Star Citizen News Update – Why Are Star Citizen’s Aliens So Un-Alien?
Welcome to the Star Citizen News… we take a look at what’s happening this week and summarise what happened over the last few days. This time we will also take a look at a dev response on why SC aliens don’t look that… well… alien.
Star Citizen Alpha 3.20 is in Evocati we know they are testing things like Master Modes with a clear break between Nav/Quantum Travel Mode and SCM/Combat Modes. CIG are apparently pushing to have a Wave 1 PTU in the near future, whatever that means.
I am hoping this addresses desync and PES issues…
Also The Foundation Festival Is Coming To An End on the 31st of July.
Players can still claim free rewards when they use the Guide System, there are also discounted Foundation Festival Starter Packs and a bit of a mini-ship-sale on currently.
We are still waiting on a Post Mortem review of Alpha 3.18 / 3.19 coming from CI… they said VERY SOON… maybe this week? maybe next week?
What’s happening This Week in Star Citizen?
Later Tuesday, the Narrative team brings us the monthly Galactapedia update. They choose a couple of Star Systems and some planets and companies and give us a big lore update on them. It’s often pretty cool.
Wednesday will see a Roadmap Update we might see some additional 3.20 features confirmed, and some additions to the Tracker showing bits beyond that.
Thursday Inside Star Citizen returns, we’re catching up with the Gameplay Feature Teams to take a look at the early prototype of the next iteration of Salvage: munching! Which sounds pretty awesome. We know the Vulture and Reclaimer (at a larger scale) will both make use of this mechanic.
Friday, there’s no Star Citizen Live this week BUT we do have the summaries of last:
SCLive Summary – The episode was called Making Ship Up III (3)
There wasn’t much in the way of tangible relevant dev info or news here BUT it had:
Senior Concept Artist Alberto Petronio – He began as a vehicle artist and moved onto concept art specialising in ships and vehicles.
There are 2+ unannounced ships that are currently being worked on.
In this show they kit bashed an origin hover tank. They had some pre-baked assets and used bit of other vehicles etc…
In reality it would take a lot longer than an hour and there would be a few attempts and then they would show them to Chris for direction. They’d then move forward with one of the ideas OR make another set of attempts.
They made some other quick concepts for a hover tank thru the show.
Some tanky, some boaty.
They also made a weird vertical tank.
There was a speedboat looking one.
They put a lot of weapons on one and it’s like a battleship
I actually quite like the idea of a Origin or Drake Hover Tank.
From the CIG Newsletter Exciting News From CitizenCon
CitizenCon is on the horizon, CI announced a 2v2 dogfighting tournament, applications for that are closed but we will be able to watch the action at CitizenCon 2023.
CitizenCon Tickets are still available – it’s a 2 day event 21-22nd October in LA.
Community booth applications are coming to a close at the end of the month too.
You will be able to watch CitizenCon live for free and it looks like this one is going to be much bigger and a bit different than previous ones.
Sneak Peek Tumbril Storm again – Which is looking like it might turn up in 3.20 to me as CIG push ahead with it’s work.
I saw a Spectrum Thread – Why are Star citizen’s Aliens So Un-Alien?
‘ve been looking at the available images for the alien species in the Star Citizen universe, and it immediately struck me that they’re all ‘humans in rubber suits’. They all have two legs with the same joints as humans, just slightly different stances and bone lengths. They all have two arms… with the same joints. They all have heads with primate-like faces… a high forehead, a pair of eyes above a nose and a mouth.
Why is this? Why do all these species need to be humanoid? Is it so that they can be performed by humans in motion capture suits? to make them more relatable to the players? Or is it just a lack of imagination?
As someone who has made a hobby of designing realistic, biologically plausible but truly alien aliens for TTRPGs and books that I’ve written, it is rather jarring to see such un-alien ‘aliens’.
Dave Haddock Responded to this:
it was a conscious choice for a couple reasons that were touched upon in the thread. It was so we could potentially capture actors playing the roles, but also one of the original goals was to ultimately allow players to potentially play as aliens so it would save us from having to create completely unique animation sets and allow for our ships to accommodate them with minimal modifications as well as letting humans fly their ships. It would be considerably more difficult if the aliens each had really exotic physiology.
Boom, that’s it for your Star Citizen News today!