The reasons for today’s invigorating renaissance in PC gaming, for the triumphant return of so many of its best development heroes, are threefold...
First, the guys who made those classic games, mostly in the 1990s, are now frustrated creators with a pent-up desire to deliver amazing new experiences.
Second, through crowd-funding, they are suddenly able to sail around the frigid limitations of the publisher-model and deliver those games to the public.
Third, because the people who enjoyed those games are still gamers. We want to re-experience those old game-styles in a 21st Century mode. Our passion raises funds and interest and inspires younger gamers. When it works, it’s a virtuous circle.
Chris Roberts and his famed project Star Citizen is one of those projects. It’s a dazzling, high-end PC game offering space combat and exploration on a monumental scale. This is not the kind of game that would likely get a green-light from a major publisher, but through KickStarter and other crowd-funding outlets, it’s attracted millions of dollars, enough to guarantee enough moolah to magic the game into life. Star Citizen might be two years from launch, but it remains, undoubtedly, one of the most warmly anticipated PC games currently in development.
If you were a serious PC gamer in the 1990s, you probably played one of Roberts’ games, most likely a Wing Commander 3D space shooter or one of his more ‘explore-and-trade’ games like Freelancer or Privateer. These games were central to PC gaming. They were gorgeous and they were great fun. They always made the covers of PC Gamer and its ilk. They were the big-sellers of their day.
Time moves along, most especially in gaming. Today, they look primitive and slow. They also took an unfortunate turn into the world of Full-Motion Video, with grand stories starring Mark Hamill, which seemed like a big deal at the time, but turned out to be a dead-end for gaming.
As the '90s drew to a close, Roberts had fallen in love with filmmaking and went off to be a director and producer for a while. Now he’s hungry again to create huge game-worlds, space-epics pitching alien races against one another, bulking starships spewing streams of buzzing battle-fighters.
The games make the promise to put you in the dog-fightin’ action-sequences reminiscent of Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica with the option to toddle off and live a quieter life at the edges of space, trading, exploring, perhaps dabbling in a spot of casual piracy.
Roberts is not afraid to embrace his past and to admit that Star Citizen is an amalgamation of his best previous work, with the added bonus of modern computing power and honed game-design techniques. (There will be no FMV sequences.)
He tells IGN, “If I was going to make another Wing Commander, a lot of what I'm doing now would be in that game. I feel like the tools and technologies have moved on so much that you could go back and do a reboot, the same way they did with Batman or with Star Trek, where you tell the same story again but it’s a different experience. The way that you can present it is on a whole new level.
“For me, there were a lot of things, when I was making Wing Commander or Freelancer or Privateer, that I would have wanted to be able to do, but I was limited by the time and the technology. Now I don't have the same issues. I'm getting to go back and revisit those old ideas and concepts, but greatly expand them in a way that I couldn't in the past.”
He adds, “In the past, you'd build these cool pre-rendered cinematic sequences and you'd do it in high-end software on SGIs. You were always thinking, ‘If only I could do this in real time, it would be amazing.’ That's where we're at right now. You can do a lot of that in real time. It's amazing, and it's fun.”
Star Citizen’s story is typical space-opera. Its single-player campaign, called Squadron 42, puts you in the front-line of a galactic dispute and you’ll do yawing, spinning, turning combat in order to gain enough cash and experience to beef up your ship and / or go gallivanting around the galaxy, raising hell or gathering space-shekels. (The thing to read is Anthony Gallegos’s preview.)
So 3D space-combat is the game’s central mechanic and, of course, this is where it gets interesting. Because videogame and movie space-combat is not quite the same as probable, actual real space combat, and this causes a disturbance in the minds of those who desire not merely physical realism, but absolute realism.
Roberts has clearly given this some thought. When I raise the issue, he is unapologetic. “The model of space combat isn't what it really would be, because it would be at ridiculously high speeds. You'd never see your opponent. It would all be done with computers. You'd basically be flying big spheres around. You’d wait for a blip to appear on the radar screen, lock your missile, hit a button, and watch it blow up.
"But that's not fun. The model is really World War II dogfighting in space. Even though we're doing a bunch of things on the physics side that are actually accurate, we do do things like limiting speeds because it's really the only way where you can have much fun dogfighting. So we take a certain amount of license to bring it down into the fantasy realm of space combat.”
Despite his wanderings in Hollywood - as well as directing the failed Wing Commander movie, he produced a number of films, including Lord of War - Roberts has remained a gamer. There are elements of game design’s evolution that he believes mark a wrong direction, specifically, a lack of consequence for failure.
Clearly, players who invest days into building a snazzy spacecraft, all 25th Century conveniences with a bursting cash-box under the cockpit, are not going to be happy if their life’s work is nabbed by some lurking scumbag space-pirate. And so, anyone venturing into the cosmic badlands can purchase certain insurance packages. Even then, getting blasted in Star Citizen is not going to be a good experience.
“I do miss a certain amount of difficulty in playing games,” he says. “I feel like my sense of achievement in beating a level or beating a boss is almost nothing now, because I know that no matter what I do, I'm going to respawn two seconds before I died. Games like Mass Effect or even Uncharted, I play them all, but I bully my way through the story. I don't really pay that much attention to whether or not I'm running into a room and getting killed in a hail of bullets, because I know I can just do it again.
“I thought Demon's Souls had a really nice, balanced setup. It was hard, it was challenging, but at the same time, it was fair. If you learned what to do and what the techniques and pitfalls were, it was always your own fault if you died. It wasn't an arbitrary thing. There was an immense sense of satisfaction.
“I'd say that Demon's Souls is more difficult than I would want to make one of my games, but it's reminded me of the idea that you should have some level of challenge in your game. It gives you much more of a sense of satisfaction and personal achievement than something that lets you quickly restart like the current generation of console action-adventure games.”
Even if you’re not a massive fan of space-combat, there’s little doubt that Star Citizen is representative of hardcore PC gaming’s rebirth, of the confirmation of PC as a core gaming platform for the future. in his Kickstarter pitch, Roberts makes this point again and again.
“The PC represents constant change and innovation. It doesn't stagnate. It's always challenging you. As someone that likes cool new stuff, I'm much more into it than a platform that's going to be the same for six or seven or 10 years.
“I like the fact that there's a more powerful video card every year, and maybe there's something new I can do that I couldn't have done last year. It's one of the reasons I think I was successful when I was doing the old Wing Commander stuff. It got to the point where I could see that, alright, it can really do what I want to do now. And, yes, it inspires people to buy new hardware and really geek out. It's all about building the most immersive, cool experience.”
For daily opinions, debates and interviews on games you can follow Colin Campbell on Twitter or at IGN.
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