That reason is I’ve watched roughly and near-exactly this trailer five fucking years ago. You can still find it on Youtube if you bother to look. Fuck it, I’ll do it myself. LOOK.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMSGlZSL0DE
And that isn’t the only time, or even the first. I’m genuinely amazed that this grift is so perfect that the same vaporware can get polished up again and again, spinning its wheels in place, and people on the official forum and in Youtube comments say they’re in tears about this.
I won’t say I respect the hustle because I don’t lick boots, but I am truly impressed with how powerful this grift is that it’s self-perpetuating with that little to show for it over half a billion dollars and over a decade later.
His real love was movies, or more specifically, Hollywood movies. Thing is, “what if movie-like cutscenes” was such a novelty in the 90s that it didn’t take much for that to stand out. He was never actually good at doing movies (see the Wing Commander movie as the primary example) but he wanted to schmooze with famous actors and rent/sell them used luxury cars. Not kidding on that part; that was his business after Microsoft kicked him out of Digital Anvil. He’s always been a bit of a starstruck grifter.
That whole game Kickstarter hype of the early 2010s was largely driven by ”look at all these industry legends and imagine what they could do if you funded them and they had free rein to do what they want!”.
Thing is, Star Citizen is the perfect example of what a guy who’s not so great at project planning does with no oversight. I don’t want to present Microsoft or corporate managers in general as the good guys or anything, but Freelancer actually got released because they didn’t have infinite tolerance for his BS.
“Auteur theory” has been a lie to me ever since I paid attention to what often happens if an “auteur” gets an inflated sense of self-importance and no longer has anyone else to bounce their work off of. Compare the conflict-riddled production of the Alien and Aliens films to the “behold the unfettered genius of the auteur” Prometheus followups, for example.
I just know that not only is his company probably full of sycophants, Roberts thinks he’s actually a legendary game developer and filmmaker because EA happened to give him a ton of money to spend at a time when FMVs were a big deal in gaming.
Wing Commander may have had Mark Hamill, but the X-Wing series always had the better gameplay
TIE Fighter is one of my old problematic favorites considering you fly as space fascists and it makes the space fascists seem cool.
I wouldn’t be surprised if that game was where all the ”DAE Empire cool tho?” shit started. It was really the first time the Empire was portrayed in a not cartoonish way.
You may be right, and that said, I’d be fine if the Empire was portrayed in a Wolfenstein “real shit actually horrifying” way more often.