Star Citizen really is something special. I backed it during 2021/the pandemic, despite the controversy and not knowing much about it, because I wanted to try something a bit different and growing up my dad fed me a steady diet of Asimov, Clarke, and Gibson. Besides, I'm privileged enough to be in a position that being out $100 for a virtual space ship is an acceptable risk to me.

While I'm not one of those people that spend countless hours in game, I do love the time I get to play. Technically, it's a game, but honestly that feels a bit misleading. I almost view it as a massive crowd funded engineering R&D project. There are plenty of bugs that can ruin the fun, but when things go right, it can be an almost magical experience.

The level of detail and artistry in the ships is astounding. The graphics are like something out of a game engine tech demo, but instead of a far off future, "maybe it'll be implemented in a game at some point", it's here today!

I'm sure plenty of people will read this and think it's stupid, but seeing what CIG calls "Volumetric Clouds" from orbit in your space ship is one of the only computer graphics experiences that's ever made me stop and stare. It's hard to convey the experience through a YouTube video. I wasn't particularly impressed until I had it running on my own machine. Maybe it's something about it clearly being rendered in real time when you adjust the camera angle? I'm not sure. That's not even real game play either! Some of the most fun I've had is finding folks that left their ship doors open, pulling up next to them, exiting my ship to space walk over and boarding their ship to take for a joy ride! Or dropping out of your own ship in a tank to fall through the atmosphere of a planet!

There are a lot of things you can say about SC and CIG, plenty of well deserved criticism, but it's an objective fact they've pushed the boundaries of what I knew was possible with games. Perhaps that's a limitation of my own knowledge though :)

In some ways now I enjoy watching the game engine and graphics engineers do live streams on the SC twitch channel and talk about their work just as much as playing. I wish they'd go into a bit more technical detail, but they're in a never ending rush to deliver, so I get why they're not going to conferences and giving presentations.

Anyways, you don't have to take my word for it. On Friday, May 20th to 31st is a large event and the game is free to play. Kick the tires yourself if you're curious! It's certainly worth a couple hours to see what over $400 Million in crowd funding buys you.