Version 3.0, set to release later this year, promises a "living, breathing" universe. Can you give an idea of how the Star Citizen universe will feel different from other space games? Just how big will the universe be?asked by Michael Finn
TL;DRThe plan is roughly 100 star systems with far denser content than other space games, driven by a universe simulation and a world that reacts to players, though not all of it works yet.
We're planning to get about 100 star systems in the game. Each star system will have anywhere from one to six planets, and then there will obviously be moons, space stations, asteroid fields and all the rest of the stuff. You'll have oceans and forests and mountains, different homesteads and locations, as well as the landing areas. There's going to be a huge increase in the play area and what people can do, and we're really going for a kind of frequency of interaction and interest and AI and everything that is much more dense than what you'd typically get in a space game.
Normally you'd go to a star system and maybe there would be one or two locations you could land on, you buy or sell stuff, and then you'd go to another location. With Star Citizen just one star system should have enough content and enough things to do for players to play for hundreds, even thousands of hours. The density of experience is going to be much higher than what you've seen in other space games, including my own.
We actually have a full universe simulation that runs on separate servers, responsible for deciding which planets are trading, which organization is doing what, which factories are doing well, who's selling what, who needs what kind of goods. It's populating the universe with the various people going about their jobs, whether it's a pirate, trader, bounty hunter, law enforcer — they're all running around in this universe simulation, and then we use that simulation to drive the content that people interact with when they're flying around in the universe.
The whole concept is to have a living, breathing universe that reacts and responds to the players' actions. We're doing things like items, ships or even characters that age, wear and tear. You need to make sure that you're servicing your spaceship or your equipment, otherwise it's gets damaged. The idea is that nothing in this world should feel static. It should feel like your actions, and your friends' actions, have an impact. And the world moves on whether you're participating or not. I think that makes the game quite different from a lot of the MMOs out there. We obviously haven't got all this working; it's all in different stages of development, but that's the long-term vision — a dynamic, living, breathing universe where you can just go off and spend as long as you want in it.