Star Citizen, the game that made a very good case for Crytek’s CryEngine, is now doing the same for Amazon’s Lumberyard instead. The engine switch occurred with the release of update 2.6, and while the patch notes make no mention of the new arrangement, a big new splash screen logo at the start of the game kind of gave it away. Cloud Imperium Games’ CEO and creative director Chris Roberts confirmed the news in a press release:
“We’ve been working with Amazon for more than a year, as we have been looking for a technology leader to partner with for the long term future of Star Citizen and Squadron 42. Lumberyard provides ground breaking technology features for online games, including deep back-end cloud integration on AWS and its social component with Twitch that enables us to easily and instantly connect to millions of global gamers. Because we share a common technical vision, it has been a very smooth and easy transition to Lumberyard. In fact, we are excited to announce that our upcoming 2.6 Alpha release for Star Citizen is running on Lumberyard and AWS.”
If you’re a Star Citizen yourself, you’re probably slightly more interested in the contents of the patch, which will finally let you play a bit of Star Marine (Star Marine being the game’s FPS module). Take on other players in two maps and on two modes, fighting in traditional spaceship corridors or by heading outside for a bit of zero-G combat. Here’s what all that looks like:
