Star Citizen Shows Off Alpha 3.0's Seamless World

Fancy space games are certainly more common now than when Star Citizen [official site] was announced but Cloud Imperium's space 'em up is still the flashiest. The devs are still working on its core elements and pulling them together into a concrete whole, but that's starting to look pretty dang swish all right. During Gamescom last week they showed off an hour-long gameplay preview of alpha 3.0, with two players in a ship flying down from space, through a planet's atmosphere, to land at a settlement, wander around, and pick up a contract from a proper voice-acted NPC. Have a look:

That's pretty nice, that! It's the first thing I've seen which looks much like the vision Star Citizen has sold all along: a persistent universe seamlessly combining people on foot, in space, and flying around above planets, with players able to fly ships together, run missions, run around doing FPS zapping, even loading crates of cargo into ship by hand, and and and... yeah, it's impressive. I've been sceptical but this is looking swish.

It's still only a demo, mind, so we'll have to see what how it ends up in reality. Alpha 3.0 is due to launch around the end of the year.

Far sooner than that, Cloud Imperium will release alpha 2.5. This here trailer gives a peek at some of what it'll bring: