Cloud Imperium Games have confirmed that their epic space game Squadron 42, the single-player component of their Star Citizen franchise, is now feature-complete and entering the polishing and testing phase ahead of release. The release is not imminent - the similar polishing phase on Bethesda space RPG Starfield took two years by itself - but at last light can be seen at the end of the tunnel.
Back in 2010, Wing Commander and Freelancer developer Chris Roberts decided to make the space game to end all space games: a vast, multiplayer game featuring piloting, space combat, first-person movement and combat, trading and exploration. The game, Star Citizen, entered full-time development in 2011 and by 2012 had raised a modest $2 million via Kickstarter. Cloud Imperium also allowed direct funding via its own website, which quickly dwarfed the funding from Kickstarter. The original plan had been to have a Wing Commander-esque single player campaign included within the overall Star Citizen title, but this was spun off into its own game, Squadron 42, quite early on.
As funding for Star Citizen and Squadron 42 increased, so the scope for both games increased dramatically. Fully-voiced and mocapped sequences starring major actors were added, followed by dynamic physics for everything from planetary orbits to the sheets in your pilot's bedroom. Cosmetic upgrades and even entire ships were sold at premium prices via Cloud Imperium's website, leading to accusations of being a scam. However, Star Citizen also released fully-playable game modules and steadily expanded these over time, showing there was a game being developed (albeit over an almost-unprecedentedly long period).
As of today, Star Citizen and Squadron 42 have been in full-time development for well over twelve years, raising over $616 million in funding from just under five million backers and investors, making this comfortably the most expensive video game project of all time and the most successful crowdfunding project of all time. By some metrics it might be the most expensive entertainment product ever, with twice the budget of the most expensive movie and the previous most expensive-ever video games. Several rivals and sort-of rivals to Star Citizen were announced after it but launched far earlier: Elite: Dangerous in 2014, No Man's Sky in 2016 and Starfield in 2023.
The trailer shows your player-created character (gender and appearance fully customisable, as you'd expect from a modern game) chewing the fat with Gillian Anderson, boarding a derelict space station alongside Mark Hamill, watching Gary Oldman give a rousing speech and being guided through a mission by your man-in-the-van John Rhys-Davies (resuming his collaboration with Roberts from multiple Wing Commander games and Freelancer). The game features space combat and dogfighting, exploration of vast alien structures, ground combat, stealth, boat-driving and physics puzzles. The game engine boasts of the ability to seamlessly transition from walking around on your carrier to flying your fighter to flying over the surface of a planet, landing, jumping out, fighting and taking over vehicles (contrasts with Starfield's endless array of loading screens have been made).
Given the gigantic scope of the game, bug-fixing, tech optimisation and polish will likely take a good year or two (possibly more), but it looks like Squadron 42 is finally moving towards completion. How long it will take for Star Citizen itself to follow remains to be seen.
The world's most expensive video game has gotten richer. Star Citizen's funding yesterday crossed $500 million.
Star Citizen started development in 2011 and was revealed to the public in the autumn of 2012 with a Kickstarter campaign. The initial Kickstarter campaign was relatively modest, drawing in $2 million. However, Cloud Imperium Games allowed crowdfunding to continue directly between fans and the company, resulting in a continuous revenue stream. By the end of 2014 funding had reached $65 million and $127 million by September 2016.
Star Citizen is the brainchild of veteran video game designer Chris Roberts. Roberts began his career in the 1980s working on games on the BBC Micro like Stryker's Run (one of the very first video games I ever played) before moving onto much more powerful machines. In 1990 he released the game that made his name, Wing Commander, a space combat simulator with a strong storyline attached. Several sequels followed and saw the game branch into full motion video cutscenes, using actors like John Rhys Davis (Indiana Jones, The Lord of the Rings) and Mark Hamill (Star Wars) to tell increasingly elaborate stories about the war between humanity and the alien Kilrathi. After the release of Wing Commander IV and Wing Commander: Privateer 2 in 1997, Roberts moved on to working on a Wing Commander movie. The film, released in 1999 and starring Jurgen Prochnow, Freddie Prinze Jr., Saffron Burrows and David Suchet, was critically derided.
Roberts returned to gaming, producing with his brother Erin the games Starlancer (2001) and Freelancer (2003), which were set in a shared universe. Starlancer was a story-focused, single-player game with a strong narrative and linear campaign, whilst Freelancer was envisaged as a more freeform, open-world game akin to Elite or Privateer, with a bigger focus on online multiplayer. After multiple delays, budget issues and concerns over "feature creep," not to mention a buy-out by Microsoft, Freelancer was released in 2003 with a reduced focus on the multiplayer approach and a narrative storyline in place. Roberts returned to working in the feature film industry, believing it was not possible to make a game based on his vision with the resources available in the industry at the time.
Star Citizen marks Roberts' unfettered vision for a science fiction video game set in a large, open universe that the player can explore as they choose. They can own multiple spacecraft and take part in trading, mining and mercenary work. The game features a first-person mode, allowing characters to walk around their spaceship, take part in boarding actions and leave the ship to engage in combat, negotiations or discussions in person. The game will have a storyline of sorts, but will rely on online multiplayer for most of its dynamic plot generation.
The game also incorporates a whole second title using the same engine and assets, Squadron 42. Squadron 42 will be a more linear, story-focused and single-player game akin to Starlancer and the Wing Commander series, guiding the player through a lengthy story campaign featuring characters modelled on and voiced by actors including Gary Oldman and Gillian Anderson (plus a returning Mark Hamill.
Star Citizen has raised most of its money through direct player donations and contributions, including the sale of more powerful and capable spacecraft they will be able to use in the game itself. Almost 4.1 million individuals have contributed to the funding scheme. It has also raised over $60 million in external, private investment.
The game has attracted criticism for its funding methodology and its extended development time, with frequently missed deadlines and an apparent overload of feature creep, with development reportedly focusing on things like realistic sheet deformation for beds rather than optimised performance (the current build is noted as being very laggy even for top-end graphics cards). Newcomers to the early access version of the game have also criticised it for a very steep learning curve and almost non-existent tutorials. However, its fanbase has also praised the game's commitment to unparalleled levels of detail at both the macro and micro levels and its focus on immersion, as well as the potential for highly varied missions incorporating both spacecraft and ground combat, and the extended development time has been down to the game doing things that no other title has before attempted (not to mention using an engine - derived from the CryEngine mostly used for first-person shooters - that is perhaps best not-suited for these things).
Whilst scepticism over the game's progress and its funding methods is natural, there does appear to be an interesting and ambitious game design at work here, and the fact you can play it right now does show where a lot of the work and money has gone. What is astonishing is that after ten years, people are still funding the game to a very high level (in the time it's taken me to write this article, the game has raised around $4,400; the game raised $75,000 yesterday by itself), showing a remarkable degree of confidence and trust in the project.
It's hard to get precise figures, but the previous most expensive video game development budgets for titles like Red Dead Redemption 2 and the in-development Grand Theft Auto VI are thought to be more to the in the region of $200 million, with around the same for marketing. Star Citizen pulling in vastly more money, mostly for development alone, is an impressive achievement.
Star Citizen and Squadron 42 remain in development with no estimated release date at this time.
Roberts Space Industries have dropped a new trailer for Squadron 42, a new space combat game from the creators of the Wing Commander franchise.
Squadron 42 is one of two related games the company is developing, the other being Star Citizen, a massive multiplayer online space trading, exploration and combat game. Squadron 42 is a single-player focused version of the game using the same tech, with an in-depth, long story and a greater focus on narrative and characters. The story focuses on the United Empire of Earth and its attempts to retain control of a star system against the encroaching threat of hostile aliens and pirates.
As well as space combat, the game will feature sequences where you leave your spacecraft and engage in zero-gee combat, as well as first-person fighting on space stations and on planetary surfaces. The game will tell its story through elaborate cut scenes featuring motion-captured acting performances from some very big names: Gillian Anderson, Gary Oldman, Andy Serkis, Mark Hamill, John Rhys-Davis, Liam Cunningham, Henry Cavill and Mark Strong, among others. Hamill and Rhys-Davis previously worked with the same team on the Wing Commander and Freelancer games.
Star Citizen and Squadron 42 are crowdfunded projects. Over 2,100,000 backers have pledged more than $195 million to the development of the two games. Work on the games began in 2011, with the initial crowdfunding taking place in 2012. The lengthy development of the two games has attracted criticism; Star Citizen won WIRED magazine's "Vaporware" award in 2016 and some backers have sought refunds. However, the developers have continued to release sections of the game for early play and bug-testing to backers, and have released several lengthy gameplay videos showing what the game looks like in motion.
No release date is set for the first part of Squadron 42 (the game will be released in several episodes), but a firm release roadmap will apparently be announced in the near future. Star Citizen will follow some time afterwards.
The creators of infamously long-in-development space sim Star Citizenhave released an hour-long video demonstrating the game's single-player campaign, Squadron 42. Although some CG videos have been released of the game previously, this is the first attempt to stitch the game's numerous components together to demonstrate a single mission.
As I detailed last year, Star Citizen is the biggest crowdfunding project in history, fans and backers having raised over $173 million to fund the game. This almost certainly means that Star Citizen is the highest-budgeted video game of all time in terms of the actual development funds: Grand Theft Auto V and the last few Call of Duty games all broke $200 million, but that was split roughly 60/40 in favour of marketing. Star Citizen crowdfunding campaign was its marketing, along with the numerous free column inches given to the game every month (like, er, here). Fundraising is continuing, of course, and the game is expected to comfortably break $200 million before all is said and done.
The main game of Star Citizen will feature a persistent online, open-world universe with people flying through it engaging in bounty hunting, trading, space combat, mining and other activities, like EVE Online and Elite: Dangerous. Star Citizen is promising a great deal more depth, however, sacrificing the accurately-rendered Milky Way galaxy of Elite (complete for 400 billion stars) for a more handcrafted universe of several hundred systems packed with missions, activities and seamless transitions from space to planet, with your character being able to jump out of your ship and engage in personal ground combat like a first-person shooter, or even jump in a ground attack vehicle.
Squadron 42 is the more focused part of the game which will replicate the single-player, story-driven drama of games like Wing Commander (Star Citizen's guiding developer, Chris Roberts, created the Wing Commander franchise back in 1990). Although personal combat, zero-gravity spacewalks and ground battles will feature, the focus will be on a military conflict which pitches your character as a fighter pilot on a large carrier vessel belonging to the United Empire of Earth. This story will be related by a large cast of characters, played by actors including Gary Oldman, Mark Strong, Gillian Anderson, Mark Hamill, John Rhys Davies and Andy Serkis. Liam Cunningham (Game of Thrones' Ser Davos Seaworth) serves as your commanding officer in the released demo. You will be able to port your character over from Squadron 42 to the full Star Citizen game.
Squadron 42 was meant for release this year but has been delayed, with no firm release date set. However, the above video shows what the full game experience should be like (hopefully with less performance issues, but that's pre-release games for you). There's another version of the video here with developer commentary.
Meanwhile, the makers of Star Citizen and Squadron 42are being sued by CryTek over their use of the CryEngine in the game. It is unclear how serious this is and how it may affect the game's release.
For those unfamiliar with it, Star Citizen is the most expensive crowdfunded project in history. It is the brainchild of Chris Roberts, a veteran video game developer who'd worked on projects stretching back to the 1980s and the BBC Micro. Roberts became famous almost overnight for his space combat game Wing Commander, released in 1990 on the PC. It had cutting-edge visuals, a vast sense of scale and an unusually strong storyline. It was one of the first games to really push the PC as a gaming machine as well.
Several sequels and spin-offs followed, some of them worked on by Roberts's brother, Erin. Chris and Erin together set up Digital Anvil Studios in the late 1990s to make a new series of space games set in the same universe, to be published by Microsoft. In 2001 they released a single-player game, mostly created by Erin's team, called Starlancer. It was excellent, one of the best space combat games made before the bottom dropped out of the market. In 2003 they shipped the considerably more controversial Freelancer. Originally mooted as an open-world multiplayer title, the game had been delayed numerous times, was started over on a couple of occasions and fell far short of its ambitions. The game was retooled (fairly late in development) as a singleplayer game with a multiplayer mode. On release it was criticised for being dumbed down (replacing the joystick with mouse-and-keyboard controls like a shooter, for example). In later years it was praised for its moddability, which allowed some enterprising fans to rebuild the game into something more like what Chris Roberts had originally intended, but it certainly wasn't the game that fans originally felt they'd been promised.
By that point Roberts had quit the industry to go and work in Hollywood. His Wing Commander games had developed to feature lengthy full-motion video sequences starring actors like Mark Hamill and John Rhys-Davies, directed by Roberts himself, and Roberts decided to work on a stand-alone Wing Commander film. The resulting movie, released in 1999, was widely derided. Whilst working on Freelancer and encountering publisher interference, Roberts decided that he'd rather work somewhere where his vision could be fulfilled with less hindrance and he went back to Hollywood to work as a producer. He ended up working on movies including The Punisher, Lucky Number Slevin and Lord of War before deciding to return to video game development.
In 2011 Roberts decided to dust off his original design for Freelancer and take another punt at it, this time with much better technology. His original plan had been to create a modest prototype to attract private investment, but the prototype ended up being so ambitious and impressive that fans - many of whom had played the Wing Commander games as kids - flocked to give him their money. Roberts ran a Kickstarter campaign that raised $2.4 million, but also included a crowdfunding platform on his own website. This kept growing and growing in a way they defied belief. As of this month, almost $127 million has been donated to the development of the game.
Star Citizen plans to be the ultimate science fiction video game. You will control an avatar which can pilot one of hundreds of starships as well as engaging in first-person combat both on the ground, in space stations and even in zero-gravity encounters in space. The ships can fly between several hundred planets, landing anywhere on their surfaces (from massive cities to mining bases to open wilderness) and engaging in activities including combat, courier work and passenger-ferrying. The game will have lengthy missions spanning many star systems and taking hours to fulfil, as well as a dynamic, developing universe. The game will also incorporate an entire Wing Commander-esque single-player military campaign called Squadron 42, along with CG movie sequences featuring voice actors including Gillian Anderson and Gary Oldman.
The game will basically be Elite: Dangerous, Crysis and Mass Effect, all at once. It is literally the most ambitious video game ever designed. That budget may sound huge, and it's certainly getting up there for a video game (it's a lot more than, say, Mass Effect 3 or Fallout 4), but it's still only about half the budget of the likes of Grand Theft Auto V and Destiny, which are somewhat more modest in their ambitions.
Yeah, it's an hour long, but well worth it for a look at the sheer scale of what they are attempting.
At this point Star Citizen is two years overdue and it is highly unlikely we will see it before 2018 at the absolute earliest. We may see Squadron 42 next year, if things go well. Some backers have grown angry at the game's lengthy development and what has been perceived as "feature creep" and demanded refunds. However, others are keeping the faith. Recent gameplay videos giving a better idea of what the game will look like - featuring a player moving from a meeting on a space station to flying through space to salvaging a derelict spacecraft to landing on a planet to engaging in combat, all seamlessly - have restored some flagging enthusiasm for the project. Most heartening, from the Kotaku article, is that the problems, development bottlenecks and logjams which blighted the project in 2013 and 2014 now seem to have been cleared. Erin Roberts, who (unlike his brother) remained in the game industry working on the tightly-focused, efficiently-developed Lego video games, is now in charge of several of the more problematic areas of development and a host of ex-CryTek staff have been brought in to work on the tricky engine.
It'll be interesting to see if Star Citizen soars or crashes and burns, especially after the disappointing and controversial No Man's Sky. There's plenty to be hopeful about, not least the fact the the Roberts brothers have a pretty strong track record behind them, and they certainly don't have the normal problem of not enough money. But I think we'll need to some pretty solid releases next year of more playable material or even the entire Squadron 42 game so fans can continuing keeping faith with the project and taking it all the way to release.
In-development space sim Star Citizenhas added a lot of top-tier voice actors to its roster. Most of these actors will appear in the single-player and narrative-focused companion game, Squadron 42, but it's possible that some will also spill over into Star Citizen itself.
The announced voiced actors so far include Gary Oldman, Gillian Anderson, Mark Hamill, Mark Strong, John Rhys-Davies, Andy Serkis, Jack Huston, Ben Mendelsohn, Liam Cunningham, Rhona Mitra, Sophie Wu, Gemma Whelan and Craig Fairbrass. Some of these are familiar voices from Chris Roberts's previous space games: Mark Hamill starred in Wing Commander III and IV alongside John Rhys-Davies, who also appeared in Freelancer.
Star Citizen is a large-scaled space simulator. The core of the game is trading and combat in a vast, online universe. Players will be able to buy different ships, have multi-crewed ships and, in a notable difference to other games like Elite: Dangerous, will be able to get up, walk around the ship and even exit the vessel to take part in ground combat and exploration. The game is the single most successful crowdfunding project in history, having raised over $91,584,000 (yes, that's $91 million) in donations. The game is widely expected to pass $100 million in the next few months.
Squadron 42 is described as a spiritual successor to the Wing Commander games and StarLancer. The game will focus on the United Empire of Earth's battle against the alien Vanduul, with the player (presumably) joining Squadron 42. Although single-player in focus, Squadron 42 will have a co-operative mode and some achievements in the game will be carried over into Star Citizen itself.
Development of Star Citizen began in 2011 and was opened to crowdfunding in late 2012. The game has had an open development process, with regular updates issued on progress and what the developers are doing. However, the game has come in for some criticism due to missing a large number of release deadlines and questions being raised about lack of oversight and a lack of recent game development experience for Chris Roberts and senior managers. These criticisms led to a renewed development timeline being issued, with Squadron 42 expected to now launch in 2016. Star Citizen will hopefully follow by the end of that year.
Chris Roberts, the creator of the Wing Commander franchise, has announced a new, PC-only space combat game. The game is extremely ambitious and highly modular in design, consisting of multiplayer, co-op, single-player sandbox, linear mission-based and MMORPG elements. As well as private backing, the game is also being crowd-funded (and, just a few days after its announcement, has already raised more than a quarter of the funds asked for).
The new project's overall title is Star Citizen. Set several centuries hence, it establishes a traditional space opera universe in which characters can fly around and trade between planets and star systems. This part of the game can be played on the public servers, in which case it works like an MMORPG (complete with skill trees and experience for characters). However, players can also play on their own in single-player mode, effectively replicating the experience of the X or Elite series or Roberts's own Privateer games and Freelancer. They can also play in small, closed servers with just friends rather than strangers.
The game will also ship with a mission-based, linear single-player campaign. Though using the same setting and art assets, this is structured differently enough from Star Citizen 'proper' to have its own name: Squadron 42. In this sub-game players can take on military roles and fight in an extended war. This game can also be played co-op with several players on the same side. This mode is meant more for fans of the Wing Commander, X-Wing/TIE Fighter and Freespace games.
