While it might be a little disappointing for long-time Star Citizen fans to not see beefier news out of CitizenCon, the clouds are genuinely gorgeous. At around the 1:15:00 mark in the video below, the developers take players on a ship walkthrough hovering over a planet in the upcoming Pyro system. They emerge into the cockpit to show an absolutely beautiful blanket of fluffy clouds, which produce lovely little droplets of water on your front window. (Starshield? Cloudshield? What’s the space equivalent of a windshield?) If you’re interested in the tech, the devs talk a bit about it all at around 38:47. They have tools that let them alter cloud density, shape and more. They’ve developed all this to help them make weird and wonderful cloud shapes that wouldn’t naturally occur on Earth, but could on an unfamiliar alien planet. All this chat almost made me feel like I was watching a science program, rather than a video game stream. That didn’t last too long though, because the devs proceeded to show everyone a picture of a cat they’d drawn with all this fancy new tech. Weirdly grounding, that. CitizenCon also had some new outposts and ships to show off, including the Origin 400i. My expert opinion is that it’s very shiny, has nice round bits, and the trailer is way too similar to the sort of car advert you’d see on TV. Do bear in mind though that this ship costs a helluva lot of real-life money - £211 for something that isn’t actually in-game yet. Cloud Imperium have previously been in hot water with the Advertising Standards Agency for not making these sorts of microtransactions clear before too. Other than that, yeah, not an awful lot of newness I’m afraid. The last big chunk of news we had on Squadron 42 was around this time last year, when director Chris Roberts said it “will be done when it is done”. For details on what’s to come in Star Citizen, take a peek at the game’s roadmap. The “tentative” release window for its next update, 3.15, was slated for Q3 2021 (which is supposed to be between July and September, so it’s running a tad late).
