Star Citizen's New Trailer Is Full Of Hollywood Stars
If you enjoy seeing popular actors and actresses in video games, you likely won't be disappointed in the single-player campaign the Star Citizen team is currently working on. In a new trailer, Star Citizen's standalone Squadron 42 release includes appearances from major television and film stars such as Mark Hamill, Gary Oldman, Gillian Anderson, Henry Cavill, and everyone's favorite right-hand man, Liam Cunningham (who plays Ser Davos Seaworth in HBO's Game of Thrones).
The trailer itself doesn't do much to tease any kind of coherent story, but if the footage is little more than a way to show off Cloud Imperium's motion-capture technology, it certainly gets the message across. The actors and actresses featured are highly detailed, thanks to the tech being used for capture. According to the Squadron 42 team, the game uses "one-to-one facial scans to create hundreds of unique blendshapes along with animated wrinkle and blood flow maps."
Long story short: Squadron 42's capture tech is able to portray every star's face in a pretty realistic way. And with the full cast providing over ten hours of motion-capture work for the game, fans can probably expect a story-heavy game full of cinematics like those featured in the trailer.
Star Citizen itself is a sort of outer space MMO that's been in development since way back in 2012, following a successfully funded Kickstarter campaign. It's directed by Chris Roberts, who made a name for himself on a few other space-based games, namely Wing Commander and Freelancer. Those games have pretty serious cult followings, so if either of Roberts' new projects can come close, fans are in for a treat when they finally ship. And hopefully, they do ship — because there's been plenty of controversy surrounding Star Citizen in recent years.
As of press time, there's no word on an official release date for Squadron 42 – or Star Citizen, for that matter. The official word from Cloud Imperium is, "We will publish the full roadmap to Squadron 42's release in December." So you'll need to sit tight until then.