Star Citizen Adds Playable Females, But No Release Date; Raised Over $700m; Free to Play Coming Soon; Developer Hits with Layoffs; $45,000 DLC; 11 Years In, Squadron 42 ‘Feature-Complete’; Developer Buys Montreal Studio; Apologises for ‘Super Rough Start’
The eagerly awaited Star Citizen alpha 3.5 update is set to arrive for backers this weekend, and one of its key features is the addition of playable female characters.
“This has been a long time coming and a significant undertaking,” said Chris Roberts, the game’s creative director, in a press release.
“Creating a completely new ‘rig’ for female characters to make them distinct from male characters was a major challenge, as most games don’t even attempt this for player characters.”
Once the female version of Star Citizen was completed, it meant that everything in the game, including ships, animations, clothing, armour, and weapons, had to be retrofitted to work with her.
Customizing both female and male characters can now be done in a unique way called Gene Splicing, which allows players to tweak the amount of features their characters inherit from other faces, rather than having direct control over their facial features.
“The advantage of this approach is that you always get realistic-looking characters, avoiding the immersion-breaking ‘monsters’ that can sometimes be created using more traditional techniques,” said Roberts.
Alpha 3.5 also introduces a new urban planet called ArcCorp, where players can now explore. This is the same planet that was impressively demoed a couple of years ago, with cities the size of planets.
On top of that, the entire Star Citizen flight model is being overhauled in alpha 3.5, and planets now have in-atmosphere gravity to deal with. Oh, and there will be AI bounty hunters, too. These are just some of the updates, but they are among the most notable. For more information, visit the Star Citizen website.
Star Citizen continues to take a long time to develop (and may never be completed), and currently has no set release date. However, the developers at Cloud Imperium openly share a roadmap for the year ahead, and the plan is to reach alpha 3.8 by the end of 2019.
Will there be a beta? We don’t know. But perhaps we can look to Squadron 42, the standalone, single-player companion to Star Citizen, which features Hollywood actors like Gillian Anderson, Gary Oldman, and Mark Hamill. A beta for Squadron 42 is officially due in mid-2020 – could Star Citizen follow suit? Then again, with Star Citizen, it’s important not to get your hopes up.
