A space senate speech by a virtual Gary Oldman establishes the tone of Star Citizen‘s Squadron 42 single-player story mode, featuring the voices of Mark Hamil, Andy Serkis, Gillian Anderson and many, many more.
It’s like Star Citizen‘s Chris Roberts is picking up where Wing Commander left off, gathering a massive cast to tell another epic tale of spaceship shooting. We’ve got Wing Commander alum like Mark Hamil and John Rhys-Davies working side-by-side with veterans and relative newcomers alike.
The cast was announced today during the CitizenCon 2015 event in Manchester.
For those of you who’d rather not read the cast list as the credits at the end of a video clip, here’s the full list:
- Gary Oldman
- Mark Hamil
- Mark Strong
- John Rhys-Davies
- Jack Huston
- Ben Mendelsohn
- Andy Serkis
- Harry Treadaway
- Liam Cunningham
- Rhona Mitra
- Ian Duncan — The Player
- Sophie Wu
- Gemma Whelan
- Craig Fairbrass
- Gillian Anderson
Check out the full cast talking about the filming process in the behind-the scenes video below.
And here’s a look at the facial animation tech being used.
Squadron 42 should be ready for play sometime next year. Watch the Star Citizen Twitch channel for more from the event.
Comments
39 responses to “Gary Oldman Headlines Star-Studded Star Citizen Story Mode Cast”
I guess this is what 90 million dollars of crowd funding gets you, never mind that in the same period another space shooter, elite dangerous, has crowd funded 1/10 of the amount, gone through beta, launched on pc and Mac and now launched on xbone, and about to launch their first expansion.
I’m a backer of star citizen, but damn they are taking their sweet ass time to get things done.
I’m a backer too and I am happy to wait to have the game I backed in 2012 made to the best quality it can be and absolutely set the standard for gaming going forward. I’ve rarely seen a single thing that was made quickly be better than something made patiently.
Assuming of course that it does eventually get made. So far it feels like Chris Roberts getting paid to meet his heroes and burn more cash. I hope SC does get done, and is great, but the cast list looks more like a personal vanity project than the best way to ensure a quality end product.
I hate to think what the spend (money and time) is on these sequences, it adds to the game, but not as much as, well, actual game play.
CR was a Director and Producer in Hollywood dude – most of the guys there were excited to work with Chris again. Also it was part of the 12 million dollar and 29 million dollar stretch goals to put Hollywood actors into MoCap for the games story mode – so the backers are getting the Stretch Goals they paid for – also the Backers seem to be quite happy on all this.
Erm, I know his record in ‘Hollywood’
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0730932/
Outlander and Lord of War are both pretty good. The rest, not so much.
The Wing Commander movie got fucked over by Fox as a rider for the Star Wars Episode 1 trailer. They deliberately crippled the budget and made it a half-assed film.
Point of reference – did you expect any of those movies with their budgets to be much more better just with a different director?
Yeah Chris Roberts might not be an Oscar winner but he went out there and did make movies more than can be said for most of us.
I’ve backed both, E:D may be launched but has sod all to do in the way of gameplay, is as much fun as owning an oil painting, and are asking full price of the game for each yearly expansion.
Maybe in 5 years E:D will be a fun game with lots to keep you occupied, but unless you derive massive thrillsfrom shooting things, flying up to totally static spheres in space or flying from one of a very limited pool of station looks to another of the same pool of stations pretending you’re carrying cargo you’re gonna get bored fast.
Oh and everyone is mute in E:D, except for station computers,
Rather annoyed ED hasn’t bothered with a Linux release yet. I guess hardware devs are to blame for that due to their rotten drivers for Linux. (mostly AMD)
Also you can’t compare this really to ED, for starters ED has no characters, just box ships, it’s a vastly more simpler game to design if you take out NPC characters like that.
I suppose if Elite had any actual content there might be a worthy comparison, but my experience with it has felt distinctly like an engine, not a game.
They better do take their time! I Mean Star Citizen is doing something huge comparing to Elite, the whole Squadron 42 as revealed it’s a big part of the game (and the biggest reason of many backers on the making of their original kickstarter pledge)
Wait is wait, i believe we are all used to it, wait years and years for titles we do love and want to release a single teaser, trailer, conference attendance, etc…
I wonder who was responsible for putting Sandi Gardiner (aka Mrs Roberts) in the voice cast and how much she is being paid. Hopefully she made the cut on merit alone and not because of her connections, and hopefully she is being paid an appropriate amount for the work she is doing and her recognition as an actor(?)
Also interesting how the RSI website shows Sandi just below Gary Oldman, ahead of such actors as John Rhys Davies and Andy Serkis. Since it is not alphabetical, you might wonder whether the listing is based on the prominence of the character in the game.
Additionally, Mike left Sandi out of the ‘full cast list’… don’t want to be accused of hating Star Citizen or harassing the Roberts family!
As a Backer I’m glad Sandi is in the game and CIG did use a lot of their internal Staff to flesh out the game instead of using Backer money to pay for large amounts of background actors.
Also CIG is a private company they can do as they please in relation to putting staff and family into their games. Basically its like complaining that a guy opens a Small Supermarket and gets his family to run the joint and then complain because they’re not hiring outside the family.
Why do you even follow Star Citizen if you’re slighted by everything they do?
I said I hoped she was being paid an appropriate amount. I wouldn’t expect her to do the work for free (although maybe she is, as far as we know). However, she’s no John Rhys Davies or Andy Serkis (certainly no Gary Oldman). If I had $92 million to make a movie (regardless if it were publicly funded or not) and cast my wife (with comparatively little acting experience) in anything like a prominent role, I’d cop a public flogging if she did anything less than a stellar job. Star Citizen isn’t some sci-fi B-movie, so hopefully Chris Roberts has enough sense not to indulge his wife’s acting aspirations to the detriment of the finished product.
You’re right that CIG is a private company but even private companies get lambasted when they make shoddy products for public consumption. Even notable developers such as Crytek and Double Fine are privately owned, but we happily judge them for stuff like not paying staff (Crytek) or what happened with the Broken Age kickstarter (Double Fine).
I think telling people to ‘leave Britney alone’ is an example of misplaced loyalty. CIG is a commercial operation operating in the public domain, and isn’t in need of someone to protect it from having hurt feelings.
You seem fairly critical of her acting talent, have you actually watched any of the things she’s been in or are you basing your criticism solely on the length of the list?
I’m happy to be corrected if that is great acting, but it looks B-movie grade to me.
I couldn’t really say how that compares to her actual work. She’s been in one or two decent movies over the years though. That said, we don’t know anything about the role she’ll be taking, it seems a bit premature to be making guesses. There’s no live filming in SQ42, she may well only have a voice role.
Aren’t they doing full mo-cap as well as voice? But yeah, I agree that if she has a minor role there’s probably no harm in it. If you check on the RSI site though she is listed quite prominently compared to say Rhys Davies or Serkis. Time will tell 🙂
@zambayoshi They’re doing mocap, yeah. I think that also makes it difficult to assess how her acting will be if she’s one of the subjects of it. I suppose what I object to is more you saying she’s only really suited to a minor role, I think that’s really something we have to wait and see. Voice-only roles can still be major roles, which could be a factor in her position in the list.
Before the people start – $45 is all you need to get Alpha and Beta of Star Citizen and the Squadron 42 game the trailer was for. There are no more modules – the game is switching over to baked in everything with a Mini Persistent universe coming out which they will add to overtime to build out to the full game. SQ 42 will not be put into alpha or beta but will be released as the whole version so very little of it gets spoiled.
Still feels like they are spreading themselves and the money too thin, rather than crafting a really tight experience that will be finished this decade, but I hope they can pull it off.
I’d rather more gameplay than second rate cinematics personally.
Is it bad I’m thinking that CG looks subpar and far, far under developed? The motion is nice, but the texturing seems odd and the facial animation seems like it’s fresh from the late 1990’s…
That weird stretchy-mouth…
It’s not CG, it’s real time.
CG just means computer graphics, it can be real-time or pre-rendered.
I agree, it looks awful either way.
If you want to be literal sure, but typically CG is used as short hand for pre-rendered. Going by the standard of most other real time cutscenes it looks fine to me. The Order is about the only thing that springs to mind that look noticeably better, and that is a very different kind of game.
As I said, the motion is fine, but the facial animation is bad. There’s time before release though, hopefully they fix it a little. That elastic mouth look is pretty dodgy, which is unfortunate because though some might decry it and say ‘oh its just a mouth’, unfortunately it’s not, it’s a focal point, it’s not like it’s a tiny bit of scenery and lets down the whole, otherwise impressive, scene.
I think the mouth problem comes from getting the actors to pose in extremes and building the models from those. The last 10-20% of movement towards the extremes are pretty much never seen in real life, and create large amounts of dysmorphism in the facial structure. It works better when you set less extreme boundaries as your blend targets.
That, and at times the mouth is forming almost unnatural shapes. But, to be fair no game has achieved this perfect replication yet.
Also to be fair, Gary does have kind of a dodgy mouth. Watching Fifth Element now, and his real face looks kinda stretchy.
I thought Until Dawn was a good recent example. Even when Peter Stormare was stretching his mouth in an exaggerated fashion (which I’m sure he was directed to do) it looked fairly good. Of course, LA Noire is still the pinnacle of facial capture for me.
@poita – I like Gary in Léon, particularly the meme-worthy “EVERYONE” moment.
https://youtu.be/NRIr9MNmCwU
I really only come across CG as referring to “non-physical/non-practical” props, characters and effects, not as a delineation between real-time or pre-rendered, but that is just my experience.
That’s because you’re correct. “Computer Generated Imagery” can be either prerendered or real time.
SO.DAMN.GOOD!
That is all.
Awesome work but did anyone else feel like they were watching Starship Troopers and expected a “Would you like to know more” splash appear?
Absolutely!
great cast but yeah im extremely wary of this and will wait for release of the single player part and reviews before i touch it with a 10 ft pole. far to many warning bells are ringing for me but i still have hope it succeeds
So here’s what we know so far, Chris has been spending a lot of time/money actually doing what he said he would do. The art is coming along really well, there’s a lot more content than people thought there was coming online, and the CG in the ingame cutscenes is still a WIP which Roberts actually said was the case in the video. Overall the project is humming along well. As someone who actually tried to make a game like Star Citizen (http://vegastrike.sf.net) I can tell you that their progress has been pretty reasonable. Considering that we never got even close to having FPS occurring inside ships, or half the content they’ve been able to generate.
Watching Star Citizen progress has been an excellent view at how you create a project of this size. Modularising the development the way they have is clearly the only way to go. I am not surprised that Arena Commander was able to morph into a persistent universe relatively easily as this is how Vegastrike progressed.
When we started the scene was just a cube and you could fly through the background and disappear, then we blew the play area up to an insane size, and finally we added jump points and inter-system travel. It’s an iterative process guys, I would be a lot more worried if they had tried to make a single large project and released everything in one hit.
This sort of quality takes time, Wing Commander 3/4 took 1-2 years each to develop, but what people forget is that almost all of the engine code was developed in Strike Commander. Strike Commander in it’s day was known as the Apocalypse Now of gaming, it was due to appear in 1991 but wasn’t released until 1993, but it did eventually ship. It went on to provide the foundation for Wing Commander Armada, Wing Commander 3 and Wing Commander 4. It’s really not surprising that Roberts is taking a long time with the engine creation. What’s been shown so far has been amazing and it’s going to be worth the wait.
They said The Order looked amazing and it turned out to be a bit disappointing in terms of gameplay.
Similarly, I think Chris Roberts should have had a fixed budget for the game as originally conceptualised. Anything beyond the $20+ million he was talking about around 2 years ago should have been either marked down for development as DLC or put into a sequel. Having a rolling budget of unknown size must be impossible to manage if you don’t set tight boundaries and stick to them. Instead, Chris has stretched the original concept to epic proportions to the point where if the funding stops the project will likely collapse in a heap. This is the likely reason that so much effort has been put into fundraising, culminating with the latest ‘referral programme’ malarkey.
Good thing the backers have had alot of input into how the game actually plays and have been able to do this for quite some time now, and will have only yet even more input into how things work when the next stage of the alpha releases and we can all dink about in the finally wrapped up threads of seperate development, rather than it being a secret for 6 years, its hard to fix a budget when the money just keeps rolling in. I’m pretty sure they stopped doing stretch goals at the 60 million dollar mark so, I guess they have closed the scope after that point, there might be a point as to them having closed the scope earlier, but the scope has been closed.
I’m also pretty sure any game ever that has people playing online has friend referrals. People don’t want to pay a subscription for this game, but they also want a massive universe to run around in to shoot other people, because theyre pvp junkies and others want a persistent pve universe so, what does that leave them with as a way to continue their funding? money doesn’t grow on trees and if they don’t force a subscription, its going to be the already in the website cashshop and referrals trying to get more people to buy into it. 1 million people have bought into the game or very nearly, with nearly 100 million. thats nearly 100 dollars per person on average. alot of people just plumped for the basic package. You never ever ever have to spend more than 45 dollars, of course the temptations are there, but you’re pledging to make the game more awesome and get something in return for the game, thats it. I have no issue with people questioning things but its always brought to the fact its going to explode in a heap which if so it will be some pretty expensive fireworks. I bought a first class ticket to the show, what did you get? 😛 I have no regrets. Never spend what you can’t afford to lose. Its what I would ahve spent if he’d kept making space sims on a regular basis anyway. I’m purely paying back the amazing childhood I got growing up on Wing Commander/ Privateer and Freelancer.
RE: Sandy, She was born in australia, south australia no less, so theres a piece of australia right in there in RSI. I’ve never seen her act. *shrug* she’s already VP of marketing so I would be suprised if she actually needed anything more, theyre independently wealthy, and she got to rub shoulders with some pretty awesome actors. At the very least, SOMETHING would ahve rubbed of on her in that regard of how to act. We’ll find out when it ships.