Lets be honest, when Star Citizen first announced, and after its big switch to making the game bigger and more expansive.. CIG's defense, backers defense, and the over all goal of Star Citizen was to push the gaming possibilities, and space sim genre to all new heights. Never seen or done before things, and more expansive than ever. We as backers, have been not only funding Star Citizen, Squadron 42, but also heavily supporting and funding the pioneering tech that would be required to do this. That's half of CIGs constant defense.. first we needed to spend 5 years developing the planet tech to make it all work.. THen the back end PES, Socs, and multiple other system... Back end UI and UIX etc... Global lighting tech, the list goes on.... That was fair.. All the way up to just recently. --------------------- Unreal Engine 5 is now releasing major game changing tech for developers in planetary tech, that greatly lowers pc impact, pixels, and triangulation.. global illumination, planetary development tools, etc... Alll stuff CIG just spent 5 years trying to develop. Hell even Creation Engine 2, Bethesda's jank but loved engine has that now, with some extremely impressive planetary tech, and procedural generation potential to make extremely breath taking looking planets.... This sounds to me exactly what Star Citizen, and CIG have said they will want for exploration. Final Fantasy 14, has just released some major server tech, with the ability to seamlessly transfer your character, and all its data, and progression to an entirely different server, and state, in an entirely different region of the world on the fly. A lot of this tech has a lot of Socs, PES, and other back end tech, CIG has said they've been trying to work on for the past 5 years in it, in the form of one server passing off all of the data relevant data to another server, and keeping the transition of the player persistent when being handed off to different servers. Yes I understand its not exactly the same thing, but there is a lot of very similar, underlying code, and functions in that under the cover. No Man's Sky procedural generation tech, which helped jump start, the Creation Engine 2 version of it, which seems to have taken that, and made it even more robust and multi layered, rather than 1 dimensional. Elite Dangerous as well, which could have honestly been the next best thing, if that dev team hadn't completely messed up every opportunity they had with that game.. It could have been such an amazingly expansive space sim/rpg open world game as well, but luckily for CIG, they messed that up in every way possible to really take advantage of its amazing potential. (Don't get me wrong its a good game, but it could have so easily been so much more) ------------------------- I'm worried this is potentially the starting of the cracks opening for CIG. Where they go from the team that wants to pioneer the tech, and space sim genre, to chasing all the other games who are now suddenly doing it, and with the tech CIG still hasn't fully developed. CIG was supposed to have the jump on these techs, and a jump start into this genre.. They've been doing it for a DECADE before anyone else really has, or had the full tech to do it, and suddenly with the release of these techs, which are only going to advance from here on out quickly, they're loosing their grasp and advantage. -------------------------- I'm fearing quite honestly, that if this keeps going, in the next 5-10 years, we'll see CIG chasing these games trying to play catch up, rather than being the spearhead in the genre, that everyone else looks up too, which I honest to god, feel like is what Chris Roberts, and a lot of the backers were expecting and hoping for.