Speed. What is it? What does it mean? These are the questions posed in the new commercial for ORIGIN Jumpworks 300 Series line of spacecraft.

This commercial has, singlehandedly, motivated me to break my ‘kickstarter virginity’ and pledge money towards Chris Robert‘s Star Citizen. Heck, if the comerical wasn’t enough, just check out their brochure. Now THAT’S marketing!

For those of you unfamiliar with Star Citizen, it’s an open world space-combat sandbox game with the goal of creating an astoundingly detailed world for players to explore and create their own stories. While the game is structured in a similar way to modern day MMOs, it’s going to lack a subscription as well as feature a single-player campaign game and support private servers. This is a game aimed at the PC gaming crowd and, more specifically, all the space simulator fans out there that haven’t had a decent game to flock to in ages.

Now I’ll admit that I’ve had my eyes on Star Citizen for some time now. I was a HUGE fan of Freelancer back in High School and fell in love with the space sim genre from that point on. This was a game so detailed that you could, if you so desired, explore the deepest recesses of space to find secret jump points to hidden pirate space stations and even long lost empires. Or perhaps exploration wasn’t your thing, and you just wanted to make tons of money, buy the sexiest ship, and blow up some criminals. Or maybe you wanted to be one of those criminals and hijack trade-lanes for profit! Freelancer let you do all of that and more; yet fell short of what Robert’s and his team at the time really wanted to do with the genre. Star Citizen aims to fix that and take that level of detail to a whole new level…

It should also be noted, if the 300i commercial hadn’t demonstrated it enough, that the team behind Star Citizen is giving the game a level of scale that no game I know of has ever managed to create. You can literally be the captain of an entire Carrier, with your friends logging online and running around on-board your ship before hopping in their own spacecraft or one of the carriers turrets to defend it against attackers. This is similar to what the Battlefield games have done in the past, only at a level that those games only wish they had. Wanna hang out in the carrier’s mess hall with your buddies? Go for it.

The team making this game is doing everything it can to make sure these ships and locations are as realistic and detailed as possible; and for good reason too! Because the game isn’t just limited to space combat, but person-to-person on-board combat as well. Perhaps you’re more confident in your friends shooting abilities than their piloting skills, then have them load themselves up with some serious armor and go board an enemies ship. If you’re able to kill them, then the ship and its cargo is yours! Of course, not being in your ship has its own dangers. After all it’s much harder to get shot in the head when you’re in a cockpit than it is in a cramped hallway during a fire-fight. And with death in Star Citizen being “permanent” in its own unique way… players will have to weigh the possible pros and cons of everything they do.

Star Citizen may still be a year or two away from being released, but that hasn’t stopped me from getting excited about it. This is the space simulator that I’ve been dying to play for almost a decade now, and I’m ecstatic to see that someone is finally bringing it to fruition. I’m not going to sit here and tell you to go pledge money to them or anything like that, they’ve already raised $10 million dollars and aren’t really showing any signs of losing momentum. I will say this though; the stuff Chris Roberts team has been putting together has renewed my hope that the game industry still has a bright future ahead for it, despite how stale the console industry has become as of late.

It may have taken a while for me to finally do it, but I’m glad that Star Citizen was the first game I helped put money towards to develop. Star Citizen has the potential to change the face of PC gaming; and if their level of detail and standards of quality is any indication of what’s to continue as the game grows, then I suspect nothing less out of it.

So swing by their site and give the game a look. You might just be surprised by what you see… I know I was. I can’t wait to see what’s next for them!