Star Citizen - What is It?

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:07

   [Music] [Applause] great

2. 00:01:28

   oh hi I'm Chris Roberts ever since I saw Star Wars as a wide 8-year-old I dreamt of being a hot shot pilot saving the Galaxy or a lovable Rogue making my way across the cosmos it inspired me to make win commander and has influenced everything I've done since then 10 years ago after 20 years of making games I was burned out so I took a break but I never stopped playing games nor loving them and now I'm ready to come back and I'd like to show you something I've been working on but I don't want to build any old

3. 00:02:18

   game I want to build a universe I want to build the game I always wanted to build but I didn't have the tools to do until now one that you can fly off a carrier fighting heroic war on the front lines but also one that you can muster out and find your own fortune in the Stars wherever your spaceship takes you I want to be able to share this experience with my friends and fight against Real opponents in space not just Ai and I want this to be as good or better than any other game out there and I want to actively push the boundaries of what you can do in a game none of this would have been even possible 2 years ago but with Mo's law driving PC performance and cost and The Gaming Community embracing talented developers via crowdfunding I believe it is possible today I've never been accused of having a small vision and so I thought thought it was best if I share my ambition with you visually I'm pretty excited by how it's joined out so why don't you come join me for a sneak

4. 00:03:09

   peek while I'm building you know the star CI and the Squadron 42 combination you essentially have both things available to you so Squadron 42 is the sort of single player experience where you are getting missions you're in the military so you know it's not that open world cuz you're going to be going a wall if you decide you want to go after some other planet so the idea of it is you you serve a campaign you fly missions it's branching just like Wing Commander was and you have exactly that Wing Commander experience with the added bonus of some multiplayer and your friends be able to sort of Co-op play with you as wingman when you fly your missions but when you finish your tourah duty you muster out and you're in the wide universe and then it's open world you can go where you want do what you want choose who you want to be and the other thing that's nice about this is

5. 00:03:56

   you don't have to do Squadron 42 you can get into the star unit you can basically decide you're never going to go fight in the military you can decide that I'm just going to be a merchant or I'm just going to be a pirate I think what we're talking about here has everything that made Wing Commander great and has everything that made Privateer and freelancer great is it basically has both things and the single player sort of military campaign side sits inside this whole universe in a holistic fashion the idea is that it should be dynamic so I've talked about a sort of the universe being a living entity and something that's always changing and it's going to change based on the player's action so things that players do will have an effect on the universe and they'll also be able to become part of the universe so a good example is say player that's an Explorer and they explore around enough time and they find a space anomaly and then they manag to navigate a jump that jump point and the

6. 00:04:44

   system that they've jumped into will get named after that player so like that player becomes part of the history and lore of the universe and on top of that you know we're going to be dynamically adding content to these Universe I'm not interested in having yearly updates we'll have have a team of people that are adding content on a weekly uh you know every two weeks basis so you're starting this system and you st in the game and it's got 50 star systems for instance and you know uh two weeks in a jump Point's discovered for another system and someone navigates it and Bam we've got a 501 system and so on so one thing I think you'll all be very excited about is the level of Fidelity in Space the graphical detail and the immersion cuz it's to a level that I've never been able to achieve

7. 00:05:32

   before I'm trying to build a world that it's so detailed and has such great texture that you forget that it's a game which is always my goal when I'm building games I'll just climb into the uh cockpit of the fighter and as you can see as we're sort of climbing in there's a huge amount of detail in the cockpit because one of the biggest keys for me in in the next game I'm building is I really want to have that immersion to be complete and we're going to do a lot of things that will really push that everything inside the pit operates and moves and works if I look around the cockpit you can see uh the displays my hands on the throttle my hands on the joystick the whole idea is we're immersed fully in a cockpit that's fully rendered in 3D so if you issue a command you hit a button you'll actually see your character doing the cockpit it's all for the immersion well I think immersion is really important for me because I think that you have to really

8. 00:06:20

   visualize and create a very believable world I so that's one of the reasons why I always sort of really push the visual Fidelity is because I think that helps with the immersiveness and the more immersive the more connected you are to the experience the more connected you are the experience I think the more fun the game itself will be so uh an example of that is if we're looking around at our character we can see that you know the character himself is you know about 100,000 faces which is about 10 times the detail of most Uh current day uh AAA games there are about 10,000 faces or so and so that just allows you to have a little extra detail the the wires on his uh on his Pilot outfit the creases in the uniform uh and have it really stand up when you come in close and and not uh break down because it's too Pixy so I'm really excited about the

9. 00:07:07

   physics and they're going to be a strong part of the gameplay so let me demonstrate uh some of the features of how the physics interacts with how you control the ship itself is built and designed and simulated like a real ship so there's four thrusters on the bottom and there's four frosters on the top and then of course there's obviously the engine at the back most of the ships in this universe are going to fly very much like an F35 would do they're fly by wire so they take your input as a pilot and crunch it into trajectories and vectors it needs to tell the various thrusters to achieve um what you've asked it to do so if I want to rotate or I want to say if I want to pitch like I'm doing now or I'm going to y or I'm going to roll it actually pulls the thrusters themselves and says how quickly can you rotate to the position I need you to deliver thrust and how much thrust can you deliver and the thrusters talk back to

10. 00:07:56

    the flight computer and says okay I can get you there in in. one of a millisecond and I give you this much thrust the whole system is dynamically doing that every single frame and uh flying that way it's really cool because what happens is a lot of unexpected or dynamic Behavior happens by it and then for instance if we're flying around in a dog fight one of our thrusters gets damaged it will affect our maneuverability and it's not a matter of changing a script or data it's actually all dynamically simulated in the system so here's a really great example of the level of scale I'm going to walk out this Corridor and out onto the flight deck and as you can see it's huge uh the carrier uh that's in the Prototype level is about a kilometer in size is full of uh activity and spaceships and people so one of the

11. 00:08:45

    things that I'm the most excited by the uh the the technology we've been working on is the ability to scale so we have detail for scale at a human level so our our character is about 1.8 meters in size uh then the same level of detail for a fighter craft that you'll fly or a bigger craft which uh you know say this fighter craft is 27 m in size I'm building a game in a universe that's essentially the universe and the game I would like to play so it's for gamers like myself so I wouldn't say that I'm a social Casual Gamer that plays Farmville I mean I like sophisticated experiences well I'm picking PC over console because PC was what I always used to do in the past but more more importantly it's because PC is an open platform PC is always constantly innovating I really care about the PC I

12. 00:09:35

    really want to push the PC to limit I think it's a great gaming platform I'm really actually quite sad and angry about the situation right now where it sort of feels like you know PC games and PC Gamers don't get any respect it's the medium that is the coolest and the most powerful and that's really why I'm focused on PC we're going to allow users to design some spaceships and build them and submit them and if it passes the standards then it can get sold in the ship dealers on certain planets and you know maybe the person that built that spaceship will be earning money from other players that think that spaceship's cool and want to pay them for it so one of the things that I like about crowdfunding is cutting out the politics and and the the noise of the the big publisher and you're dealing directly with the people that that want to experience the game that you're

13. 00:10:22

    making so one of my main goals whenever I make a game is to really immerse you in the world and universe and I think you've seen that on what we've been even trying on the website today and this visual prototype is a demonstration of the direction that I want to take and will be taking with today's technology I can do that to a level that I never could have done uh when I was making Wing Commander all those years ago or even freelancer um 10 years ago and uh it's actually really exciting I feel like I can do something that has the Fidelity of a film but real time and I'm in it and that is my dream my name is Chris Roberts and I would like to build a universe with you