Players stood up from their seats on the bridge and moved to gunnery positions on the top and bottom of the massive Constellation ship.

When players arrived at the communications outpost, AI-controlled pirates ambushed them. The upcoming release will features a playspace with a volume of 400 quadrillion cubic kilometers. 'Though on some level we will do some compression of play spaces because you don't want to be even at point-two speed of light you don't want to be sitting there for 3 hours. 'I do realize that a full solar system is much bigger than a million kilometers wide,' Roberts said. (Polygon readers may remember that ship from a tongue-in-cheek tour we did of a secret asteroid base earlier this year.) Three players stepped aboard and used their quantum drive to move towards a communications outpost that was in need of repairs.ĭue to the sheer size of the proposed persistent world, the team at Star Citizen has had to take concepts like relativity into account in order to move players around the map effectively. The demonstration, played live from a pit filled with high-end PCs just off stage, began with players spawning into a spaceport and calling up from storage a Constellation class ship outfitted for a combat role. And then there was Lord of the Rings Online, and I think that was a 71,000 square kilometer map.' 'To give you an idea, we were trying to figure out other games, and the biggest game that we could find online was The Elder Scrolls 2, which was meant to have a 161,000 square kilometer map. The playspace Roberts' team is currently working on, an area around a planet called Crusader, is clearly many, many times larger than The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and other, even bigger games. The goal for the release stands at a space that is actually 400 kilometers high, a volume of 400 quadrillion cubic kilometers.

We reached out to the Star Citizen team for clarification and it seems that Roberts actually understated the size of that space. 'Just to give you an idea,' Roberts said, fumbling for a way to communicate the sheer massive size of the upcoming release, 'the playable area on the large world map that we're currently using is one million kilometers by one million kilometers by 200 kilometers high.' 'Everyone gives me shit for giving you dates, but let me say it's in the near future.' While details on its timeline were held back, the demonstration itself showed for the first time the grand scale of Star Citizen's multiplayer ambition. 'That will be in the near future, by which I mean inside. 'We're not very far away from being content and functionality complete,' he said.

'Everyone gives me shit for giving you dates, but let me say it's in the near future. 'I don't want to give you dates,' Roberts said while standing on a stage erected beneath a retired Concorde supersonic jetliner at the Manchester Airport. Following a live 20-minute, eight-player demonstration, Roberts gave no release date. That update, he explained, will essentially include the promised features from the Star Marine module. After very publicly missing the release date for Star Marine, the sprawling game's first-person shooter module, Roberts took the stage to detail the upcoming release of its massively multiplayer persistent world module. This weekend in Manchester, England, Chris Roberts hosted CitizenCon, the annual convention for backers of the crowdfunded spacefaring simulation Star Citizen.

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