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An upcoming Star Citizen mission will let you leap from ship to ship

Jump ship

Though space is considered fairly empty, Star Citizen isn't quite as sparse as people believe. I spent some time with it earlier this year and enjoyed a whole weekend exploring the universe. I flew to ArcCorp, a planet covered in a city. It was well worth the trip. I got to ride on a cyberpunk tram!

That’s not all there was to do, though. Star Citizen does have quests, I just didn’t partake. They’ve just shown off a very early concept for a mission in which the player leaps from one ship to another and starts a fight, which is exactly the sort of thing that gets my attention.

The latest insider video shows a rescue of "a hijacked 890". It makes use of one of the game's sickeningly expensive ships for a level full of enemies to kill and terminals to dehack. It's not a good example of the shooting, because there's a lot of developer-powers helping the player. God mode and recall are clearly running, and the AI doesn't look very sharp. But it has the basic boarding that I'm into. Besides, the AI in Star Citizen is slowly being upgraded, and this is just a look at an early set-up. The game has only been in development for 8 years, after all. You can't rush these things.

Watch on YouTube

You have to do a lot of mental gymnastics to see past the early... well, early everything, really. I do like the notion behind it. I still dare to dream about Star Citizen. I've probably played it for about 40 hours, but most of that was this year. It's a big, unwieldy game, that's growing limbs at an alarming rate, but if you pay attention to it you do see progress, and it's getting more and more playable. The monthly blogs are a nice place to start if you want to. But it's also OK to snark at it after all this time. It's a ridiculous thing.

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