Star Citizen will "compete with any triple-a game out there", says Roberts
Star Citizen's Chris Roberts has teamed up with Crytek employees in an attempt to deliver a sci-fi wonder on CryEngine 3. As such, he firmly feels that the game will be able to roll with the cream of triple-a development when it launches in 2014. Find out more on his collaboration with Crytek below.
Speaking with Gamesindustry International, Roberts discussed the rapidly growing PC market, and the steadily improving technical prowess of modern day rigs. Given the amount of money raised for the project via crowd-funding, the site asked Roberts if - in two years time - the budget will give him enough breathing space to deliver what PC gamers believe to be cutting edge or 'triple-a' at the time.
"It's a little more complicated than doing an old-school graphic adventure", he admitted. "I'm confident now that we'll be able to compete with any AAA game out there. I can't do what I did with Freelancer, or what id did with Rage, and take five years to release it. At that point, the moment in time will be gone. But in two years, it will be pretty great."
Elsewhere, Roberts discussed his collaboration with Crytek, revealing that many of the studio are fans of his classic game Wing Commander, "I have a bit of an advantage in that there are a lot of people who played Wing Commander in the Nineties, and that was one of the reasons they got into making games in the first place.
"I got the feeling that there were quite a few Wing Commander fans at Crytek, and they were all just excited to help out.”
Initially Roberts planned to release the game on console, way back before his Kickstarter campaign launched, but grew concerned over the purchase of his name, given that Wing Commander has been absent for many years now, and that it is largely held in high-regard with PC-faring folk.
"I didn't think the project would suit a traditional publisher route, because big-box publishers won't bring you success in the PC space. The big successes in PC are like World of Tanks and League of Legends: Riot was nobody before it did League of Legends, and Wargaming was a small, niche publisher.
“But as time went on, the old console publishing path started to feel very yesterday, and I was thinking, 'Do I really want to spend three years working on a next-gen console game that would ship just after the new consoles are out to a very small customer base.' It would get a month's worth of play and they'd be on to the next thing. So I cut out the first step.”
Would you have played Star Citizen on consoles, or is it a fine match for PC? Let us know below.