Chris Roberts, the man who dreamed up Wing Commander, is set to return with another sweeping space saga. Star Citizen is still a fair way off at present, but has a number of promising aspects to it. It’s going to be a resolutely PC title, based around the CryEngine 3, so expect giga-polygons galore or whatever graphics obsessives go for these days.
Broadly speaking, it appears the plan is to make the game an MMO. However, players will also be able to play an offline single player campaign (dubbed Squadron 42), call fellow pilots in for co-op in a Dark Souls type way and even host their own private, modded servers for multiple players if they don’t want to hang around on the main, developer-hosted ones.
Roberts says he’s trying to produce a universe where humanity is entering a stage akin to the last days of the Roman Empire; a crumbling society, besieged by aliens at its borders. Citizenship is everything in this world (hence the name) and earning it is just one of the paths players can pursue (either through military service, forging their own paths or simply acquiring enough money to buy it).
More details about the game, including a crowd-funding effort involving pre-orders and beta access and the like can be found at the official Roberts Space Industries site. As I write this it’s taking a bit of a hammering, so you might get directed to a back-up.
Investor capital has funded Star Citizen so far and paid for the tech demo you see at work in the trailer below, but Roberts hopes to raise another $2 million USD from the general public (in turn, this will trigger more private investment).
