5011

I wholeheartedly concede the point.

5012

5 years, $150 million, and

Still a bit to do then!

5013

Didn’t we see photos of Mark Hamill with motion capture dots all over his face and stuff? What happened to the single player scripted portion?

5014

It was subsumed by Chris’ ego.

5015

I mean, this is hardly a reassuring answer:

I’d love to hear you answer your critics. The game has a lot of fans but also a lot of detractors, and for every missed deadline those detractors’ claims are proved more correct. What would you say to reassure them?

I mean, you’re a gaming journalist, I’ve been in the industry a long time. How many times do you hear that another publisher like EA or Ubisoft or anyone that’s creating something big or new or ambitious, even after four or five years of development, where they’ve promised it for this year and then when the time comes they say ‘actually, it’s going to be the following year after all’. It happens a lot. A lot of titles get killed along the way. The game business is unpredictable - there’s a lot of R&D which happens, people are just not particularly aware of that because they don’t see how the sausage is made a lot of the time.

5016

That’s a pretty awesomely vague answer, even for Roberts.

5017

So, project cancellation is on the table now?

5018

It’s Chris Roberts. Project cancellation is the default, not the exception.

5019

All I saw was "Question: How do you answer your detractors? Answer: blah blah blah “a lot of titles get killed along the way”.

Holy crap.

5020

He’s saying that lots of other titles have troubled production too. Most of them either aren’t sufficiently disastrous to come to the public’s attention or turn out really badly, though. I can only think of a single exception-- DOOM 2016.

Through that equivalency he’s implying that his game’s problems are similar in degree to other games with dramatic dev chaos. Perhaps that’s true, in that the crowdfunded nature of the game forces much more transparency. But it doesn’t feel true.

5021

It isn’t true, based on how the project evolved. Software development can have bumps and issues, but there are big differences here to remember, IMHO.

A. People paid money, sometimes hundreds or thousands of dollars, based on promises that have been broken time and again. In the case of the other games he talks about, the publisher or developer bore those costs.

B. They continue to make money on imaginary ‘ship’ pictures, despite not really being close to a full and completed product.

5022

Pretty interesting commentary on the interview:

5023

I still dig Times of Lore.

5024

And I enjoyed the Wing Commander games. And Freelancer.

Let’s not talk about the Wing Commander movie, though. ;)

5025

image

5026

I like the way you followed the letter of what I asked for while going directly against it both creatively and effectively . Well done! ;)

5027

I’m a little confused on the timing of the scope change. How much money did they have raised before they turned the game into a massive simulation of the entire universe? Did they ever have enough money to complete the original scope of the game, or did they extend this scope so early on (through stretch goals) that the only reason they got so much money was that they overpromised? I know that at one point Chris Roberts said they had “enough money to complete the game as pitched.” My question is, had the game already become the all-encompassing everything at that point? In other words, did they get all the money by overpromising, or did they have enough money to do what they said they would do before they went off the rails?

Sorry if this is a stupid question.

5028

I have never played a Wing Commander game but I did watch the movie. I was mostly disappointed that Scooby Doo never showed up.

5029

Best way to maybe look at it is their funding page

They got 2mill from the kickstarter, then once that finished they shifted funding to their own website and stretch goal after stretch goal began to pile up with the free money. At some point during the run to $65mill (where they finally realised they should maybe stop adding new goals), it became less about a Wing Commander remake and more about simulating life, the universe and everything…in space.

5030

WTF S42 chapter 1 of 3 is how sometime in 2018?