Chris Roberts still believes CryEngine is the right choice

We've been talking about Star Citizen, Cloud Imperium Games' ambitious simulation game, for years. During a recent interview Chris Roberts has released some very important statements relating to the engine they chose to develop the game, CryEngine, declaring that, despite some problems, the team is still determined to use it.

The developers, in fact, had to rewrite part of the engine code, going from 32-bit to 64-bit, to meet the needs of this ambitious game. Roberts also said that the studio had to make a decision between the Unreal Engine and CryEngine, stating that the latter was seen by the team as a more mature engine than the first.

"I was judging both and playing with both of them and ultimately decided on CryEngine because Unreal 4 back then was very early. It had all sorts of power and flexibility, and it's used a lot - but at that point, they were still refactoring even fundamental systems. It still had time to mature and the CryEngine was just a bit more mature", Roberts said.

"There isn't an engine that can do what we're doing. If there was then we'd have licensed it. We had to refactor it to scale. [...] You can have millions of kilometres you can travel. Draw distances are hundreds of thousands of kilometres. You can't do that in a 32-bit engine. It doesn't matter if you're using Unreal or CryEngine or Unity. We would always have had to do that refactoring. Yes, you can get into CryEngine and do things simply and you can do the same in Unreal and Unity, but it won't work for what we need at all".

"I don't believe that if we'd picked Unreal 4 that we'd be in any better a position. I can see how [adapting the engine from 32-bit to 64-bit] would be frustrating for some people, but I don't look back and say 'I wish I'd gone with Unreal'. We would have had this no matter what. People in the industry, even internally here, our designers and artists aren't technically [informed]... they just know their tools."

"I think it's easy for people to scapegoat CryEngine, or any other engine choice. If we were doing a simple FPS shooter, we wouldn't have had the same issues or challenges, but we aren't doing that, and we didn't raise the money that we raised because we were doing something simple. We raised it because we wanted to push the boundaries", he concluded.

Star Citizen will land exclusively on PC, but at the moment any release or window date was already announced.