Mike Snowdon · VFX Director

From my point of view, there's a lot of similarities, but they do have very different challenges. Squadron 42, obviously I can't give away spoilers, but everyone knows it has VFX. It's got lots of them, lots of destruction, but more importantly, as a game, it's more traditional in that there's a series of levels that you linearly progress through. And with that, there's a lot more control. So the effects can be controlled much more. And when I say control, I mean we're much clearer on camera positions and things like that. Cinematic sequences, we know that the camera may or may not be fixed at certain points. And therefore, again going back to the overdraw thing, we can look at it specifically at a frame, a point in the location, and we understand that that's what we're working with, and we can start to dial in the effects to suit those specific viewpoints. Whereas having some kind of similar sequence in Star Citizen, which is much more modular and much more free and not at all linear, you've just got to be able to factor lots more things in. And I guess that's why the tools that you provide to help us have as much information as possible are super useful for it. Again, talking about budgets in Star Citizen, we don't really know how many ships are going to be in any one place. It could be hundreds, could be dozens. All of them, right? And inside a gas cloud, which is full of all kinds of other things. The scalability of Star Citizen is a vastly different challenge to the Squadron 42 cinematic experience.