Cloud Imperium has released a new video in which it showcased the next-gen faces that will be featured in Star Citizen. Star Citizen is powered by CRYENGINE and these faces are among the best rendered real-time faces we’ve seen, therefore we strongly suggest taking a look at the video.
Needless to say that we were really impressed with the facial animations and the overall quality of the in-engine faces that were showcased.
Star Citizen is shaping up to be a glorious title, with visuals that will impress every single gamer. And yes, the game remains exclusive to the PC (at least for now).
The original video from Cloud Imperium can be found below.
However, YouTube’s “Jack Frak” has isolated the in-engine footage in the following video.
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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Where the f*** is my jaw? Oh here it is,,, on the floor.
I want to slap those smug glasses off that guys face.
I thought we would be in this class way earlier, anyway, i will buy it, never liked the theme of space ship this looks really promissing
“theme of space ship”
uhh
Uhh
Crysis were not that distant…
And how many games have that technology implemented? Exactly 0 like 99% of all their tech demos.
And who’s fault is that oh the dev’s
lol good joke
Sadly its not a joke. Dev’s could do this despite what console games have.
And PC hardware would be even more advanced than it is now if not for consoles because devs would be constantly pushing newer hardware to the limits
True, hardware development would likely accelerate if there was a need for it, console gaming has held hardware back and because of it, slowed down the need to need better hardware, ironically, console hardware would be better now if a lot more games targeted the PC hardware considering consoles are more or less PC’s now, in a sense, console only develop as much as the PC does, the more reason for pushing the hardware on PC which games can do, the more demand for better hardware, so yeah, console gaming has held progress back, having a console on the market for 8 years was bound to do that.
It’s not the devs, it’s the Publishers.
Its both probably 70/30
Consoles are the real blame for holding back technology.
I’m glad Star Citizen is PC only.
The more read and watch on Star Citizen the more I’m convinced it was money well spent, I can’t wait!
The more *I read…
Cheers
yeah but its not just the face you have to consider. its also the rest of the game. No point in having an extremely realistic face with 8 bit gfx for the rest of it!!!!
It’s literally just a static mesh where you can mess around with the lights and the quality is nothing compared to this, it doesn’t even have sub surface scattering nor does it show the eyes.
That’s a whole GPU to render a mediocre head mesh in an empty scene, here it’s vastly better tech with realistic animation, that will be used in a MMO.
They just continue to throw out new content for us to see like there’s no tomorrow and I love it! I’m so damn thankful we’re finally getting a game that takes advantage of modern hardware like in the old days of gaming ^^ It’s already looking visually better than The Spirits Within and Beowulf, which are movies I thoroughly enjoyed.
yeah i miss when games studios were always pushing technology now everything has to make sense to the bank so it usually ends up just a different version of the other guys game.
Indeed. But who knows what kind of impact this game may have on the entire industry. Could potentially open up crowdfunding in a really big way or convince publishers that there is a market in PC gaming that doesn’t care much for F2P or MOBA games. Hopefully it’ll inspire other long time creators to establish new ambitious IPs, putting PC hardware first and foremost and then lesser hardware as an afterthought. One can only hope. 🙂
I’m interested to see what can be achieved on PC without being held back by consoles and so far from what I saw at Gamescom, I’m really impressed, we saw a few things in that that we just don’t see in other games, so much so that many said a year ago that what we saw at Gamescom wasn’t possible and here we are, some people don’t realise that Star Citizen could really shake up the games industry’s, showing what PC’s are really capable off and showing how much better games could be if it wasn’t for publishers and consoles holding games back, but then only time will tell but things are looking promising, I suspect next year we will see a lot more contents for this game at a more regular pace than we do now.
Bare in mind that the demonstration showed off at Gamescom, despite being very impressive, was from an outdated build even at the time when it was shown off. We can only imagine what the newer builds can show off. Maybe we’ll see it in CitizenCon but I’m sure the event will be a blast regardless with Star Marine and hopefully Squadron 42 big reveal.
But like what you said: people used to doubt the game so much but the more we see the less they have to say about it. It’s really what a decent amount of revenue, good intentions, passion and creative freedom can do to a single project. I kinda wish every game could have that opportunity, even on closed systems like consoles. But I’m seeing poor attempts made by companies like Nintendo which doesn’t bode well.
We’ve had way too many disappointments and a luckluster titles coming out in the recent years in my opinion. I think it’s about time that changes. And you never know, publishers may begin to lean more on the PC market once they see some potential, it’s just too early to tell.
That’s true, if I recall I think they said the next build will be shown at CitizenCon so looking forward to that, 3.0 should be intresting that should be out late this year or early next year, I’m trying to keep my hype in check but what I’m seeing is impressive, this could end up being the true next gen game we’ve been waiting for.
I have to admit, I’ve not really had any doubt about Star Citizen at all and I’ve been following it almost from the start, it started out slow but thats understandable, takes time to build a big enough team and also, the scope of the game is much bigger than any of us could’ve imagined, Chris Roberts had no idea that he would get the money he’s got which changes the game that can be done.
I do like how open they are doing things with this project, it’s not perfect but I think it’s a far better way of development than being very closed like most are, we get to see the game as it’s being made, they get to change things going of feedback that we give them which should help to improve the game, it should also mean we don’t get any nasty surprises like No Man’s Sky because we know what we’re getting by how it’s developing.
Problem is with consoles, Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft have a interest in keeping them locked down because it means more money for them, unfortunately for them, PC is on the rise and I suspect it’s to do with PC being so cheap to buy now, don’t have to spend that much more to compete with consoles and the running cost end up being much cheaper.
In any case, if the PC keeps rising, it’s going to be harder for developers to ignore it and I suspect if the rise continues, we’re going to get more developers targeting the PC and doing stuff on it that would be hard to do on consoles, at least without cutting the game down too much.
The best thing for anyone to do is to keep their expectations low. I think I had a pretty high expectation during the early days of the development when there was less to see. But that was from exploring the website and reading about the vision Chris wanted to achieve. I just knew the only way a game like this would only ever happen is through crowdfunding, which is a shame but a blessing too to think about it. And yeah the scope has gotten a lot bigger since, which raised unwanted attention from the media but most of the fanbase voted on it so I don’t see a big issue with that.
I also like this way of development, it’s different yet refreshing. At the beginning though I was worried that eventually I’d get tired of seeing way too many content and by the time the game releases I won’t be seeing anything new, but I doubt that’s the case now, with all the game has going for it.
The main thing that keeps people away from purchasing a PC though is the intimidation of having to build one and install all the software and so on. It’s the reason why they purchase consoles to begin with. That along with the exclusives. And it’s also the reason why we see so much parity till this day, despite the publishers really have no reason but to utilise the PC to it’s fullest capabilities.
I remember back when people complained about the downgrade of The Witcher 3 but console owners defended the move by saying no PC was ever capable of handling the graphics which was first shown at the scale they were aiming for. I always ruled out that type of thought because there is a thing called future proofing. It was made possible with Crysis and it’s being done with Star Citizen. Not all PCs will handle Star Citizen on max settings at 60+ FPS but that’s the whole point. The game is bound to look incredible even on the lowest settings and hopefully most moderate PCs will run it well.
With the statistics we see on sites like Steam I think it’s safe to say that PC could eventually become the dominant platform in the not so distant future. Which obviously can only mean good things 🙂
That’s true and for me, I used to check the site almost daily but now mostly weekly to catch up, not actually ran Star Citizen for about 8 months now and will wait till 3.0 is out before I do, my hype is in check but I think the problem for most is that waiting 5, 6 or so years feels too long and it’s mostly to do with seeing a lot of how the game is being developed whereas most of the times we only hear about a game about a year before it’s released, but I suspect the game will be out in some form or another by late 2018 or at the very least, the vast bulk of the game will be which would be around 6 years of development and considering what Chris Roberts is trying to achieve, well let’s just say my PC is getting scared of running it and thats my future upgraded PC I’ve not bought yet lol.
Same here, I like the development model, it’s not perfect but I’ll take this anyday over how publishers do business but my advice to anyone is not get too involved in the project and let them get on with the project, otherwise, 6 years will feel like 60 and frustration will set in thinking it’s taking too long when it probably isn’t.
I used to hate building PC’s when I was younger but nowadays it’s almost as easy as lego is and mostly only need the manual for wondering where the power connectors go on the motherboard, I wouldn’t say it’s easy but it’s not hard anymore, i do agree with the software part, well mostly upgrading of the software, more needs to be done to automate the process but to be fair, it’s not as bad as it used to be, a lot of drivers update automatically, Windows does with Windows 10 so it’s getting there.
As for parity with consoles, that won’t change unless we get more gamers on PC, good news is that the PC gaming market share is rising faster than the console market is, if that keeps happening, I suspect it’s only a matter of time before more developers target the PC more, more so with Vulkan and DX12, would like to see what the PC could do with these new api’s using much more of the cpu power the PC has on offer and combining DGPU with IGPU as most of us have one but it’s going unused, last game we had that pushed the PC was Crysis 1 but then hardly anyone could run it, so it’s a fine line with pushing hardware but making sure enough gamers can play it otherwise the game won’t sell which is why it’s interesting to see AMD try to grow the mid range market because to me, thats the market that counts, high end market is all well and good but software will never target it which is why AMD, Nvidia and Intel should push the mid range market more aggressively, thats probably the best way for developers to use PC hardware better and also a big incentive to get more console gamers on PC.
I agree with the future proofing aspect of gaming and with any luck, now that consoles are getting a mid life upgrade and with any luck that continues, they might not hold back PC gaming as much, still, the cpu they’ve got on the PS4 Pro is still too weak, but as you say, it’s looking like the PC platform is going to dominate and with that, developers will target the power of the PC.
P.S. Sorry for the long write, I go on a bit at times lol.
It’s cool 😛 I like seeing how much passion others have for this game, it’s nice to see I’m not the only one feeling a little burned out about where the industry currently is, specifically for AAA titles.
I feel like Squadron 42 and Alpha 3.0 will be enough to keep us busy for the longest time. In the recent interview I just watched the other day Chris described 3.0 to feel like an actual fleshed out game, which I’m hoping that’s the case. Not only that but they are going back to improve Arena Commander in a number of ways. With Star Marine hopefully feeling like a game of it’s own I feel like we’ll be well occupied for a decent amount of time before the game is “finished”. It also gives someone like myself time to go back and play all the Wing Commander games I never got to play 😛
I don’t think anyone should worry about optimisation. If anything it’s just the netcode. I also don’t think many will be able to crank up the game to ultra anyway by the time it’s out of alpha/beta phase. Regardless I think the game will look spectacular even on optimal settings. Because it’s being tested by backers with all kinds of specs I’m sure they’ll keep those with low end rigs in mind. But I do kinda think at this point it’d be virtually impossible for a game like this to be able to handle most hardware that’s as old as 5 years.
To be fair though wasn’t the game supposed to come out back in 2014? Things would have been so different if that was the case. We’d have a very fun and unique space sim no doubt, but most likely nothing revolutionary. The wait is long but it’s worthwhile if we continue to keep getting contents along the way, and of course if we don’t place so much time and focus on the whole development like you said.
Personally I’d prefer if they just focus on Vulkan if they can. I’m really not a huge fan of Microsoft’s latest Operating System. For someone like me who loves playing old school games a lot it’s problematic. And of course the system feels very closed and driven by monopolisation, thus why I hope for the best with the Linux brand.
Also remember that Crysis wasn’t well optimised anyway. It’s graphically demanding no doubt but I’m sure more work could have gone into the coding to have it run much more smoothly. With APIs now tackling performance issues much more aggressively and games that utilise the program properly (it’s early days for Vulkan, so it’ll naturally grow once devs understand it well) optimisation will hopefully be less of an issue with most upcoming games.
But overall regarding Star Citizen, it’s just way too early to make any assumptions on how it’ll end up being like, performance and gameplay wise. Once 2.6 and 3.0 arrives we’ll get a clear idea and hopefully there’ll be a much more positive vibe across the gaming community who are still way too skeptic 🙂
Just like many others that are sick of Call of Duty clones that rinse and repeat the same thing, I want something fresh, I want to see what the PC can really do if developers target it properly with no console in sight to hold it back, we might find out how much console gaming is really holding gaming back.
Personally I don’t mind waiting with Star Citizen, I rather them get it right than rush it out and so far it’s looking promising, I think next year will be an important one because we will see the game come together as well as a lot more contents for it so we’ll get a clearer idea of how the game really plays together.
Speaking of Wing Commander, when I was a kid, my brother bought a PC for £2500, crazy I know lol, to play Wing Commander 3 in the mid 90’s, even back then Chris Roberts liked to push the hardware on what can be done.
Yeah most of the performance issues are netcode related, not worried about that for now, I’m still wondering when they are going to move over to Vulkan and DX12, I would imaging they want to take full advantage of those api’s and getting onboard with them earlier might be better to get the best out of them.
I suspect many gamers will want to play the game at 4k when it’s out so playing the game at 1080p might not be as demanding as we think with what hardware will be out at the time, not to mention VR, if we want to play this at 4k VR, we’ll need a super PC.
No I don’t think it was ever planned for 2014 release, could be wrong but I’ve not heard that, in any case I suspect late 2018 could be the year it’s out or very close to release.
Same here with Vulkan, I sometimes wonder if there is any point in them supporting DX12 considering how well Vulkan is and we already know Star Citizen is going to be released on Linux as well at some point so Vulkan makes more sense.
Like you I do prefer Linux but the problem with it is that there are too many distros that really should work together to compete with Microsoft, Linux as a OS can do pretty much anything Windows can and more, and it’s all free but it’s rough around the edges.
Yeah I remember Crisis, the first one was really buggy in those snow stages near the end of the game, performance really went down hill there, Crysis 2 with the bit near the beginning of the game with the tessellated water was a mess as optimisations go, it was rendering it all even thought you wasn’t looking at it, would loved to of seen Crysis 3 with a Vulkan patch, that game hit the cpu a lot, more than any other game I’ve played and it was always in the fields where I suspect it was a lot of draw calls being used.
I’ll keep my hope up, my hype in check and keep my eye on Star Citizen development, CitizenCon should be interesting, but personally, I don’t think they will get it wrong with this game with how open they are with us fans, as well as we’re getting to see the game every step of the way, for them to mess that up would be a crime, personally, I think we will get a masterpiece of a game or a game thats good but could be better.
Fan-f*cking-tastic.
Reminds me of Crysis 2, it was the same with the “faces feature promo”. How often did you see faces close up? How often do you see faces close up in FPS, except Call of Cutscene?
Anyways, it’s ok they polish graphics and implement new things. But is it really necessery for a game you play lonely in your spaceship in black space for 95% of the time?
I am an early backer on kickstarter, but now it’s 4 years and still no release in sight. I would like them to focus on more important things than faces.
The game has this “tech showcase” side of it so might aswell use those bazillions of dollars to go crazy. 🙂
You know, pushing boundaries, raising bars, PC gaming yadda yadda.
Early backer? Do you know that this game has a single player? And the NPC interactions in the MMO will still be as high quality and close up like the campaign.
The game hasn’t been in full development for 4 years, only around two, a lot of it is dedicated to modifying CryEngine in order to make the game possible, you are completely clueless about the things they’ve achieved and just how big of a deal they are.
Well, you saw what happened with XCOM 2. So that’s precisely why we added that sentence.
And yet the XCOM devs have had a history of releasing for consoles, CR new crew does not. That and the Firaxis devs never once stated that it was 100% factually PC exclusive. I cannot find an article where they promised it as a textbook undeniable fact.
We should be asking all those RTS devs the same, especially sine I’ve yet to hear of the recent RTS titles hitting consoles.
I suspect the cpu on the consoles just wouldn’t be powerful enough to handle Star Citizen and thats the newer consoles thats on their way, the PS4 Pro and Scorpio might be able to handle the graphics but that really depends when the game is released on PC where I suspect it might be 2018 which the PC hardware will be far ahead of what even Scorpio can do and considering that this is a game thats going to be constantly developed after release, it’s unlikely it will get released on consoles and I think the best console gamers can hope for is Squadron 42, that might be possible on consoles without too much problems.
The console issue is more complex than just hardware requirements. Chris Roberts has mentioned that main reasons for not releasing on cosoles are:
1. The hardware: He wants to push technology to the upper limits of the PC, and consoles can’t match that. He’s also said he doesn’t want to “dumb down” the game so it can meet the hardware on consoles.
2. The policies: Microsoft and Sony has policies for development studios which are unacceptable for Cloud Imperium Games and Chis Roberts. This goes mainly on updates to the game – how, when, and the cost. They want to be able to distribute the game updates more freely than the console companies allow.
3. Time constraints: They don’t have time to make (a) console version(s) in addition to the PC version. Chris Roberts has said that if the console companies want to pay him what is needed to develop for consoles (and they allow a different update policy, see pt. 2) then MAYBE he’ll consider it – after the PC version is released, not before.
4. The funding: As it is now, people have pledged for a PC only game. It’d be wrong to take funds from there to develop console versions. See also pt. 3.
For these reasons there’s not very likely there’ll ever be a console version of Star Citizen.
As for pt. 2 – Gamers and online gaming media can contribute to change this. However, I see no real uproar in the community at all. No interest to try and change things to the better for users and development studios. So I guess people are satisfied with status quo. People should know that then they also choose a regime which exclude some games from the console platforms.
Yeah, this entirely. However, i don’t see much of an issue with Squadron 42 making it’s way to the consoles. Sony and Microsoft would have to pay for the ports, but i think not only would it be cool for more people to get their hands on it, but it would get some of the console gamers into trying the PU on PC after they finish the singleplayer.
Also, if they got some of the game on console, some of the really stupid naysayers of Star Citizen might finally shut up about it being a scam.
Well, there are a couple of big stumbling stones in the way, which makes it unlikely to happen.
1. They’re busy: Foundry 42 in UK, who’s responsible for making the single player Squadron 42, are making three episodes (so far). The one that is almost finished is ep. 1. After that comes ep. 2 and ep. 3 about a year(?) between the releases. So with the resources they have now they’re busy with making Squadron 42 for a couple of years forward. After that they’ve said they’re going to make even more single player games. If that’ll be Squadron 42 or called something else I don’t know.
The only way they could port to console is to hire more people to work with the port only, so that it won’t influence the PC version.
2. Unified assets and code: The single player and the MMO uses the same assets and much of the same base code. These are updated constantly (some more than others, granted) or are scheduled to be updated/polished/optimized – at least in this early phase where few things are balanced yet or 100% done. If they were to port it to consoles and “dumb down” the graphics (and some code) so the consoles can handle it, then they had to do that every time assets changed in the MMO. It’d be a constant catch-up game (pun intended).
From a developer’s point of view it’d be a nightmare … Eg. “What? Another change for this ship? Again!??!! But … I just used a large part of yesterday to port it to consoles, and now I must do it all over again!”
They could split the assets so that the MMO and single player used different sets but that’d raise other, and more serious, problems which would need even more resources to maintain.
So gorgeous.
Wow! They have todays standard looking faces. Congratulation.
No where near as detailed as Star Citizen/Squadron 42. Not sure what’s the point.
There isn’t any point, what he showed is not even close to what Star Citizen is doing.
Point is people act like this so new and posting this has never been done. Dev’s have been working on facial tech for a long time. And I would hope SC would have decent facial animations using CryEngine and collecting millions of dollars to make a game. Gfx may be dated, but the tech is there.
Those facial animations don’t look as good as Star Citizen at all. Only game that comes close is Uncharted 4. Sure Half Life 2 and some other games had great facial animations and details for their time and they still look surprisingly good but this stuff is on whole another level.
What f¨cking tech are you talking about?
For years CryEngine has always been way ahead at rendering realistic characters/faces. Even UE4 is still pretty far behind in this area.
When asked by Italian site PC-Gaming (translated by Worlds Factory) why the studio opted to release Star Citizen for the PC and not consoles, Peterson was blunt. “First and foremost, consoles couldn’t possibly handle a game like Star Citizen. Chris and I grew up with PC games and in the last few years we had the feeling that PC had been pushed aside, with most games coming out as mere console ports with graphics that didn’t really exploit the power of PC,” he said. “Gaming PCs right now are formidable, with powerful CPUs and GPUs. Even next-generation consoles cannot be compared, their internal components are already older than what I could add to a gaming PC today.”
“We wanted to create a game that showed everyone the capabilities of PC, for those that have fun building configurations with double GPUs and liquid cooling, who no doubt were frustrated to not be able to fully use the potential of their machines,” he said.
Thanks for this post Olek. Very nice indeed and I wish more developers would reason like this.
I’ve seen all that before. It’s not as good. CryEngine was at this level years ago. The quality also does not mostly depend on “3D scanning” tech either.
The images you posted are showing off very recent improvements to UE4 regarding subsurface skin scattering and skin shaders, and yet they barely match what CryEngine could do 3 years ago.
Citation needed x2.
To be fair, i completely expect Squadron 42, the singleplayer campaign to make its way to the PS4 Pro and the Xbox Scorpio. As for Star Citizen…. it would be very unlikely.
First off, you would need a persistent universe across ALL hardware, including Xbox and Playstation (and both are known to not play well with eachother). Second, both would have to allow CiG to do their own updating WHENEVER they wanted, without red flags or any limitations (also something both sony and xbox are not known for).
Aside from a couple other hurdles i wouldn’t expect it. I do however both expect and hope that SQ42 eventually does end up on the PS4 Pro and Xbox Scorpio… (as long as Sony and Microsoft pay for the port, as required by CiG as they stated that they would use NO backer money to make console ports).
I don’t know why it would make sense for the SP portion of the game to make it’s way, but not the MP based side.
See S42 will need updates as well, the vast majority of games these days need updates and updates on consoles all cost money. The same would happen with 42.
Any hurdle SC’s MP would face on console would have the same occur with 42. both aren’t entirely different games from a visual let alone gameplay perspective, which is why I don’t see either working on current gen systems let alone those in the future. The way consoles and their holders operate make sure that it won’t happen without any sort of tampering going on.
Really though, those that want to play it should build the PC’s for it, rather than have it tampered with to adhere to a console model, otherwise allow for all PC games to be tampered in the same way and then we have to wait for another CR person to take the new mantle and give us a new “we won’t pander to consoles” speech.
It’s not going to happen.
SQ42 is going to be pretty much as hardware intensive as the persistent universe.
The terrible mobile CPU in the current consoles will not be able to handle it.