14 DAY TRIAL // What we know: Star Citizen is a space-based simulation game from Roberts Space Industries that wants to create a complex universe using the CryEngine 3 technology.
The team wants to give players both a single-player campaign that’s similar to Wing Commander and a multiplayer online space.
The single player will be a directed experience, with a clear story designed to keep the player moving ahead while also giving him a chance to explore the galaxy that the team created for Star Citizen.
Gamers will be able to choose their ship and their career and will be able to move seamlessly from trading to combat and other activities.
The multiplayer part of the game will be focused towards player-on-player interactions and it seems that treachery and subterfuge will play a big part in the experience.
The multiplayer alpha of Star Citizen is expected to arrive in the final months of 2013 and it will include about 200,000 players who will be used to stress test the infrastructure of the game and deliver feedback on the core mechanics.
After about another year, the Roberts Space Industries team wants to deliver the single-player beta element of the game, with actual release taking place sometime after that.
Why it matters: Star Citizen tries to revive a space simulation genre, alongside Elite: Dangerous, which represents a hard target to achieve by itself.
But the Roberts Space Industries team is aiming even higher by using CryEngine 3 to put the game together, with some pretty impressive screenshots already released this early during the development process.
With more than 7.3 million dollars (5.57 million Euro) raised via crowd funding, it has the resources to achieve its ambitious long-term plans.
The full Incoming 2013 series of articles can be read on Softpedia right here.