Star Citizen, the game that was set to reinvent, revolutionise and overhaul the entire space sim genre, is still very much under development. While its contemporaries have been and gone, Cloud Imperium's massively crowdfunded project is still being made, but it is gradually starting to look like a fully fleshed out game.
The upcoming 3.0 update is set to arrive at the end of June and will add a whole host of new features to the game. There's new "Planetary Tech" which will give players their first look at planetary exploration. New tools have been introduced like a solar system editor, which will give control of entire solar system layouts, including suns, planets and moons.
There are new performance tweaks, including a new light controller and better rendering, which we're told should free up as much as 50 percent of the RAM used in previous versions of the game. There's a new unified material library and better texture memory usage too.
If you watch the 20 minute explanation video though, the big news with this update is cargo. Cloud Imperium has spent a lot of time - more than anyone would have expected - thinking about how it works in the game. Should players be able to move it around manually themselves? Should they be able to pick up crates in their cargo hold and carry them off the ship, or is it the kind that needs specialised robot suits to help them haul it around?
Star Citizen might be very late at this point, it might be lacking many of the promised features, but it is incredibly ambitious and still looks gorgeous.
Still, I don't get why people have spent so much money on it at this stage in its life.