Star Citizen is one of the most ambitious games in development—a massive, high-fidelity, multiplayer space combat sim headed by Wing Commander creator Chris Roberts. Back at GDC I interviewed Roberts about how he plans to realize Star Citizen’s prodigious goals, the latest development update—which details modular ship customization—and how the universe as a whole will be simulated. You probably also want to scroll down for the first in-engine screenshots since the prototype reveal.
PC Gamer: You recently posted an update on ship customization, and it all sounds great—especially component tweaking—but this question keeps coming up, which is: “That sounds amazing, but how the hell are they going to do it?â€
Chris Roberts: Well, first of all, people haven’t really been working on space sim games like this, so some of this stuff is easier—especially now, it’s much easier than it was ten years ago, because of the tool sets we’re using. Like the ship system we documented, we already have it functioning in the game and in the engine.
That was more a modular design approach, and computers are very good at doing that kind of stuff. And I also think it’s the focus of the design of Star Citizen—I’m putting a lot of focus on how to design systems versus more scripted kind of events. There’s no way this game is ever going to survive by us generating scripted content, so my goal is to have something like 80 percent of the actual action and drama, whatever you want to call it, be generated by the players themselves. They’re hiring each other for missions, they’re fighting each other, helping each other out, so we’re really trying to make a sandbox that lets people take these roles on and do their own stuff.
So that philosophy extends all the way down to the ship component design, so you can add on these different components, and depending on how you set them up you can set your ship up for dogfighting, or stealth, or you know, hauling cargo. I’m thinking about how I can design a system that will keep people bu...
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