But in addition to that it’s just, like… think of how monumentally fucked up your development process has to be, for YOU to be allegedly months away from release, and then half a decade later you’re back to talking about polishing interactions with utensils in cutscenes in that same game.
This isn’t like a “we need a bit more time” thing lots of games have. Five years! And counting! That alone is an entire dev cycle for a AAA game in 2021!
What is the explanation the true believers have for this, that isn’t either abject managerial incompetence or bald faced lying to backers? All I ever see is the same fall back excuse of “oh well they’re doing something that has never been done before!”, to explain away everything.
The explanation is “Chris didn’t think it was good enough for release in that state and he is right - we deserve a perfect game and we will give it all the time and money it needs.”.
So abject managerial incompetence with a soupçon of quasi-religious fervor, then. To let a project get to such a late stage that you’re mere months from planned release, only to end up talking about inconsequential aspects of cutscenes half a decade later.
You do realise that you peeps make up things (like: how does a SC backer think) and then take them as understood to be true, right? It doesn’t make it very motivating to engage in conversation.
I don’t see anyone pretending that they see into the minds of all backers and are selling some ‘truth’ about them. It’s perfectly common and valid to talk about the general views and opinions of communities in aggregate. I can say how Bears fans are excited about Justin Fields at QB without asserting that ALL Bears fans are excited about him or that someone can’t be a Bears fan and be negative about him. New World players are upset about the gold transfer problems. Nintendo fans are upset with the issues with N64 game emulation.
You’ve stated that you’re (relatively) new to the game. You enjoy what they have done so far. That’s absolutely cool. I don’t see why you would consider commentary on the project in the far past as off limits or unfair.
I would add that there are different truths depending on your perspective.
For example, I bought Star Citizen for the one-player Wing Commanderesque sequel Squadron 42. I am therefore a one-note pony who thinks the whole thing is just a giant scam is keeps going on with increasingly enhanced utensils and I am sure the next step will be modeling how each character masticates based on the type of simulated meal.
For someone who knows this game will never actually release and bought in wanting to be part of an ongoing and neverending saga of incremental changes, that’s also valid.
I don’t know if this is directed at me, but at no point am I speaking authoritatively from the perspective of a true believer. I have literally heard the “he’s doing something that’s never been done before!” line a hundred times in article comments, and forum posts, and Reddit threads - and I’m reporting that fact.
And sidenote: I am a SC backer. An extremely long-tenured one, who once happily walked around my janky-ass ship hangar starry eyed and excitedly showing my friends the latest CitizenCon demo and declaring that this game was going to own my life when it came out. That was over half a decade ago.
I count myself lucky that I didn’t have the disposable income back then to go completely down the rabbit hole with more expensive ships, or I might be mainlining copium these days still trying to justify my investment in CR’s “perfect vision” because of sheer sunk cost in funding it.
Principal photography lasted most of the month of May 1994, although not all of the actors were present through the whole of filming. “More than 80 experienced film professionals worked up to eighteen-hour days in order to realize Chris Roberts’s vision of the final chapter of the Terran-Kilrathi struggle,” wrote Origin excitedly in their in-house newsletter to commemorate the shoot’s conclusion. “Although always intense and frequently frustrating, the shoot progressed without any major complications, thanks in part to a close monitoring of contracts, budgets, and schedules by resident ‘suits’ in both Austin and San Mateo.” (The latter city was the home of Electronic Arts.) Few to none of the actors and other Hollywood hands understood what the words “interactive movie” actually meant, but they all did their jobs like the professionals they were. In all, some 200 hours of footage was shot, to eventually be edited down to around three hours in the finished game.
Let’s not forget he also directed the Wing Commander movie with Freddie Prinze Jr, which famously played the Phantom Menace trailer in front of it just to get people in the theater.
Yeah. I had a fondness for the movie (while knowing it was not good) in my late 20ies. It had some good actors and brought my favourite gaming franchise to life.
But I don’t think I’ll ever feel the need to rewatch it. Much as the stories and movies in the games were awesome at the time, a film director Chris Roberts is not. :/
Yeah, I really like Saffron Burrows, and it’s usually fun to watch Matthew Lillard do his thing. But even then, it was a mediocre-at-best movie.
And Roberts actually got to direct “bigger” actors in the FMV parts of the Wing Commander movies. Mark Hamill, Thomas “Stop Asking Me The Question” Wilson, John Rhys-Davies, Malcolm McDowell… which might be why he looked for Gary Oldman and Gillian Anderson and Mark Hamill again for Star Citizen. He knew it would be his last chance to work with big-name actors in his life.
Yep, the cast in the WC games was something special. Sitting down to start a new Wing Commander game was an event both for the gameplay and the spectacle. The cast was so good.
I had bought the separate voice pack for the earlier game as well (I think that became a thing in WC2 and expansion? Can’t remember if there was one in the original) because it brought so much to the story.
