CR answ:
Well yeah, absolutely. I think I’ve said this for quite a long time but Star Citizen is never going to be finished and I don’t think people would say EVE is finished or World of Warcraft is finished now. Star Citizen will go on, that universe will go on as long as anyone is out there wanting to play in it – which I’m hoping will be for a long time obviously. The games I mentioned have been 10 years plus.
So, really what we’re doing with Star Citizen is we’re working on the game, adding features for an incredibly ambitious design – I don’t think there is any other game that is trying to do as much as we’re trying to do. So, degree of difficulty 11, not 10. And, we’ll have what we determine is a minimum viable product feature list for what you would call Star Citizen the commercial release which is basically when you say, “Okay, we’ve gotten to this point and we’ve still got plans to add a lot more cool stuff and more content and more functionality and more features…” – Which by the way includes some of the later stretch goals we have because not all of that is going to be for ‘absolutely right here’ on the commercial release. But we’ll have something that we’ll think, ‘Okay yeah, not everyone can play it but it doesn’t matter – you can load it up, it plays really well, it’s really stable, there’s lots of content, there’s lots of fun things to do, different professions, lots of places to go, we’ve got a really good ecosystem.’ So, when we get to that point that’s when we would say, “Now it’s not alpha, it’s not beta, it’s Star Citizen 1.0.”
But of course the team is going to absolutely continue working on it, just like if you look at World of Warcraft – they continue to add content and features all the time. The same happens on EVE. We will update stuff, so we’ll update the graphics, we’ll add new functionality, new content, new systems, coming across additional alien races – all that kind of stuff will be there. So, we’re going to work on this as long as you guys let us or support us doing it, because the world’s huge. There’s so many things to do out there.
It’s the same on Squadron 42. Once we’ve told the Squadron 42 trilogy then we’re going to move on and we’ll have other stories we’ll tell. Maybe they’re not necessarily military stories, maybe it’s more an adventure – sort of a Han Solo style adventure.
It’s just a huge universe, you know. Look what Disney’s doing with Star Wars. They’ve got a whole roadmap of the main ones and the spinoff ones and all the rest of the stuff.
So, you know, I think Star Citizen has the possibility to have a huge interesting universe. We’ve really put a lot of effort into the lore of it. I mean, you see from the very beginning that’s one of the things that we made foundational. Dave and his team constantly are fleshing out the world in addition to writing stuff for the Squadron series as well as doing stuff for the PU.
You know, we want to make this world as livable and believable and you guys spend many years adventuring around in it. And I think in today’s world, it’s not the way it used to be… where it was like, ‘Here’s a game, then you put it on the shelf, and then you come back to another game a year or two years later and you sort of iterate it.’ You know, where you have Grand Theft III and IV and V come out. I think with us, we’re just live and we’re just continually improving and adding stuff and more people are having fun and adventuring around. So, kind of like what we’re doing right now but obviously with more features and more content. Better stability, better performance under our belts and then at a certain point we’ll say, “Yup, ready for the full general public,” there you go.