For one thing, it looked smooth, responsive, and photorealistic, inasmuch as fictional spaceships can look photorealistic. For another, the damage modeling and the spiffy shield functionality were like nothing I've ever seen in a space sim. I especially dug little details like the fact that a ship's shields will take on the color of the energy weapons used against them.
Other noteworthy tidbits included the hit detection system wherein each spacecraft has individually modeled and registered subsystems complete with physical locations. Roberts provided additional details on the projectile weapon and signature systems, which will include visual, electromagnetic, and reflective components. Each sig system and its various countermeasures will be managed in real-time by the pilot, and players will be able to evade detection by ducking behind asteroids and the like.
DoaS laid out Roberts' overall goal of a persistent universe with a "sense of living history" as well as his thoughts on player death, physical and visible damage, and general immersion. "I feel that if everyone can be cloned easily, it fundamentally changes the structure of the universe," he explained. "You now have a universe of immortal gods that can't be killed. Death is just a financial and time inconvenience that has no further consequences."
His solution is basically a system of lives, sort of like an "old-school arcade game." Each player avatar will ultimately have "the ability to 'die' multiple times before the character is finally put to rest." Each "death" creates wear and tear on the avatar, and ultimately there will come a point when you'll no longer be waking up in a med bay with another cybernetic replacement limb; instead, you'll be attending the funeral of your avatar from the perspective of a new avatar whom you've previously named as your beneficiary.
There's much more to Death of a Spaceman than I can cover in a couple of paragraphs, of course, and it is absolutely essential reading for the knowledgeable Star Citizen fan.
While Star Citizen is clearly about space ships first and foremost, it is in fact a sim, and marrying a complex player-driven economy with a robust space flight engine has been on Roberts' mind for a couple of decades now. "What has surprised us most is the fact that players are as interested in seeing this happen as we are," Roberts told me later that same month. "It was always in the spec, but it was never something we thought would bring people into the community. I think this is one of the major strengths about Star Citizen: There is no one play path; you can focus on combat, trading, exploring, or building an economic empire."
Said empire will make use of the game's economic "nodes," which are entities that "accept one or more types of input goods and output one or types of output goods." Some nodes will operate "in a self-contained fashion, while other needs must be met by external entities whether [they be] NPC trade routes or player-run missions."
I know it sounds complex, so why don't you watch this video?
The PvP portion is particularly noteworthy because it clears up a lot of the misconceptions spread about by forum ignorati regarding the pervasiveness of PvP and whether or not Star Citizen is EVE with joysticks. "Star Citizen doesn't shy away from PvP, but we're not building a game around it either," Roberts said.
So that's that. For clarification, posterity, or what have you.
Thankfully Star Citizen is part of what I'm tentatively calling the new sandbox movement. These games don't shy away from including substantial non-combat gameplay alongside their murder-sim aspects, and they don't fall all over themselves placating the time-poor. Star Citizen boasts public transit, salvaging, exploring, and mining, not to mention the potential for plenty of slickly realized out-of-ship roleplaying elements thanks to the underlying CryEngine and the extensive bipedal avatar stuff already in the works.
And that's all I can say about these clips, since their in-engine pictures are literally worth a thousand of my words. Be sure and check out the 300i series video above.
Gameplay proper is pretty limited in the hangar as of press time, but Cloud Imperium nonetheless managed to nail its first public deliverable and gift fans with a nifty if agonizingly teasing piece of pre-alpha content.
As the preceding list illustrates, there are dozens of tangible reasons why these numbers were achieved and why they continue to be surpassed. And while milestones like $10 million, $20 million, and the most recent $35 million mark are undeniably impressive, in reality they're a sideshow to the actual game and why the people creating it made 2013 an MMO year worth remembering.