Star Citizen's Chris Roberts Opines on 'Saving Anthem'

In a new interview with Newsweek, Star Citizen's Chris Roberts segued into a discussion of Anthem and what steps he would take to fix the game. Roberts believes, according to the interview, that gamers often have unreasonable expectations compounded by their hatred of EA. "A lot of gamers don't understand quite how difficult it is to deliver everything working flawlessly," Roberts stated. "The expectations keep ramping up and may be higher than people are humanly possible of delivering."

The interview centered on the recent Kotaku article about the difficulties of developing and launching Anthem.

How would you respond to the negative sentiment surrounding Anthem?

You've seen it from No Man's Sky and Sean Murray. Let me put it this way. There's was 13 of them and they built something amazing. They should not have taken the amount of abuse and flack they had when it came out. As a technical challenge, to build something that big with that much stuff and such a small team, I am hats off very impressed by their talent.

The problem was players' expectations were so far beyond that. They imagined all this extra stuff. When they were first showing it maybe there was some stuff that, through iteration or whatever, they couldn't get into the game. They took a huge amount of abuse, they were written off and they just put their heads down and they kept updating, delivering and making it better and better. Now the perception has changed.

I would say the same for Anthem. I've played it, so I know there's plenty of nice stuff in there, stuff that works, and then there's some stuff that doesn't work. It's like what we're doing on Star Citizen. It's just iteration. I hope EA and BioWare don't give up on it, that they get their heads down, roll out and improve things to make it work. Destiny was an ongoing process. That's kind of how these games are.

A lot of gamers don't understand quite how difficult it is to deliver everything working flawlessly. The expectations keep ramping up, and in some ways those expectations may be higher than people are humanly possible of always delivering. Then you've got some other realities that come in, like if you've been working on it for a while and just need to get it out. In the case of the live side, just keep working at it. Keep on swimming.

Read the full interview over at Newsweek.