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Roberts debunks Star Citizen 'feature creep' theories, announces next stretch goal
Star Citizen's crowdfunding total is chugging steadily past the $20 million mark. As such, Cloud Imperium boss Chris Roberts has authored a new letter from the chairman that outlines the next stretch goal and addresses a host of other interesting topics. The goal in question is realistic facial capture technology, which will officially unlock at the $22 million mark. Roberts also took the time to debunk allegations of "feature creep" regarding Star Citizen's ambitious and expanding gameplay functionality. There are two types of stretch goals, he explained. The first are goals that involve features we already have planned or have implemented, but we couldn't create content because of budgetary constraints. The first-person combat on select planets is a great example of this type of goal. We already have FPS combat as part of the game in ship-boarding, and we already have most of this already functional thanks to CryEngine, as we essentially have Crysis3 functionality out of the box. But creating all the environments and assets to fill them is a huge task, so we were planning on not doing any planetside combat initially, simply because of its cost, with the idea that we would slowly roll it out once the game is live. But with the additional funds we can now afford to create some of this content earlier rather than later. The second sort of stretch goal is typified by the facial recognition functionality, "where [the devs] identify technology and equipment that will make the game better and allow us to be more nimble and economically efficient in continually creating content," Roberts explains. In both cases, he says, "we don't commit to adding features that would hold up the game's ability to go live in a fully functional state. Also remember that this is not like a typical retail boxed product -- there is no rule that all features and content have to come online at the same time!"
