Star Citizen continues to be one of many largest, strangest anomalies within the historical past of videogames. During a time the place few publishers believed ‘area video games’ have been even viable, this recreation turned a crowdfunded juggernaut, roping in a price range akin to the largest AAA video games ever made.
Few video games have complete conventions devoted to them. Fewer nonetheless have them earlier than even reaching beta levels of improvement. Still, Citizencon is a factor, and Roberts Space Industries have assembled a series of videos masking all their main bulletins and displays from the occasion this week, cropped from their eight hour stay broadcast.
It’s onerous to consider the speak of Star Citizen’s improvement being a secretive, insular factor once they appear so desirous to spend hours on stage detailing all the things from engine technology development to fictional xeno-linguistics. The videos on show give a broad overview of what is occurring with Star Citizen’s manufacturing proper now. That, and some additional fripperies.
Silliest of all of the issues featured is the shiny promotional video for the Sabre Raven, as seen above. It’s a nice-looking ship for certain, however it additionally comes as an unique bonus with Intel Optane SSD hard-drives, that are by all accounts exceedingly quick, however priced accordingly so, making them (and the ship) a luxurious merchandise.
Beyond that, what caught my eye is the in depth part on the Xi’an, an alien race that can be central to the story of the sport each in its singleplayer and MMO-ish features. Inspired by quite a lot of asian cultures and with a language not too dissimlar to on Mandarin, they’ve clearly put quite a lot of thought into them. Their whole aesthetic, proper all the way down to their vertically oriented language, is filled with tall, sharp-angled buildings.
In phrases of uncooked gameplay proven, essentially the most revealing stuff got here from the director’s Keynote presentation, detailing quite a lot of new areas and showcasing additions like procedurally generated planetary cityscapes, landings, on-foot gameplay and a few wandering round on a hoverbike in addition to a primary have a look at some native (non-sentient) alien lifeforms. It’s a visible feast for certain.
As attractive as a few of the footage proven is, I reallly do marvel what the ultimate really useful specs for the sport can be, on condition that even their ultra-high-end presentation machines appear to wrestle to hit 60fps even in quieter or extra scripted scenes. Clearly they have quite a lot of optimisation work to do, and it will be attention-grabbing to see how a lot they will squeeze out of Lumberyard, Amazon’s variant of Cryengine.
There’s no set release date for any aspect of Star Citizen, though the first beta iteration of the game ought to be coming to the general public check servers someday within the subsequent few weeks.
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