New Space Game from Wing Commander’s Chris Roberts

Wing Commander is one of my all-time favourite game series’. The branching storylines! The incredible space dogfighting! Maniac! Even Strike Suit Zero hasn’t quite captured that same feeling of wonder. I miss the brutal thumping of the ion cannons, the camaraderie of that comes of saving your wingmen and intense dogfights in space. Not the escort missions though. I’ll never miss those.

Creator Chris Roberts is coming back to the games industry after more than a decade of film. Star Citizen is his new baby and it’s been in production for a year already, at his studio Cloud Imperium. Here’s the trailer, which is ridiculously exciting to me because it features space dogfighting and a space carrier that’s very reminiscent of the old Tiger’s Claw.

According to Eurogamer, Star Citizen will be a PC exclusive and have both single and multiplayer components:

Star Citizen features a dynamic economy and an open world. Roberts describes it as a mash up of Freelancer and Privateer, two of his previous games, and a Wing Commander game. The single-player mode can be played offline or co-op with friends in a similar fashion to the way players impact each other’s games in Demon’s Souls, he said.
– Wesley Yin-Poole, Eurogamer, Wing Commander creator returns to melt your PC with new space sim Star Citizen

It won’t be like Eve Online, however. The multiplayer combat will apparently be more like a World of Tanks battle. In that game, players fight each other inside a dedicated instance.

The Star Citizen universe won’t be static either. As time goes on, Cloud Imperium will be quietly adding star systems and extra stories to the universe. Gamers will be able to discover and explore these system, selling the map locations on the in-game market.

“We’re not actually going to tell anyone a star system has been created,” Roberts adds. “The very first time a jump point is discovered, some people may want to be explorers and you find this galactic anomaly near a star and you explore it and realise it’s a jump point. If you navigate it for the first time and make it out to the other side, the nav computer’s recorded your moves and you can sell those back for a lot of money, and then everybody else gets the nav data.”
– David Scammell, Videogamer, Wing Commander creator announces ‘dream’ space sim Star Citizen

He’s also talked about letting gamers design their own spaceships and sell them within the game. It’s an ambitious vision and I really hope they pull it off.

The game is being self-published. Roberts already has funding but is asking for an extra US$2 million from fans, in the form of a Kickstarter-like pledge or pre-purchase but doing directly to the company.

For all but the lowest tier of funding, you get a full copy of the game (no subscription is required), some in-game currency and a spaceship, as well as access to the Alpha and Beta.

I do hope it’s a nice spaceship, since it would be rather disappointing to get the same thing as the plebs who buy it after release. Even more worrying, we don’t yet know if spaceships can be destroyed like in World of Tanks, or just damaged and need repair. I might cry if I lose a special pre-release ship.

Talking to Develop, Roberts has said that there will be a cap on how much players can spend and that the game will not be pay-to-win, so things are hopeful on that front.

The team are aiming to launch the game in November 2014. You can find out more about the game and the available pledges on the official Roberts Space Industries website (or if it’s still having trouble, try the backup sites – European and North American).