Star Citizen has had loose ties to virtual reality since the project emerged, but there’s been some confusion about its implementation over the past few days. After angering fans, Cloud Imperium Games programmer Ben Parry took to social media to clear the air.
Controversy erupted on Tuesday when Parry was asked if Star Citizen’s switch to Amazon’s Lumberyard engine would make VR development easier. His response caught much of the game’s passionate community off guard.
“Don’t hold your breath for this,” he said. “Ignoring the render tech for VR itself (which given the work we've done, would definitely be a read-and-rewrite job, not a merge-this-file job), making a game properly VR compliant takes a lot of work at the design and testing level regardless of the engine used. We'd probably need to get the framerate up a bit higher too,” the developer mused.
This was a problem for some of Star Citizen’s thousands of backers that have donated millions of dollars to the project’s development. A portion of those paying customers supported the endeavor in hopes of playing it with the Oculus Rift or HTC Vive. Such concepts were openly discussed early in the crowdfunding campaign. Parry’s words certainly made it sound like that wasn’t going to happen.
With negative community reaction swirling, Parry has since clarified his statement. “This is not the meaning I intended,” he posted on reddit Wednesday, “I want to be clear: I was not saying it's off the table.”
That being said, it’s been a while since the subject was mentioned by anyone at CIG. During the Dec. 2015 Holiday Stream, Director Chris Roberts referred to the process as “complicated” due to limitations with CryEngine. At the very least, Parry’s words would imply VR headset support is on the backburner despite not being totally canceled.
Right now much of the community’s focus is on developments to alpha 3.0. The major 2017 release is supposed to offer glimpses at a robust career structure, environmental scanning and maybe some peeks at the single-player Squadron 42 campaign.
Star Citizen ’s alphas are currently only available for backers on PC.
Do you think Star Citizen will ever get true VR support? Is the game’s community overreacting? Tell us in the comments section!
