Before Star Citizen, Chris Roberts was working on Space Exploration/Trade/Combat game for Digital Anvil and Microsoft Game Studios - the Freelancer. He was ambi

Before Star Citizen, Chris Roberts was working on Space Exploration/Trade/Combat game for Digital Anvil and Microsoft Game Studios - the Freelancer. He was ambitious, the features planned for game involved: - dynamic economy based by station/planetary production of goods, demand and supply (influenced by distances and space piracy) - known actors lending their voices to characters - hundreds of items and ships - massive universe filled with mysteries and lore What happened instead was Microsoft stepping into the project and forcing changes to make ship plausible within a year due to continuous delays. Chris left the project. Universe was cut to 50 systems, bulk of characters gets killed off quickly after appearing in the plot, or have few spoken lines. There are omissions in items, like only only single top-class shield, whereas in every lower class there were three types of shields. Some commodities are sold on planet or few, but not bought anywhere in the universe, being useless for trade. Engine supports ship animations and plenty of ship models implement those, but they were eventually disabled. Etc. ect. But game shipped, and besides cut content, it actually delivered quality experience, and even if it lacked replaybility, content or sandbox features of X-Universe games, it contained stateful multiplayer that resulted in game having long live in multiplayer thanks to Role-Playing mods and communities build around those.