Chris Roberts has done more in his life than most of us can dream of. He created the Wing Commander franchise (including several sequels) but eventually burnt out and sold his company to Microsoft. After that, Roberts went on to produce several Hollywood films; work that he feels helped him learn more about telling better stories.
Years have passed and the technology powering games has grown exponentially, unlocking the potential to create something Roberts has been envisioning for well over a decade. Today Chris Roberts is coming back to games. Today Chris Roberts wants to champion the return of the space combat genre.
Roberts aims to create a whole new world for us called Star Citizen, a space-combat game where you’re not just a ship in a universe, but a person living a second life in a galaxy full of possibilities. How open-ended Roberts will make it remains to be seen, but conceptually Star Citizen sounds like the ideal game for anyone who has ever watched Battlestar Galactica, Firefly or Star Wars and wished they could have a chance to live in those universes.
Single-player games often manage to create worlds that feel believable, but Roberts wants Star Citizen’s world to be huge and populated by players, rather than NPCs. Thus while Star Citizen will feature a single-or-multiplayer campaign mode called Squadron 42 (playable offline if you desire), the bulk of the experience will revolve around player interactions in the universe at large. If you want to be a privateer and prey on the ships of others you can do that. If you want to hunt bounties players place on the heads of said privateers you can do that too. Heck, you can even just run goods, selling them in the safer parts of the universe or risking piracy and other threats by taking them to the outer-reaches, where they’re much more prized.
The level of interactivity and immersion Roberts desires comes at a cost, though, most notably that it requires great PC hardware. Developed in CryEngine 3, Star Citizen is at least two years out from release and is being designed for advanced hardware, the results of which are already stunning; A small, pre-alpha demo showcased ships with hundreds of individual parts, all of which contributed to the physics driving its movement. On top of looking like something out of a current game’s cinematic, each ship has an exceedingly realistic damage model, allowing players to damage each component and have it dynamically affect a ship’s performance.
The gorgeous look of Star Citizen extends far beyond the hull of your ship, too. During the hour long presentation I watched Roberts fly his ship into the hangar of a kilometer long, highly-detailed battleship, only to get out and start running around in it on foot. Each running light, girder and handrail looked incredible, and to get out of it and experience it all firsthand – rather than have it be a facade – left me bewildered. One second you and your friends could be flying a mission alongside this behemoth, the next someone could be in the bridge waving at you as you do a fly by.
For all the beauty Roberts longs to bring to the Star Citizen universe, he also wants it to represent life – which is to say it’ll feature a truly ugly side as well. Travel outside of the heavily governed areas and you’ll find yourself without police protection. Journey out into space in search of treasure or to do a quest and another player might just decide to gang up on you with his friends. When pitched a scenario where me and my friend are piloting a freighter, Roberts said the plan is for it to be entirely possible to have one person flying while the other runs around in the ship to man stations and turrets – like the freaking Millenium Falcon. If things go way south and, say, the attackers want to take your ship, they can board you and it can come down to shooting it out, gun in hand, just like a first-person shooter.
So much of Star Citizen’s design is conceptual at this point, but some things have been figured out...mostly. The plan is to support Star Citizen in a similar fashion to Guild Wars 2. You buy the base game, get the single player Squadron 42 campaign and access to the Star Citizen universe, and then have the option to buy cosmetic and other non-balance-altering items for either real money or the in-game currency you earn. The hope is that an entrepreneur (read: bounty hunter, pirate, smuggler, trader, etc.) will be able to earn their money in a way that’s fun and not at all a grind. If you want to buy Star Citizen, that’ll become an option in the very near future. Roberts isn’t using Kickstarter, but he is going to let interested parties support the game through early purchase packages that include a number of to-be-determined benefits.
Yup, it really does look this good.
As the lights came up after my two-hour demo with Chris Roberts I realized two things: 1) PC games in the next few years are going to look better than we expected and 2) I’m a believer in Star Citizen. Not because I’m already convinced that Roberts and team will be able to pull off the lofty goals they’re setting out with, but because his passion is so infectious, his love for the PC platform so palpable, that I can’t help but fall in love with the ideas powering this game. Two years is a long time, but if Star Citizen matches Roberts' expectations it’ll be more than worth the wait.
Anthony Gallegos is an Editor on IGN's PC team. He enjoys scaring the crap out of himself with horror games and then releasing some steam in shooters like Blacklight and Tribes. You can follow him on @Chufmoney on Twitter and on at Ant-IGN on IGN.
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