Star Citizen Preview

Far from being a novelty, EVAs are shaping up to be a fundamental component of the game. One of a handful of missions currently present in Star Citizen involves restoring power to a satellite comms-array. To do this, you must fly to the satellite, destroy a couple of pirates that are hovering around it like wasps around a jam-jar, then climb out of your ship and EVA into the superstructure of the satellite. Negotiating this maze of metal pipes and wires is a strange, eerie genuinely eerie experience. This cold chunk of metal floating silently in space feels like a place no living things should be. At the heart of the satellite is a small computer, which, when interacted with, reboots the satellite, causing motors to whir and lights to illuminate. It's a great example of what Star Citizen can do, and that mission basically amounted to roleplaying an intergalactic handyman.

The EVA mechanic also produced one of the most terrifying experiences I've had in any game. I was acting as a Private Investigator, exploring an abandoned space-station to gather evidence for a client. I'd parked my ship alongside those of a couple of other players doing the same mission. I was deep inside the station, searching through the floating wreckage and listening to the audio-logs of its presumably dead crewmembers, when I noticed the icon that showed the location of my ship had started moving away from me.

At first I thought this was a bug, or that I'd bumped the ship against the station while "parking" it and the motion had caused it to float off. But my suspicions changed immediately when the quantum drive activated and my ship suddenly darted to the other side of the galaxy. Some chancer of a player had only gone and stole my bloody ship! Even worse, the ship he left behind was almost immediately destroyed by another player, leaving me stranded in an abandoned space station hundreds of light-years from the nearest hint of civilization. For a few moments I completely despaired.

Immensely annoying as this scenario was, I was also deeply impressed that the game allows it to happen. I should imagine that balancing the PvP aspect of the game is going to be incredibly difficult, however. Right now, if something like this occurs, you can just re-spawn and get yourself another ship. But when there's a fully fledged economy in place, figuring out how much or little to punish players for getting their ship destroyed or stolen is going to be tricky. On the other hand, such eventualities enable the possibility of player police-forces or player bounty-hunters, which I like the idea of a lot.

Even in the tiny slice of game that I played, there's so much else that impressed me, from little things like how well all of the side-missions are written, and the fact that you can go to a particular station and have your ship repaired by tiny drones, to broader things such as how weighty and satisfying the FPS component is (another station is dedicated to PvP combat, both in space and on foot), and the fact that you can stand on the landing platform of a space-station and watch other players duking it out in space. At one point, a ship crash- landed on a platform right in front of me skipping across the surfaces of the station in a giant metallic fireball. Those player-created moments are better than anything any scripted game can offer, and right now, Star Citizen looks to offer plenty of them.

All that being said, if I was looking to actually buy Star Citizen, I probably wouldn't invest in it just yet. You can experience everything it has to offer in a couple of hours, and it's also still pretty unstable. Crashes are fairly frequent and the game is enormously power-hungry, with the framerate jumping up and down like a slinky on an escalator. Nevertheless, if Roberts Space Industries can take those ideas and expand them out into a universe that includes large-scale space battles, hand-crafted missions and planetary landings, then it's going to be quite special.