different” says Jones, “and I think, development in the games industry is different from a lot of other activities. It’s very creative and it’s very collaborative, and while we found it very easy to move everybody into remote work, after this long period of doing it we’re starting to realise that it’s not the ideal way for games to be created.” Citing innumerable game delays over the last two
years, Jones feels that studios have struggled to maintain quality during successive lockdowns and the wider period of the pandemic. “More and more studios are talking about bringing
“It’s going to be an extraordinary site. It’s just a beautiful location and it’s going to have a great vibe and a great buzz for our young staff.”
In the ‘verse We couldn’t let Carl Jones go without asking him about “the metaverse” and to what degree Star Citizen might realise the potential advocates of the concept have for it. Predictably, he sees Star Citizen in terms of its immersiveness, and the game offering players the opportunity to create meaningful social stories. However, he made a point that what really differentiates Star Citizen from other games - whether they’re considered metaverses or not – is its fidelity: “I don’t think anyone else has got the ability to build scale and detail like we can. Obviously we’ve got a lot of work to do to create fun within that, but we’ve got tens of thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands of players, enjoying the game as it is today. Maybe one day we’ll have something that people refer to as a metaverse – we’ll certainly have the technology to build it - but that’s not our business focus. Our focus right now is delivering Star Citizen and Squadron 42 to the community that supported us.”
people back to collaborate. We’ve quite recently brought most of our Squadron 42 team back into our office in Wilmslow. The capacity is limited so we couldn’t bring everybody back, but it’s transformed the vibe and the morale of the team.” Jones gives an example where bug-fixing is made
much easier by the teams being in close proximity. Where during lockdown a request might linger in a JIRA task for up to two weeks, now it might be dealt with on the spot after calling an on-team engineer over to check it out. “Since we’ve been in lockdown, everyone is in twice as many Teams meetings as they used to be, so a lot more time has been taken up in meetings, which means finding a slot to talk to a person a week in advance. Whereas when you’re in the office it’s so much easier to have that discussion. When we brought the
22 | MCV/DEVELOP January 2022
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