Stars Amongst The Stars In Star Citizen
The word "star", man, it's an illusion
Hollywood actors including Harry Potter's Gary Oldman, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back's Mark Hamill, Sliders' John Rhys-Davies, Volume's Andy Serkis, Eastenders' Craig Fairbrass, and GILLIAN CHUFFING ANDERSON are lending their voices and faces to Squardron 42, the single-player side of Star Citizen [official site].
Creator Chris Roberts's years in Hollywood may not have produced much of note, but his crowdfunded space 'em up has let him pull together a pret-ty swish cast. Fresh from his debut at the CitizenCon shindig over the weekend, here's an eerie virtual Gary Oldman spouting jingoism as a space-American:
Yes, but what about Gillian Anderson? The teases.
I still don't understand the time, effort, and money that goes into recreating real people's faces with fancy technology and lots of dots when the end result is deep in the uncanny valley. The Witcher 3's faces aren't motion capture but its characters look so much more alive and subtle. I'm sure that took loads of work, but I can't imagine a Hollywood cast is cheap either, and Star Citizen's ongoing development is running off selling imaginary ships (a new one's up now for $170, by the way - only for a few days, to stir up panic purchases).
Squadron 42 is to be a single-player campaign starring a rookie pilot aboard a vast capital ship, split between social-y ship side, spaceship pew-pew, and on-foot FPS action. It's due next year, but CitizenCon showed a bit of a work-in-progress version with a live demo. Bafflingly, a fair bit of their video footage of that is recorded off screens over the audience's shoulders like a leaked Avengers trailer:
Also at CitizenCon was a bit of Star Citizen's alpha 2.0. Developers Cloud Imperium Games whipped together the following video with gameplay snippets, which mostly look a bit dull and janky except for the neat bit where the player is pottering about the bridge of a ship their pal is piloting:
The full CitizenCon presentation is also archived, if you want to see the whole shebang in full livery: