Star Citizen (2015)
Star Citizen really is something special. I backed it during 2021&#x2F;the pandemic, despite the controversy and not knowing much about it, because I wanted to try something a bit different and growing up my dad fed me a steady diet of Asimov, Clarke, and Gibson. Besides, I&#x27;m privileged enough to be in a position that being out $100 for a virtual space ship is an acceptable risk to me.<p>While I&#x27;m not one of those people that spend countless hours in game, I do love the time I get to play. Technically, it&#x27;s a game, but honestly that feels a bit misleading. I almost view it as a massive crowd funded engineering R&amp;D project. There are plenty of bugs that can ruin the fun, but when things go right, it can be an almost magical experience.<p>The level of detail and artistry in the ships is astounding. The graphics are like something out of a game engine tech demo, but instead of a far off future, &quot;maybe it&#x27;ll be implemented in a game at some point&quot;, it&#x27;s here today!<p>I&#x27;m sure plenty of people will read this and think it&#x27;s stupid, but seeing what CIG calls &quot;Volumetric Clouds&quot; from orbit in your space ship is one of the only computer graphics experiences that&#x27;s ever made me stop and stare. It&#x27;s hard to convey the experience through a YouTube video. I wasn&#x27;t particularly impressed until I had it running on my own machine. Maybe it&#x27;s something about it clearly being rendered in real time when you adjust the camera angle? I&#x27;m not sure. That&#x27;s not even real game play either! Some of the most fun I&#x27;ve had is finding folks that left their ship doors open, pulling up next to them, exiting my ship to space walk over and boarding their ship to take for a joy ride! Or dropping out of your own ship in a tank to fall through the atmosphere of a planet!<p>There are a lot of things you can say about SC and CIG, plenty of well deserved criticism, but it&#x27;s an objective fact they&#x27;ve pushed the boundaries of what I knew was possible with games. Perhaps that&#x27;s a limitation of my own knowledge though :)<p>In some ways now I enjoy watching the game engine and graphics engineers do live streams on the SC twitch channel and talk about their work just as much as playing. I wish they&#x27;d go into a bit more technical detail, but they&#x27;re in a never ending rush to deliver, so I get why they&#x27;re not going to conferences and giving presentations.<p>Anyways, you don&#x27;t have to take my word for it. On Friday, May 20th to 31st is a large event and the game is free to play. Kick the tires yourself if you&#x27;re curious! It&#x27;s certainly worth a couple hours to see what over $400 Million in crowd funding buys you.