Imagine, the trailer asks. Imagine you could be anything you wanted to be. And then it shows you –well, not everything, but enough to get your mouth drooling. Pilots pulling on leather gloves, striding coolly toward sleek-finned ships. Cyberpunk bars filled with smugglers sipping cocktails. Soldiers in power armour bro-punching each other in dropships. Exotic alien planets, just waiting to be discovered.
In-game means footage taken from a game that you could potentially play right now. In-engine is like an in-game cutscene. But we don’t play cutscenes. Cutscenes are just cinematics that run within the game engine. There is some of what appears to be in-game footage in the trailer around 1:28, where you see flashes of a dogfighting game with a floaty flight model and a rather generic corridor shooter, but the rest is of the trailer is in-engine
Star Citizen‘s pledge page, where the trailer directs you to learn more, that might raise another eyebrow or two. Pay $35 for the entry level, get a bargain basement ship. That’s right –for the beta of this game, you buy access to a single ship. The brochure goes all the way up to $265 for the ‘Redeemer’ –a capital class dropship.
Star Citizen does promise that everything you see in the trailer will be part of the game eventually, including all of the featured ships for a single price. But I worry it’s a dangerous premise to so prominently feature content that isn’t playable, and won’t be for a long time, with a potentially misleading phrase like in-engine –especially when the barrier of entry into the beta is so high.
