During early stages it was the backers that chose the direction and the BDSSE idea was pushed. The backers pushed for the change loudly and the people who only wanted small elements were outliers then ad they are now. But yea, everything was research until breakthroughs were made and they were sure they could do this. They have spawned some fantastic tools since then.
They do indeed have some incredible tools. I guess my point, perhaps made in-artfully, is that the planetary tech breakthroughs were unexpected by everyone (devs and backers) and have changed the scope and scale (and, accordingly, time of development) of the game beyond anything envisioned pre-Frankfurt. I just wish that this was more clear to people who are only peripherally following the game.
The timeline, as I understand it, is this:
October 2012: CIG begins crowdfunding and expects the MMO portion to be in beta around November 2014. The game is basically envisioned as Crysis-level sized landing zones on planets that can only be reached by auto-landing.
April 2014: As per Tuxfools' video, Chris Roberts is talking about planets, such as they are currently showing, as "a pipe dream." It doesn't seem like he thinks spending a ton of resources on it is a great idea at this point in time.
August 2014: Chris asks the community whether to expand the scope to meet the massive spike in funding (~$50 million at the time). They say "Hell yes, make the BDSSE (Best Damn Space Sim Ever)!" I don't recall the exact details but this definitely does not include a promise to make every planet and moon fully procedurally generated, with
all of the content needed to fill that space.
July 2015: Star Citizen Frankfurt opens (basically when all the core CryEngine engineers were hired). This is the team responsible for planetary (and lots of other) tech.
December 2015: Pupil to Planet happens. In the year and a half since mid-2014, CIG saw what the ex-Crytek devs made possible and Chris obviously took the BDSSE mandate and ran with it, even though that meant a completely new plan based around this new revolutionary technology. I'm not sure CIG properly communicated what a drastic change this was and how much it would affect the timeline moving forward but they may not have understood all the knock-on effects themselves. Instead of just making a bunch of Arc-Corp style landing zones, they now have to build tons of new tools and assets to fill a vastly expanded universe, making a lot of their previous work useless(ish).
I think that when Chris asked the community if the scope should be expanded in 2014, he had no idea just how much bigger it would get. It's basically a tale of two games: the one pre-2015 and the one after. CIG gets a ton of shit for not meeting deadlines, which is understandable, but they're not making the originally promised game anymore. Not even the BDSSE that was envisioned in 2014. I'll give them a few more years before I get too upset, personally, as long as they keep showing this kind of progress (and I get to play 3.x, woot!). For better or for worse, the bulk of development has only been happening since mid-2015.
Anyways, that's all pretty speculative but I think it approaches how we got to where we are with this game presently. Feel free to let me know if I've got something wrong.
