Chris Roberts, boss-man at Roberts Space Industries claims, Custom built PC’s are more advanced technology than next generation console.
Star Citizen project has been in production for 12 months at Cloud Imperium, a Los Angeles based studio founded by Roberts in April 2011.
Roberts says, his new space faring game would not be suitable on home consoles due to various memory and processing speed bottlenecks.
Speaking with Ars Technica, Roberts said, “What I was showing [with Star Citizen] you can’t do on a current generation console, you can do most of it on a next generation console, but I can promise you a top-end PC now is already more powerful than what a next generation console is going to be.”
“You can’t do that much with 512MB [of console RAM], so that constrains a lot of your game design. If I’m building a PC game, I’m going ‘yeah, you need 4GB on your machine.’ Of course you’re not going to get all 4GB because Windows is a hungry beast, but you’re getting a lot more than 512MB so it kinds of open up what you can do, what you can fit in memory at the same time, and it changes your level of ambition.”
Roberts’ worked as director and producer on Hollywood films including Lucky Number Slevin, The Jacket and The Punisher.
He says, he came back to games because the tech has “moved on enough where I felt like I could do a whole different level of fidelity in terms of simulation of the world and the visuals I could deliver on that”.
“I was always very frustrated by that in the past. Now I’m sort of looking at stuff that I could do in real time that, when I was making the Wing Commander movie, we needed millions of dollars of SGI machines and days to render. That’s very exciting to me, because that’s sort of my fantasy, playing something that has the visual fidelity of a movie to it.”
Star Citizen’s total investment will reach $10 million due to private VC partnerships, though two separate crowd-funding projects have already provided $3.5 million of his target.
Roberts concluded that he hopes Star Citizen proves that a high-end PC is good for more than warmed-over ports of games made for the consoles. “I have a high-end gaming rig, but I’ve also got all the consoles, and if someone is making a game for a console first, and it’s being ported to the PC, I’m always buying it for the console. I don’t want a buggy port of a console game on my PC that doesn’t really show my PC off.”
“I have an iPhone and I can watch The Dark Knight Rises on it, but I don’t want to watch The Dark Knight Rises on my iPhone—I want to see it in IMAX on a big screen, and I’m willing to spend $18 to see it on the big screen in IMAX versus downloading it for a couple of dollars on my iPhone. I definitely think there’s a PC gaming audience like that.”
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