I Don’t Know If ‘Star Citizen’ Is a Real Game, But It Looks Insane

I don’t know if Star Citizen will ever become a real game, but at this point the descriptions and videos of what it might be, one day, are entertaining in their own right. The space sim and most crowd-funded project ever ($91 million and counting), is so incredibly ambitious on paper, that it sounds impossible it will deliver something that’ll satisfy all its backers.

And yet, developer Chris Roberts (of Wing Commander fame) and his multiple development studios working under the Cloud Imperium name, keep letting features creep. This weekend, developer Cloud Imperium held its CitizenCon, a convention for a game that doesn’t exist yet, mind you, where it released another mind-blowing video I want so bad to be real.

The fundamental insanity behind the project is its scope. Star Citizen wants to let players experience an entire universe from the first-person perspective. The plan is to give players the freedom to—for example—start on a planet, board a ship, fly anywhere in the galaxy, invade another ship, and pilot it to another planet.

We’ve seen bits and pieces of this idea before. Cloud Imperium already has a limited multiplayer game out called Arena Commander, where players can fly around and fight in small ships, and we’ve seen videos of the first-person shooter-type gameplay before, but we never saw the whole thing coming together seamlessly.

The 20-minute video above, shown to the audience at CitizenCon, is the closest thing we’ve seen to a realization of that concept yet. It shows a team of players boarding a larger ship (another crazy aspect of Star Citizen is that some ships require a crew, with one player piloting, another manning turrets, another in engineering, etc), traveling to other space stations, boarding and disembarking at will, and getting into fights both in space and onboard other space station.

The high point of the video for me is when we see a player in a single-seat fighter disembark in the middle of space, float gently into the center of a giant satellite to turn it back on, then get back into his ship.

It’s nuts, and it’s not nearly all Cloud Imperium had to show. The studio unveiled its Star Map, showing players where and by what routes they’ll be able to travel around the galaxy. There’s a very cool interactive version of it online here. It’s predictably huge. Cloud Imperium also revealed the first real look at “Squadron 42,” the story portion of the game, which stars the likeness and voice acting of Mark Hamill, Gary Oldman, and others. It’s starting to look like a real game, kinda.

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Star Citizen is in the midst of a very nasty controversy. Earlier this month, gaming site The Escapist published a story with multiple, anonymous ex-Cloud Imperium employees, saying that the game’s budget was mishandled, that employees are mistreated, and that Star Citizen is basically doomed.

Roberts has refuted each of these claims, point by point, in a long and detailed public letter to The Escapist. Cloud Imperium has now also threatened the publication with legal action.

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