The Transverse Story Revealed (February 11, 2024)

[Bandit LOAF]

It was a crowd funding project very similar to Star Citizen that was launched by Piranha Games way back on September 9, 2014. At the time, the game's director claimed that Electronic Arts had given them the Wing Commander license but that they had opted to turn the game into an original IP instead. This story didn't pass the smell test but it did seem clear that Transverse had, probably recently, been developed as a Wing Commander game: the space combat-filled trailer had little to do with the setting described by the crowd funding website and concept art and other behind the screens details revealed Wing Commander terminology throughout the material that had been created. Now, thanks to the website of art director Christopher M. Hunt we have better information about what really happened behind the scenes:

Electronic Arts contracted Piranha Games to create demo re-envision the Wing Commander franchise as an MMO. The first stage was create a trailer in the Unreal engine to give the fans some insight into the universe, story, and elements of game-play to drive crowd funding. I directed the entire trailer from the script written by the Creative Director. For six months, I worked with a small internal team to design, build all the environments assets, and animations from scratch in Unreal. When EA backed out of the deal, Piranha rebranded the pitch as an original IP called Transverse. Despite the fact that this was a short-lived project it really fun to develop. Here are a few screenshot from the scenes in Unreal.

Jan 2014 – Sept 2014

It sounds like Electronic Arts wanted Piranha to develop a Wing Commander Online that would compete with Star Citizen... but that they weren't happy with a milestone and killed the project. Piranha took the work they had already done and in under a month had reworked their pitch as the public facing Transverse concept. Unfortunately, it wasn't meant to be! It's also interesting to note that this is EXACTLY the same trajectory as Star Citizen, which similarly began life as a Wing Commander project for Electronic Arts and had its pitch adapted into a crowd funding proposal with an original IP (that, again, didn't quite match the clearly Wing Commander trailer!).

We've created an archive of all the published Transverse material we could find including the material from the Transverse crowd funding website and images from the online galleries of a number of the project's artists. You can access it here.




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Original update published on February 11, 2024

 

[Bob McDob]

Very similar to Star Citizen, except lacking any of the marketing subtlety that raised it six million dollars in forty days, while this died after less than a month without even pulling in $20000.

One thing I've always being curious about is the ship design. At the time the bottom row ship (the "Rebel One") was roundly mocked by everyone within spitting distance as being a ripoff of the Cutlass (though to give Monsieurs Hunt & Wang their due, I also think it looks better). but at the time it reminded me more of the Alliance Grendel from Starlancer.

The other designs also bear a striking resemblance to other Star Citizen ships although I can't remember if they were created at the time. One thing I've always wondered was what if any direction was received from management. From an unsympathetic observer's viewpoint (which at the time was essentially everyone) it seemed as if it was "rip off the other game as closely as possible", which wasn't helped by the site presentation, text or indeed entire direction of the project. But as the above image shows, there are other sources to draw on and it's not as if Star Citizen itself is a font of originality (or at times, blatant theft).

 

[Bandit LOAF]

Very similar to Star Citizen, except lacking any of the marketing subtlety that raised it six million dollars in forty days, while this died after less than a month without even pulling in $20000.

Star Citizen's reveal worked because the campaign did two things: it gave you a very bold vision for the project that seemed to cut no corners... and it contrasted that with a set of developer characters who weren't afraid to look a little goofy. The Squadron 42 presentation was exactly that one-two punch: here's a trailer that looks to be absolutely top of the line and now here's Chris Roberts filming in front of a green screen in his kitchen showing you his focus is making the /game/ look good. The community building and upkeep was absolutely essential, too... we were in there setting things up before anyone (including us) knew the name Star Citizen and we had an incredibly aggressive, gamified marketing campaign for keeping that interest going instead of the usual shock and fade for a reveal like that.

To work, Transverse needed those things at least and it didn't have any them right. The trailer was /cool/ but it wasn't 'woah, THEY made THIS?' cool... they understood they needed a community video component but like most studios they didn't understand that the developers weren't supposed to look cool... and I don't believe they did anything on the community other than hope that this was going to stop the bleeding their Mechwarrior Online game was suffering.

One thing I've always being curious about is the ship design. At the time the bottom row ship (the "Rebel One") was roundly mocked by everyone within spitting distance as being a ripoff of the Cutlass (though to give Monsieurs Hunt & Wang their due, I also think it looks better). but at the time it reminded me more of the Alliance Grendel from Starlancer.

The other designs also bear a striking resemblance to other Star Citizen ships although I can't remember if they were created at the time. One thing I've always wondered was what if any direction was received from management. From an unsympathetic observer's viewpoint (which at the time was essentially everyone) it seemed as if it was "rip off the other game as closely as possible", which wasn't helped by the site presentation, text or indeed entire direction of the project. But as the above image shows, there are other sources to draw on and it's not as if Star Citizen itself is a font of originality (or at times, blatant theft).

I've been heavily involved in the process at several points and my experience is that none of the "IT'S COPIED FROM THIS SHIP!" that fans go on about is ever true at all. No concept artist is looking up Star Citizen (or Wing Commander or StarLancer) and saying oh that's a good one, I'll make that. It's always the case that that's just what spaceships happen to look like at a given time; the 'Rebel One X' doesn't look like a Cutlass because somebody copied Jim Martin, it looks like a Cutlass because Jim Martin is one of like eight guys who happened to be defining what spaceships look like in media in 2014.

The process doesn't even work in a way that that makes sense, your art director (... or in the case of Star Citizen, creative director) is looking at dozens of quick sketch ups and picking shapes and directions he likes and asking for further development or to combine this and that and that. The closest to 'copying' another IP you ever get is maybe the corporate goal is 'this should look like Star Citizen' and so the artist has a mood board of Star Citizen renders... but I find even that extremely rare. It's just much more a case of there being only so many ways a spaceship designed to do the same thing as another spaceship can look... and especially when the goal is to sell them like cars you end up going with styles and standards that match what appeals to the audience. (Notice how some of the more distinct Chris Roberts-prefered touches, like the big spinning gun barrels, don't really appear elsewhere... but much more general ideas like how split lines are done on a freighter do.)

(And this one specifically is a case of filtering something in a way that narrows it down to seem more like it was intended to be the same as a Cutlass than it ever was to begin with... here they had to put all their assets on the table to turn this into the Tranverse pitch they said oh this one, originally rumored to be a Scimitar, that looks like it could be the privateer ship.)

 

[Bob McDob]

To work, Transverse needed those things at least and it didn't have any them right. The trailer was /cool/ but it wasn't 'woah, THEY made THIS?' cool... they understood they needed a community video component but like most studios they didn't understand that the developers weren't supposed to look cool... and I don't believe they did anything on the community other than hope that this was going to stop the bleeding their Mechwarrior Online game was suffering.

About the community, that was another thing Star Citizen (didn't) have that Transverse did: an audience that was predisposed to hate them. I don't know how many people outside of the Mechwarrior community remember this now but PGI had absolutely firebombed their goodwill over the previous two years. A lot of it were mundane things that have become sadly common in free to play online games, but then you had the president of the company being a trailblazer in drunkenly taking to Twitter to dismiss critics with one-liners like "you're on an island".

And this was the killing blow: many crowdfunded projects have cynical whispers about how the creators are going to take the money and run. Well, in September 2014, not even two years after Mechwarrior Online's (crowdfunded) open beta, came the revelation that no, the money that players had been given to the company over that time weren't in fact going into the game (which shouldn't have been a surprise to anyone playing), they were going towards this, with a nice little post on the MWO forums about the game going into "maintenance mode". It seems like PGI seems to have at least had a dim inkling of what they were doing, because when they made their Reddit group they made themselves the administrators, but this backfired because apparently that broke all kinds of rules and led to them being banned to this day. I still think they have to find other people to reply to posts there.

So yeah, ultimately the only people who cared were their existing customers, who wanted them to fail, and were not disappointed. I'm getting mad about it even now, and I didn't even give them any money.

(The funny part about it is that after this fiasco, discussion of which is still deleted on the MWO forums to this day, PGI put their money and effort back into the game they were actually running and Mechwarrior Online is still active ten years later.)

I've been heavily involved in the process at several points and my experience is that none of the "IT'S COPIED FROM THIS SHIP!" that fans go on about is ever true at all. No concept artist is looking up Star Citizen (or Wing Commander or StarLancer) and saying oh that's a good one, I'll make that. It's always the case that that's just what spaceships happen to look like at a given time; the 'Rebel One X' doesn't look like a Cutlass because somebody copied Jim Martin, it looks like a Cutlass because Jim Martin is one of like eight guys who happened to be defining what spaceships look like in media in 2014.

I agree for the most part, but then there's this:

and this:

which just confuses me more than anything. I think this was after your time, but can you shed any light on this? It's so bizarre that I have to believe it was unintentional. I just don't understand what the design process was here (why the arms?) and how it got signed off without anybody noticing.

(And this one specifically is a case of filtering something in a way that narrows it down to seem more like it was intended to be the same as a Cutlass than it ever was to begin with... here they had to put all their assets on the table to turn this into the Tranverse pitch they said oh this one, originally rumored to be a Scimitar, that looks like it could be the privateer ship.)

I did notice looking through the concept art that the hero ship seems to have been the Epee (was the name a holdover?) which then got sidelined to the point it wasn't even one of the ships that were sold. Odd that you would do that for the one design that wasn't a sketch and had actually been modeled.

 

[Bandit LOAF]

I was there for that! I did the initial brief for the Vulture (it originally had a single repair arm) and I did the making of feature of it that came a little later. It's just a total coincidence. it's a design-heavy ship (one whose form is heavily defined by its function) and it was a totally evolutionary process (and one that went on FOREVER for that particular design). It started as a cab with a single remote arm and then it had a design pass that said that wasn't workable, it had to match work done for the larger Crucible repair ship... from there it came down to Chris choosing the two arms over an L-shaped ship that had a little work area. I don't know much about the EVE ship but I think you really can see right off that so many of the things that are 'copied' from it are straight out of the extant Drake style guide -- the split lines in the front arms from the Dragonfly, the offset industrial paneling, the caution yellow paint scheme -- or taken from the obvious present day reference (construction equipment) or just the result of how design needed repair to work (they wanted the cab to turn and work in both directions and for the player to have to scoop up the target instead of having an animated arm with a button press to operate).

It also kind of fails the big question for conspiracy theories: WHY would Star Citizen copy exactly one not-particularly-famous EVE ship? Everyone is a little too into the metanarrative and we're imagining the Russians copying the B-29 bolt for bolt... but step back and the whole point of any of this is to bring in revenue and copying another company's art is a giant risk of doing the opposite of that. It's the thing the company pays lawyers and IT folks to prevent ever possibly happening! Is it supposed to be a money thing? The Vulture specifically went through three concept artists (one they we lost to ILM midway through!) so it was very, very expensive (even for a Star Citizen ship concept, which are all extremely expensive!). But even more to the point, no one involved in it ever thought it did. There was no "OH NO WE HAVE TO FIND OUT WHAT HAPPENED" internally because everyone immediately knew it was a coincidence (at both companies). The way concept artists work with art directors documents every step of their process using something called real time boards. It's just not a case of a guy going off and finding an EVE ship he likes and copying it... the whole process from what reference material the AD provided to what the artist pulled online to the sketchup to every single "take this in" and "design says this can't be a 45 degree angle" and so on. You can go back through the six weeks it takes to do one of these and see who made every single call (which was tremendously valuable when I was writing Jump Point pieces!). The days of 'I liked Firefox, make it Firefox' are long, long gone. It's dozens of people working together and seeing everything together and everyone who has done just knows that intuitively.

As for why no one noticed I think the literal answer is the legal review is to confirm that the contract artist wasn't literally copying things... there's no process for finding things that just happen /look like/ other things. And the kind of mean but true broader answer is that unlike folks on the player side absolutely no one on Star Citizen considered themselves to be competing with EVE Online or Elite or any of that level of game. In the business and perceived creative senses were RC cola, Star Citizen was Pepsi and Chris was gunning for Coca Cola (Star Wars).

So while I don't think there's a lot to praise Star Citizen for these days I can say absolutely that they aren't stealing spaceship art in the manner folks online imagine (and neither is anyone else working at that level!).

 

[Bob McDob]

Thanks for all that. Intellectually I feel like I shouldn't be surprised, but they really do look so similar. It sets off my internal Occam's razor, even if the conclusions it leads to don't necessarily make sense, because unfortunately cynicism makes it simpler to assume some level of incompetence or malice rather than a more complex explanation. (And I guess there are enough grifters at lower levels to not make that totally unwarranted)

I was there for that! I did the initial brief for the Vulture (it originally had a single repair arm) and I did the making of feature of it that came a little later. It's just a total coincidence. it's a design-heavy ship (one whose form is heavily defined by its function) and it was a totally evolutionary process (and one that went on FOREVER for that particular design). It started as a cab with a single remote arm and then it had a design pass that said that wasn't workable, it had to match work done for the larger Crucible repair ship... from there it came down to Chris choosing the two arms over an L-shaped ship that had a little work area. I don't know much about the EVE ship but I think you really can see right off that so many of the things that are 'copied' from it are straight out of the extant Drake style guide -- the split lines in the front arms from the Dragonfly, the offset industrial paneling, the caution yellow paint scheme -- or taken from the obvious present day reference (construction equipment) or just the result of how design needed repair to work (they wanted the cab to turn and work in both directions and for the player to have to scoop up the target instead of having an animated arm with a button press to operate).

I'm in the opposite situation where I had totally detached myself from Star Citizen by that time (after it had stopped being Wing Commander if I'm honest) so I don't actually know much about its ship, but I've spent quite a bit of time with the Eve ship. I say that, but really what it meant was looking at it from third person and hitting F1 + F3, there's not a lot of gameplay subtlety involved. CCP put out several books about their spaceship design but I cannot recall if they went into any detail on this particular one. It would be really interesting to see the design process and how they arrived at that particular shape. It's not a particularly common one, is it?

I think this is one area where Chris Roberts' marketing might have backfired a bit: he spent a lot of time on the "look at me, I'm just like you!" image and that rubbed off onto the rest of the team. The people who believe that see this one ship which not only looks quite a bit like this other one, but has a similar role and a similar name (Venture, Vulture) and can't believe it wasn't intentional.

I looked on the Star Citizen wiki and the different paint skins change the impression a bit. If it had done a different job the backlash might not have been so intense. Maybe it should have been a racing ship!

 

[Bob McDob]

(Notice how some of the more distinct Chris Roberts-prefered touches, like the big spinning gun barrels, don't really appear elsewhere... but much more general ideas like how split lines are done on a freighter do.)

Also, I'd really like to get more into this because I find the subject of specific ship design detailing really fascinating, just as soon as I figure out what the question to ask is. (Maybe it's "what's a split line?")

 

[Bandit LOAF]

Also, I'd really like to get more into this because I find the subject of specific ship design detailing really fascinating, just as soon as I figure out what the question to ask is. (Maybe it's "what's a split line?")

A split line is the relationship between two visually mating parts of a vehicle... sort of the sense of gaps between two parts that still appear like they fit together. So look how the edges of the paneling echo the ones at the end of the booms or how the two sides line up despite the gap in the middle. The car industry has discovered that they make a big impact on what consumers think of a car (and specifically what they're willing to spend on said car) and so they're a big part of the design process for vehicles today... basically, they're an aspect of a design that very quickly tells you a story about what you're looking at. One glance tells you if something is a Porsche versus a minivan vs bulldozer and so on. Star Citizen's AD for many years, the absolutely brilliant Paul Jones (of StarLancer fame!), was a huge proponent of defining different signature types of them as a way to help tell different manufacturers apart. So this utilitarian Drake ship has them that are designed to make you think of contemporary construction equipment and the same ones are repeated here as are used in the Dragonfly bike, the Caterpillar freighter and so on. But even when a game marketing isn't specifically following the car industry's studies they're still adding some form of those touches because they're a universal visual shorthand. Anybody that makes a spaceship for construction work versus one that's a sports car versus one that's a jet fighter is going to be drawing from that same visual language in some way.

I'm in the opposite situation where I had totally detached myself from Star Citizen by that time (after it had stopped being Wing Commander if I'm honest) so I don't actually know much about its ship, but I've spent quite a bit of time with the Eve ship. I say that, but really what it meant was looking at it from third person and hitting F1 + F3, there's not a lot of gameplay subtlety involved. CCP put out several books about their spaceship design but I cannot recall if they went into any detail on this particular one. It would be really interesting to see the design process and how they arrived at that particular shape. It's not a particularly common one, is it?

I read that the EVE one is a mining ship but I don't know enough about EVE's mining to know how much thought has to be put into that. Mining might be a magic button push or it might need the ship to be shaped a certain way to interact with the system. Certainly it's why both ships have that 'industrial' style, though. For Star Citizen, the fact that the ships have to work to a high degree means their design is very heavily at the mercy of the designers instead of just concept artists. It's a very harsh setup where you can't fake much of anything... so it's not a concept artist coming up with a preferred shape, it's weeks of work with designers to make sure everything you're building matches long checklists of very boring specifics -- can it reuse the existing animations for sitting, standing, climbing ladders, lying down going up stairs... are all the internal floor angles X degrees or lower that matches how players are able to traverse an incline? Do the external thrusters actually work as positioned so that the ship will function in the flight model? What is the bail out process, what's the unloading process, how does it dock with 300 already designed platforms and basis and so on. But much more broadly in this case is the game role. At the time we had a real process running for developing out player roles (fighter, merchant, pirate, explorer, etc.) where we would give each one a 'flagship' where the designers would include everything we thought we needed for that type of gameplay working alongside artists who designed out the ship (which we could then sell right next to the dream of a new way to play the game!). After that, we would do the SMALLEST version of a particular role... the starting level ship, to answer the idea of progression. If ten people working together fly the big explorer, how does one person fly the smallest one? And how does that evolve as they travel the ladder from small to medium to large to flagshisp. For repair specifically, the 'flagship' design was this:

https://media.starcitizen.tools/3/35/AnvilcrucibleIDRISFORMATION.jpg

It's styled to "Anvil", the military-focused company... but you can see how the gameplay needs then apply to the Vulture which is the single user started version. It's got the same big capture booms, it has the same cab that's positioned to look down on what's being repaired... but the bigger take also has a cab that turns around so the ship can fly in either direction and it has a manipulator arm another player can man and a garage that can close up to form a mobile drydock and so on. So that's a big part of where you're working from to get to the Vulture. (I think I mentioned the Vulture went through three major designs... the first one it was JUST a small version of the arm from the Crucible and design killed that... then it had kind of a static L-shaped mini bay where it could scoop things up... and finally it got the booms but not the closed off bay. (As for the shape, I don't know if it's terribly uncommon... although most of the 'gotchas' are just that... you have plenty of twin boom spaceship designs, from the BWS Intrepid to the Straith... but those are mostly children of World War II night fighters. If the EVE ship and the Vulture belong to some family it's construction equipment styled ships which do exist in good numbers though in many different shapes.)

I think this is one area where Chris Roberts' marketing might have backfired a bit: he spent a lot of time on the "look at me, I'm just like you!" image and that rubbed off onto the rest of the team. The people who believe that see this one ship which not only looks quite a bit like this other one, but has a similar role and a similar name (Venture, Vulture) and can't believe it wasn't intentional.

I looked on the Star Citizen wiki and the different paint skins change the impression a bit. If it had done a different job the backlash might not have been so intense. Maybe it should have been a racing ship!

Another perspective I can speak to with some authority is that this kind of "controversy" didn't move the needle on the sales/marketing side at all, ever. I think it's something gamers just can never understand... the self-enforced tribalism just doesn't impact the bottom line... and that's why marketing doesn't really engage in it. The guys cheering for Xbox to screw up were always going to buy a Playstation and vice versa. It's the much larger group of customers who do not care at all that you have to talk to (and we were great at that!). You do a post mortem after any kind of sale like this and we always had a great understanding of exactly what went right and what went wrong (and at least during my time selling ships we had only one that outright missed the predictions... and it was a racing ship!).