technologies so uh you know I mean like when we first uh put sound in win Commander 2 it was just cuz you know we met these little crazy sound blaster guys and were're a very small company there that was me all right there it's you all right and like hey this is cool let's do digital sound um so um all the all all those all those things are really interesting and important I think and so for me uh really supporting like peripherals that increase the experience is important so I'm so you know I think I've mentioned before but my goal would be to sort of have the rift have something like a leap uh and you know your your Hands-On throttle and stick setup and I'm sitting in a chair and that's pretty much kind of virtual reality I mean it's actually it's actually a bet you know it's better
00:39:29
easier to do it for Star scissors is for Doom because most of the time you're sitting down flying in a cockpit so it's just going to feel more natural looking around and doing stuff uh so uh we're going to do that I mean we we already actually have stereoscopic 3D in the game right now um so the rift supports pretty easy Once the uh CCH guys have hooked uh it into their stuff um and uh you know I want the other thing that I I I may I've mentioned before but um you know I want everything that you see in your point of view um is what you do so like if you're on your controller or stick and you do something you should see it mimicked by your avatar and then if you like flip a switch in your cockpit your actual hand should leave the throttle and flip the switch and by the way if you want to change you can't change velocity until your hands back on the throttle so I mean I just I kind of want to have it really sort of feel
00:40:17
immersive and and you should take some decisions then based on like is this the right time to deploy this if I'm in the middle of a dog fight and I want to be changing my my my uh velocity uh last question then um do you see any role for a second screen uh device in the game a tablet or a p or a phone as part of the persistent Universe uh yeah no we we we're already supporting or we've already said we're going to do a tablet um um app which would mostly be sort of checking in uh be allowing you to sort of set up missions do trading check on how things are going in the universe uh and uh I think that uh I would uh uh you know we're going to look in at doing sort of second like supporting second screen to be sort of you know like using a tablet as a as a touchscreen input that would feed into the main game I can't promise that's going to be Day One support but uh
00:41:05
that's definitely something we want to be be doing and uh CU I I anything that makes that more immersive I mean I think I said in the the VR panel uh on Friday that you know we're going to try and build a um you know basically a a you know a a flying pod where we have a movable platform and uh you got the VR on and the stick and everything you I mean it won't be a setup that like everyone will be able to have but we'll hopefully have it and we can take it around to like shows like PS or games con and everyone that's backed it you know just shows a citizen card and comes in and gets to try it out it'd be kind of cool hi Chris hey um I think you recognize me I do um so how would this this is this is the son of wingman very back how do you feel about bringing PC
00:41:54
games back to a younger generation like myself uh I think it's great I mean I I uh I mean I I mean firstly I think uh there's stuff that PC games do that console games can't do and don't do and there's possibilities so I think uh I mean I know you're pretty badass on the 360 but we need to get you badass on Star Citizen no that will come and and and I and I have to say that the other thing I will say is that you know I definitely like 10 years ago when consoles sort of started to gain the the prom um PCS were a bit of a nightmare in terms of config and installation all the rest of the stuff but I have to say you know Windows 7 I I'm not a big fan of Windows 8 but Windows 7 is the best operating system I've had on any one of my PCS it's completely Rock stable it detects everything I plug into it um I'm
00:42:43
developing crashing uh never reboot the system so it's you know I I think what's happened is that side of things has gotten actually a little better and more stable so I think when people have the games again I don't think it will be quite the issues that were say 15 years ago when you were trying to get games to run that's my theory I'll see as soon as we start deploying live to 100 plus thousand people I'm sure be like oh I can't believe this configuration of Hardware doesn't work oh no but that's the way it is yeah okay any other question now you want no I'm and also I'm just saying I'm telling all my friends about this game so yeah I know you got to get the word out there yeah we we got to we got to get everyone back to PC up okay all right well hey it's been nice thanks guys thanks for supporting
00:43:32
us there

Transcript from YouTube’s automatic captions — punctuation and Star Citizen jargon are approximate. The video itself is hosted by CIG on the official channel.