Star Citizen is the video game project of all superlatives: in terms of budget, concept and development time, it breaks all records.
Initiated in 2012 through a vast participatory funding campaign on Kickstarter, Star Citizen marks the return of Chris Roberts(Wing Commander) to the world of video games after a less-than-successful cinematographic adventure. Alas, since the closing of the Kickstarter campaign, and despite (or because of?) the indecent amount of money raised, the Star Citizen project has long seemed too cumbersome, too complex to succeed. Numerous updates have since been released, year after year, with new playable elements integrated each time, and many of the players who financially supported the project have had the opportunity to test these "pieces" of the game. The balance sheet for Star Citizen is mixed at the moment: some players are happy to be able to test the project throughout its development, while others feel that we're still a long way from a truly playable version and, even more so, a game that lives up to its promises.
A month ago, Cloud Imperium Games - the studio founded to develop Star Citizen - released a 26-minute video to introduce Squadron 42, the single-player portion of Star Citizen. Even more recently, as CitizenCon 2023 drew to a close, Cloud Imperium Games released a second video. Almost as long as the previous one (24 minutes), this second sequence focuses on the technical side of things. In fact, it's called " Future of Gaming: StarEngine ", to emphasize that it highlights the tools developed to bring the Star Citizen universe (the multiplayer game) to life, on the one hand, and Squadron 42 (the single-player game) on the other. It's hard to believe that two video sequences, successful as they are, will be enough to silence the critics of Chris Roberts' project. On the other hand, they will cheer up those who are still waiting for a solid, finalized and complete game. For our part, even if the game's current alpha doesn't convince us, we still hope to be able to discover a game worthy of the name... one day.
