If you’ve seen Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi or you’ve purposefully been avoiding it because of how poorly people have been saying Luke Skywalker was depicted in the film, at least the veteran actor seems to have some veritable material in which to chew up his scenes in Cloud Imperium Games’ upcoming Star Citizen: Squadron 42.
The developers let loose a new near-two minute teaser trailer featuring Hamill in character aboard the UEES Stanton. The clip features Hamill as a grizzled, hard-as-nails space veteran who doesn’t take any soy from any boys. He’s introduced to the main player-character while chopping one of the technicians down to size. You can see Hamill playing it straight and playing it tough in his role with the video below.
A couple of things here…
So first of all, this is a cinematic but this is all in-engine. The assets are the same ones that will be used when playing in the actual game.
Second of all, we see that the ambiance, lighting, and shaders are all on point. Physically-based rendering of realtime lights are on full display here. The blinking hazard lights illuminate off the face and armor of Hamill, and the sub-surface scattering adds some depth to his appearance. It’s still not quite realistic, but for gameplay assets it looks really good.
You can see the radial microsurface reflections of the light from the ship bouncing off the coiled clamps, and slightly working in tandem with the specular highlights on the fabric of the suit.
On the innermost chest-piece we can see that the light dulls, where the material rendering occludes reflective object rendering but does refract the red hue from the light source.
Small details like this within a realtime runtime is what could really help set Star Citizen apart from the rest of the horde when it does finally release.
I don’t know what the writing or characterizations for Star Citizen: Squadron 42 will be like, but so far Mark Hamill looks really good here and he definitely seems on point with his acting. Hopefully it’s a role he might actually be proud of… as opposed to his appearance in the last two Star Wars films.
