Just announced at the latest Citizen Con held in the UK, the cast members for Squadron 42!

https://robertsspaceindustries.com/squadron42

GARY OLDMAN

MARK HAMILL

MARK STRONG

SOPHIE WU

SANDI GARDINER

GILLIAN ANDERSON

CRAIG FAIRBRASS

LIAM CUNNINGHAM

BEN MENDELSOHN

IAN DUNCAN

JACK HUSTON

JOHN RHYS DAVIES

RHONA MITRA

ANDY SERKIS

GEMMA WHELAN

HARRY TREADAWAY

Please excuse me while I find my jaw.

Uh, even with the budget they've raised (and I'll disclose that I've contributed towards it) I dunno how they can afford everything in the game on top of the kind of cast listed here.

I'm increasingly mystified by this project, sometimes in great ways and other times in really ominous ones

Well, with the money that game is raking in they can afford big names like that. Still, holy shit.

The cast is pretty perfect.

You had me at Mark Strong. That guy needs to be in more stuff.

Really I think Oldman would be the only properly expensive get, maybe Gillian Anderson.

I ... have no idea what is going on but that is an insane amount of talent.

Definitely. He has a great persona that is underused.

I was secretly hoping for some rad Wing Commander 3/4 style FMV, but whatever. I'll take it.

I think it's probably important that Chris Roberts worked in Hollywood for a while after he was done with Wing Commander. I bet that dude has some connections that help explain this impressive cast list.

It's probably also telling that I totally forgot about Star Citizen's single player component on top of whatever crazy ur-game $50,000 ship MMO the rest of it is. My morbid curiosity continues to be piqued.

This is a great cast, but I am still certain that Star Citizen is going to be one of the biggest pieces of vaporware in video game history.

Mark Strong! One of my favorite actors, awesome.

...and Sandi Gardiner, Chris Roberts' wife, who also holds some type of executive type position in the company. What a shocker.

Well she has acted before, probably saved some cash by using her since she's already on the pay roll. Anyway it's not new information.

This should help to quiet some of the growing dissent. While I remain skeptical of CIG's ability to deliver everything that has been laid out, attaching such big names to a project implies a level of resource investment that should translate well to the rest of the project. Maybe they aren't snorting cocaine in solid gold Veyrons after all?

The animation stuff is also on display here, apparently secondary characters don't get the full works. It's a little rough but I do like the interior of the ship.

Wh-what?

So much doomsaying about this. Fuck that, i want them to reach for the stars (celebrity and celestial kind, bot metaphorically and actually).

It surprises me more to find there is a "-con" for a game that hasn't been made yet.

I hope it turns out great, but man the odds are getting stacked pretty high..

Andy Serkis and Rhona Mitra are pretty terrific too.

Love me some Liam Cunningham, but hoo boy does this game seem like a pipe dream at this point

I hope I'm wrong, but my gut is telling me this game will be the winner of the "biggest disappointment" category in a couple years.

"Alright, I'm ready for work. Where's the mocap suit?"

"Sorry, Andy. It's not that kind of gig..."

Stellar cast. Let's just hope it actually comes out in the not so far flung future.

Well at least we now know where all the money went...

I'm still fairly sure this game will never actually exist. It's all just been a gigantic ruse, the owner of the company is off swanning it the world living like a king.

Dat cast doe.

GameSpot has an image in their article saying more cast members will be announced.

http://static1.gamespot.com/uploads/original/1179/11799911/2949677-sc.jpg

? SQ42 is mocaped.. Full performance capture actually, they are doing it with Andy Serkis studio Imaginarium Studios.

Yeah, for me that presentation pretty much knocked it out of the park as a whole. I'm sure all of this seems extremely weird and far fetched for people who haven't been playing around with the client for the past couple of years, but watching and playing the game as it evolves through the modules that are now starting to come together in the roll out of the Persistent Universe Alpha is very exciting.

I must have read about this at some point but I completely forgot about Star Citizen's single player story. To be honest this part seems right up my alley unlike the rest of the game they are making.

yeah i'm not really following it at all (yet) and i'm surprised when people act like they're not showing anything/not making any progress. it sounds like they're being pretty damn transparent about everything.

Seems like Chris Roberts never gave up his Hollywood dreams despite having produced dreck like Who's Your Caddy? and Lucky Number Slevin, though Lord of War was pretty dope.

In pro wrestling a guy who runs an indie federation without being one of the guys (i.e. has previous ties to wrestling or earned his way in) is referred to as a "money mark". A money mark is looked down upon as a wannabe and is usually scammed out of his money because pro wrestling is still a carny business. I think Hollywood might run the same way and they found one hell of a money mark in poor Chris Roberts and his crowd funded millions. I don't know much about how any of this works financially but the same studio responsible for some of the special effects in Avengers: Age of Ultron can't be cheap nor can some of the bigger name talent on that cast list.

Man this Star Citizen stuff is secretly the most entertaining video game news story in years! I've said it a hundred times before that I really do want Star Citizen to succeed, but I can't shake my gut feeling that this is all heading for disaster.

I mean, I just don't think I believe them?

I ... I think at some point I fell off the train or something, what in the sam hell is star citizen? Are they still saying this will be FTP? Man, I am so lost.

... I don't understand what's so difficult to grasp. It's an open universe space sim with space flight and first person elements with a single player lead in campaign. There is nothing mysterious here.

Just wondering how far that 90 million dollars will go with them having to pay all of that talent and having more than 200+ people on a payroll all year round.

I guess I just dont like the practice of selling ships for large sums of cash to players. According to what I have read most of those ships arent even in-game yet.

Man, I don't know if I could handle Luke Skywalker, Scully, Onion Knight, Jim Gordon, Lord Blackwood, Gollum, and Gimli all in one film game. That's a pretty damn good lineup of folks.

Bro, Luck Number Slevin is great.

I seriously thought Star Citizen was cancelled. It probably still is now there will just be a bunch of pissed of celebrities who didn't get paid.

It's cool but that Gary Oldman character model does not match the quality of that Gary Oldman voice.

Wait, I'm confused. Is this a second game in the Start Citizen universe, or is this just the single player for the same game? I've lost track on what this game is supposed to be.

I see that the money I gave them is truly being used to make a great game.

/somesarc

At least with the actual stakes and people involved, it has more of a chance to become something tangible.

No offense but having watched that trailer that is one of the worst Gary Oldman performances I've ever seen (well heard). He sounds like he is straining to shit a brick or rather straining to hold it in and while that may work for a specific character/situation a general/official supposedly giving a rousing speech is not it.

Honestly, this to me is more exciting than anything they have shown for the PU. All I wanted when Star Citizen was announced was a modern Wing Commander with a big budget. SQ42 seems to be that, but it is really sad to see it just become an add on for the "main attraction" PU.

There seems to be a collective willingness for this game to fail.

Also Mark Strong's involvement is way more interesting to me than Oldman or Hamil. He's great.

I wonder if they will offer whatever this single player campaign component of this is as a standalone.

I thought Squadron 42 was the single player portion of the game? I'm not sure what you mean by standalone...I mean the whole game is only going to be $60 on release that will supposedly include everything, at least that's what I thought.

Who knows though, maybe they will release things piecemeal as expansions. I haven't been following development of Star Citizen that closely since I initially backed the game early last year with a package I believe was around $45 that got me access to the dogfighting beta and a single ship, a small fighter.

Everything they show is always impressive as fuck! I tried that open beta or w/e a while back and, yeeesh! Walking the hanger was just AWFUL! Flying the ship around felt ok, not overly impressive. Graphics were ok. I know there is still a shit ton of work to be done on the game, but what they had was not impressive by any means at the time. Hope it lives up to the hype, but I just dont know....

@john1912:Yes, I think you are echoing a lot of peoples feelings right now. The MMO has to work with hundreds of players doing their own thing within an instance of space, with online latency factoring into it as well. It has to track players' ships, as well as what goes on within those ships. Saying this is complex is a major understatement. Developing and implementing the tech required, getting the features to work off and online is one thing, but in addition to that, it has to be fun and engaging to actually play it. Creating content enmasse and have it be fun and not overly complicated, tedious nor repetitive on a big scale will be a challenge.

There are those who are willing to give CIG the chance to deliver, and others just want it to fold right now and be done with it.

Why gamers want a video game like this to fail is interesting and it seems the reasons I mentioned above weigh more to those groups of players than actually getting to see a game get made.