New Star Citizen Gameplay Footage Is Mindblowing; Planetary Exploration, Deserts, Giant Worms and More

Giuseppe Nelva October 9, 2016 10:38 PM EST

Today Chris Roberts’ Cloud Imperium Games hosted its presentation at Citizencon, showing off more of Star Citizen, but before we go into the really interesting and spectacular stuff, some news about the upcoming evolution of the project were shared.

Below you can see three slides about the single player portion of the game, titled Squadron 42.

It will include 28 chapters with over 60 missions, 360 speaking characters, over 20 hours of performance capture, a script that’s 1255 pages long, 40 different ships and dogfights that will take place both in space and in atmosphere.

Unfortunately, Squadron 42 won’t be ready this year as it was initially announced, but the developers are planning to show a fully finished missions hopefully by the end of the year.

Moving on to Star Citizen itself, below you can find the a progress report and a roadmap for 2017, up to version 4.0, listing the features that are going to be added to the game.

Now it’s time for the really cool stuff. During the presentation a new demo of planetary gameplay was showcased, and you can check it out below. The demo was played live in front of the audience (and in fact there were a couple of glitches), and it was absolutely impressive.

It’s broken up in four parts (gathered in a handy playlist) because the stream had a few hiccups, and the fourth bonus part is showcased within the development environments, flying directly from planet to planet, and showing a very different one.

Especially interesting is the fact that the whole planetary environment is actually spherical (it’s a planet, after all), and horizons are natural, letting you see as far as you could actually see in the real world, without any kind of distance fog to limit draw distance. But if I had to list every single impressive aspect of the demo, I’d have to write a fifteen pages essay.

Update: you can now check out the full presentation, with gameplay starting at 01:25:20.

Before you head into it and get your mind blown, as the usual full disclosure, you may or may not know already that the author of this article has been a backer of Star Citizen pretty much since the project started, and he’s more proud of it with every new piece of content that gets showcased. Haters gonna hate.