Star Citizen promised to incorporate VR help as a core function greater than a decade in the past—lengthy earlier than it scope-creeped its method into changing into the MMO of immediately. Now, Cloud Imperium Video games (CIG) says they’re really going to place VR help to the take a look at, however you continue to most likely shouldn’t maintain your breath.
As first reported by UploadVR, CIG goes to internally take a look at whether or not it could possibly deliver VR help to Star Citizen. For these counting, that might be 13 years for the reason that studio promised it within the recreation’s 2012 Kickstarter marketing campaign.
“We have now backed Oculus Rift and can help it in Star Citizen / Squadron 42,” CIG stated within the recreation’s Kickstarter. “Who doesn’t wish to sit of their cockpit, palms in your joystick and throttle, swiveling your head, to trace that enemy fighter that simply blew by?”
In a current interview although, CIG Senior Director Sean Tracy says the studio nonetheless has plans to deliver VR help to the sport, and briefly touches on a number of the challenges.
“Clearly we’ve talked about [VR] one million instances,” says Tracy within the interview, seen beneath. “It’s one thing we wish, we simply don’t prioritize it forward of all the pieces else. We’ll nonetheless be coming again to that […] I believe there are some checks even occurring within the subsequent month or two.”
And whereas Tracy says Star Citizen’s Star Engine—a spinoff of CryEngine 3—can really help VR, there are two most important points: the sport’s renderer now not helps VR, and the studio might want to engineer an answer to twin render for left and proper eyes at an appropriate body charge, which is a tall order.
Granted, a small portion of the sport did embody help for the Oculus Rift DK1 for a short time in 2013, which allowed customers to stroll round a ship hangar and visualize a bought ship. There have been different inside checks since then too, and even function releases that instructed that VR help was nonetheless on the studio’s radar, like its UI replace in 2017 which was supposedly made with VR in thoughts.
In the meantime, Star Citizen has primarily grow to be synonymous with ‘scope creep’—when a developer guarantees increasingly options past something initially envisioned for the sport—making it uncertain we’ll ever see VR help at this charge.
Starting as a comparatively modest area sim crowdfunded in 2012 with a aim of $500,000, Star Citizen promised a deep area fight and buying and selling recreation within the spirit of Wing Commander and Freelancer.
It has since ballooned right into a persistent MMO-style universe and a cinematic single-player marketing campaign (Squadron 42), additionally integrating first-person shooter gameplay, planet touchdown and procedural era, complicated financial simulation, NPC AI ecosystems, lifelike physics and harm modeling—the listing goes on.
And with over $800 million raised—by far essentially the most crowdfunded leisure challenge in historical past—the sport stays in alpha over a decade later.
