Please for the love of god don't mention the building offices. It's five years according to CR sop lease don't defend or change what he said.
He said they were in Dev a year ahead of Kickstarter, that puts them on track for 3 years.
Scope/feature creep happened and a serious gross misunderstanding of modern game development timetables. CR was using feature film timelines; not modern video game ones.
Despite the delays they still haven't come close to implementing most of their core features.
Did I believe that the game would come out in 2 years as promised in 2012? No. In fact even though I was very interested in the game and followed it daily I didn't back until 2015. Chris is no doubt a smart guy and a respected game developer, but there was 0% chance the game would be complete in 2 years.
1) Chris was coming back from an extremely long hiatus in game development, and had little to no knowledge of the ins and outs of the CryEngine or modern game engines in general. He coded much of the pitch demo himself, with help from Crytek, but if you actually watch the video the demo is some basic scripting in the CryEngine with no significant changes to any sort of physics or gameplay mechanics that are not already available in the CryEngine.
2) CIG was a team of like 14 people, half of which weren't game developers (Ben, Sandi, Eric, etc.). It would have taken more than a year (and it did) to grow the company to a decent size and hire the people to make the game, and it's not an easy task to add people to a development team, especially in the software engineering field. The engineers need to get acquainted with code, get used to the development pipeline, etc. It's a huge logistical task to manage software development. If I can put it as an analogy, it's like dozens of people trying to paint the same picture. The more people you have, the more repo managers you need, and the merge requests just get piled up and you start having merge issues and it's all a giant mess.
3) Call of Duty, even with established studios, take 3 years to make. This should give you a perspective on how long game development really takes. The Division took 7 years to build, if you include the time they spent on making their Snowdrop engine, similarly to how CIG is building their engine right now.
To put it frankly, I had never worked in game development and I knew making the game even with the original pitch would have been impossible to make in 2 years. While Chris might have learned a lot about modern game development the past 2-3 years leading the project at CIG, his release dates were extremely optimistic. Use my Call of Duty example as a yard stick, compare the engine features and gameplay mechanics of Star Citizen and COD and make your own assumptions about the release date. I'm not going to say it's not CIG's own fault for putting out false expectations, but if you've followed the game for a decent amount of time you should know better than to keep believing in their release date goals. The release dates will stabilize as major engine changes are implemented, as R&D work is extremely hard to gauge the deadlines of.
So with that said, let's be precise. It was my impression that henry1491 was referring to people getting frustrated after 5-ish years of waiting, when it's been less than 4 years since KS. You can't really wait for something you don't know about.
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