The last couple of years have seen a resurgence in the long-neglected space combat sim genre, with godfathers Chris Roberts and David Braben returning to the fold with Star Citizen (not quite released yet, but fingers crossed for this year) and Elite: Dangerous. Traffic on our space combat sim retrospective last weekend was unexpectedly high, too, and the message seems clear—Ars readers love their Internet spaceships.

Well, good news, Ars readers: some members of the design team that worked on X-Wing and TIE Fighter are at this moment toiling away on a new game—one that’s described as a fast-paced, combat-focused, Newtonian-style, blast-em-all space warfare experience: Starfighter Inc. And because this is 2015, they’re seeking crowdfunding rather than aligning themselves with a publisher. (Disclosure: being a lover of Internet spaceships myself, I backed the project.)

"Lured from the stripped husk and squalid poverty of Earth by boundless opportunity on the frontier, the player deploys from their carrier in a standard space superiority fighter alongside a wave of other players piloting everything from heavy utility ships to lightning quick interceptors," reads the game's press kit. "They scream toward the USS Manhattan, a massive cargo freighter in a decaying orbit around a frontier world. As they approach the derelict behemoth, a flight of ships from an opposing company crests over the horizon and all hell breaks loose."

"Our game is like World of Tanks meets Counter-Strike in space," explains Starfighter Inc. lead designer David Wessman (one of the team’s LucasArts alums) in the Kickstarter video. According to VentureBeat’s write-up of the project, the game will focus on Counter-Strike-style fast gameplay sessions, with an emphasis on player-versus-player battles as opposed to an Elite: Dangerous-style game of spending hours flying, trading, or exploring.

Beyond the fast PvP-oriented hook—something that will appeal to a lot of gamers who find Elite’s unfocused player-versus-player experience not to their liking—the designers also promise that the game will employ a Newtonian-style flight model, where inertia and physics matter. This is in sharp contrast to every other successful space shooter in the past; those that have tried to implement full Newtonian physics (like Independence War or even previous Elite games) have never found the widespread success of more popular "fighter jets in space" games, largely because a true Newtonian flight model isn’t necessarily very fun. However, given the pedigree of the team, it’s pretty easy to imagine that the resulting flight model will be a good one.

Unfortunately, one thing that Starfighter Inc. probably won't share with its predecessors or contemporaries—at least not at first—is a single-player campaign. When we asked Wessman about whether we'll be able to hop into the cockpit alone, he wasn't positive on whether the feature would make it into the game. "This will depend largely on how much funding we get and how much demand there is for single-player," he told us. "For now, though, maintaining laser focus on our core multiplayer gameplay is the best way to guarantee a great experience right from the beginning."

The creators of both Star Citizen and Elite: Dangerous have extolled the virtues of crowdfunding and of not being beholden to a publisher, and Starfighter Inc dev house Impeller Studios feels the same way. "For the first time, we really get to reach out to the community, and I’m not going to have some producer or publisher tell me what to make," says Creative Director Jack Mamais in the Kickstarter video. "I’m going to have the people playing the game tell us what to make, and that’s really what we want to see." It’s a sentiment echoed more than once in the video, and it resonates with fans of the genre—after a 20-year drought, it’s finally time to break away from the AAA machine and give the fans what they want.

Crowdfunding was always the plan, Wessman tells Ars. "The successful Kickstarters we saw proved that this was a viable way to go. We were also hugely attracted to the idea of working directly with our fans and getting their ideas into the game." Indeed, according to the Kickstarter page, starting at the $75 level, backers are promised access to a developer team forum where they'll be able to vote on features.

One modern game design feature the developers say won't be finding its way into Starfighter Inc. is free-to-play or microtransactions—at least, not for anything that has a material effect on gameplay. "Absolutely NO pay-to-win!" emphasized Wessman. "We're planning to offer lots of cosmetic upgrades, though maybe not so many hats."

As far as actually playing the game, at least for now, Starfighter is planned only for PCs—and Wessman tells us that the team will focus on including VR into the game as well. With as much fun as we've had with the Oculus Rift DK2 and Elite: Dangerous, this is exciting news.

Wessman has been a part of the industry for a long time, and as with the Descent Underground development team, he's got our hopes set pretty darn high. "I got into the industry because of great games like Star Raiders, F-15 Strike Eagle, Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe, and Falcon 3.0. I had the incredible good fortune to begin my creative career with X-Wing, he said to Ars when asked about what brought him to Starfighter Inc. "This is the game I've always wanted to make," he continued, "and now I have the unbelievably good fortune to be working with a team that shares this vision. We can't wait to bring this experience to all the true believers who never stopped loving deep, immersive, intense space combat!"

Although crowdfunded games can have their own huge issues—Broken Age’s failure to deliver is one of the biggest—that idea of side-stepping increasingly risk-averse, franchise-only focused publishers benefits non-FPS fans more than any other game design and development trend ever has. Wessman sums it up in the Kickstarter video: for decades, he says, as soon as people find out he worked on X-Wing and TIE Fighter, the first question they ask is when he’s going to make another game of that kind.

"That’s what this project is," he says, smiling. "We’re gonna make another one."