Part way through Chris Roberts’ presentation at PAX East 2015, a particularly bold claim flashes up on the screen behind him. Roberts is talking about Star Marine, the upcoming first-person shooter module for Star Citizen sim that’s currently, in purest mercenary terms, crowdfunding’s biggest funding success to date. We’re used to bold claims when it comes to crowdfunding, but this one stands out: “Best playable soldiers on the simulated Battlefield.”

“Everything in Star Citizen has to be as good or better than anything out there ,” Roberts says to the crowd. Thing is, there’s a difference between making a statement like that when you’re talking about spaceships and when you’re talking about the biggest genre in videogames. Before the crowdfunding revolution, and games like Elite: Dangerous and EVE: Valkyrie , the spaceship genre was, forgive the pun, an empty space. But being as good or better than anything out there as a shooter? That’s a levelling of the sights at the biggest games in the world. Everyone wants to be better than Call of Duty . But so far, at least commercially, everyone – even Battlefield – has failed.

“It’s not [a] Call of Duty or Battlefield imitation,” Roberts tells Red Bull, when we ask him point blank how he and his team aim to out-CoD CoD. “We’re going for a different FPS experience from the Call of Duty or Battlefield insta-respawn, rushing, quick combat, quick shooting set-up. We really want the players to be invested in their characters, so when they get into FPS combat it should be more meaningful. The idea is to be more in the direction of a game like Demon’s Souls, where your character and life mean more to you, so you don’t want to get killed.

“We want to make sure that the combat that you get in Star Citizen isn’t just a dumbed-down version of an FPS. We also want to make sure our FPS has its own personality.”

So much of what we know about Star Marine comes from just a few sources. We’ve seen its latest mode – called SATA Ball – a de facto training module that turns FPS into a floaty game of space basketball (with more than a hint of the zero-gravity court game from the original Dead Space). We’ve also seen distinctly CoD-like gameplay in the PAX Australia video from late 2014 (above), in which a group of (very serious) players duke it out aboard the Gold Horizon space station, trading rounds at ground level before some stumbling klutz breaks the artificial gravity. That last twist aside, though, the plugging of enemies down the iron sights does, despite Roberts’ claims, feel awfully CoD-like.

And, actually, Roberts admits that’s not an unfair comparison at the moment. When we ask him if the no-respawning rule makes the game work in a way similar to CoD’s more leftfield modes like Search and Destroy or Sabotage – in which teams compete to either place bombs or defend targets from them, but crucially only have one life each – he agrees it’s an apt comparison. It’s the singleplayer waves of enemies and the multiplayer deathmatches’ lemmings-esque charges into the meatgrinder that Star Marine is leaving behind.

“If I’m doing Call of Duty, especially doing the singleplayer, I’m killing 50 or 100 enemies per level,” says Roberts. “It’s fun when you run-and-gun; it’s satisfying to shoot these people down. But if you’re out in space in Star Citizen and you’re boarding some other player’s ship and there’s only three or four people on that ship and there’s only three or four of you, you don’t really have waves of players or AI. So you need to make the combat itself take a little longer and be a little more tactical.”

Roberts also points to Star Marine’s movement system, which will, he says, be another key difference for ‘traditional’ FPS players – and also present more of a learning curve. Roberts gives the example of player momentum. Like much of what we discuss about Star Marine, it feels like the first-person part of the game is being designed with the same, physics-first principles as Star Citizen proper.

“In real life, if you run at top speed, you can’t stop instantly or go instantly to the right or instantly to the left, whereas if you’re playing a fast-paced shooter, usually you can,” he says. “For Star Citizen, as we’re trying to be more realistic in terms of [things like] how the spaceships fly around, we have things like stamina for your character. So if you’re running a lot you’ll drop your stamina and that will make it harder for you to hold your gun while you’re aiming, so you’ll have to recover a bit. There will be a level of control and inertia that I think players will have to get used to.”

Star Marine © Cloud Imperium Games

Being honest, for us, that’s not enough so far to hold up the claim that Star Marine is going to unseat today’s shooter royalty – the tweaks to the formula that Roberts is discussing wouldn’t sound out of place at a new Battlefield reveal during an E3 conference . But Roberts says in terms during our interview that the first release of Star Marine is really “a test bed for basic movement and mechanics” and “the simple basic stuff that everything’s going to get added to.” Like all things Star Citizen, what backers are really buying into are promises that will be delivered months down the line. And, if you buy into that optimism, that’s where Star Marine starts to sound a bit special.

Take the Aegis system, for example. Aegis is the fancy name for Star Citizen’s body-damage system. In the same vein as the Fallout series and 2000’s Deus Ex , enemies don’t have a simple life bar that drains until they fall over. Rather, if you’re good, you can pick off individual limbs one-by-one (and have yours picked off in return).

“If you shoot someone in the leg, they will limp and they won’t move as fast,” Roberts explains. “If you shoot someone in the arm, they have to go one-handed. The idea is the same thing we do on spaceships. So, in the past, in the old Wing Commanders, you’d shoot a ship and knock its shields down and knock its hit points down and then it would blow up.

But in Star Citizen, we model all these different components… so that when they get damaged independently they affect the behaviour of the ship. That’s kind of the same idea with the limb damage system that we’re doing on Star Marine. You shoot both of someone’s legs out, and they’ll be down on the ground, like the Monty Python scene.

“I can definitely see someone being vindictive and shooting someone in the leg, and then not doing a kill-shot just to see them limp away.”

Back in more familiar territory, future releases of Star Marine will also include customisation options both for your marine and for their weapons. Here again, the promise at least is ‘CoD-but-more-so’. So instead of picking equipment that sits in a magical backpack and confers benefits automatically, your gear in Star Marine will follow the same rules as the ships: if the pack that’s powering your armoured suit gets damaged, then bits (or all) of that suit might stop working (Roberts’ example).

Star Marine © Cloud Imperium Games

Weapon upgrades will, Roberts says, follow equally complex rules. He gives the example of fitting a silencer onto a weapon. Instead of there being a default minus-X-points-of-damage stat being attached to silencers, Star Marine will, he says, be making more realistic physics calculations on the fly.

“If I put a silencer on, that silencer may reduce the noise that’s emitted,” he explains. “Which is important for us, because we have this whole radar system which runs off various kinds of signatures, one of which will be audio. But then it may reduce the muzzle velocity, and instead of having to say, ‘well, now this bullet will only do eight points of damage instead of 10 points of damage,’ we can say, ‘well, now this muzzle suppressor reduces the exit velocity by 10 percent’ and everything else falls out from there… It will be emergent.”

‘Emergent’ is a watch-word when Roberts talks about Star Marine’s future. In addition to the game’s balance of ballistic and energy weapons (which do more damage against shields and armour, respectively), in later versions of the game you’ll also be able to make tactical use of explosives to change the on-board environments in which you’re fighting.

Currently, the plan is for those areas – specific windows, specific sections of hull – to be fixed. Roberts compares it to Battlefield 4’s ‘Levelution’ (everyone still cringing about that name? Yes? Good) elements, in which players can cause, for example, a high-rise to collapse mid-match, permanently altering the layout of the map. But the eventual idea is to have these moments be unscripted.

“At present, there are specific things that can be blown up or destroyed: displays [and] windows, stuff like that,” says Roberts. “Longer term, we’d very much like to have a more procedural system, where you could perhaps blow out parts of the ship at any point… Longer term it would be nice to have some of that on the bigger ships, so you could set a grenade off in a corridor and it would rip a hole in that particular section.”

Star Marine © Cloud Imperium Games

Which is good, because as we point out, the problem with both Battlefield 4’s Levolution and later CoD’s similar weapons-of-map-destruction is that while they’re cool the first couple of times they happen (especially on stage at a gaming expo), watching the same building collapse 50 times over becomes predictably ho-hum. A procedural destruction mechanic is one guard against fatigue – the other is the resulting shift to zero-gravity.

“It’s not so much that an area can get flooded, or now a big building falls on you,” Roberts says, when we make the comparison. “There will be cases which are the equivalent of the building falling on you that do significant damage inside some of the structures, and if you’re out in space things will blow open and people will be ejected into space. We have some procedural destruction. But I think the zero-G aspect changes things up. You’re not just walking along flat surfaces; you can launch up to what used to be the ceiling.

“You also have to be more careful about movement, because in zero-G, it’s all about inertia, right? So in zero-G, unless you have the jetpack on, you definitely need to be aware of where you can push off and where you can hold on and judge those movements, because if you push off from one wall heading towards somewhere else, unless you have something that [allows you to] change direction, that’s the way you’re going until you hit another object or item. So there’s a bit more planning about where you’re going to go in zero-G than there is in moving around on foot.”