Star Citizen finally allows playable women among the ranks in character customisation overhaul

Star Citizen has already led quite a lengthy 8-year-long development, with a number of features still yet to arrive to the ambitious space simulator. Alpha 3.5 is set to land this weekend and while the team at Cloud Imperium Games will be dropping a number of new ships, weapons and general improvements, the “headline feature” is finally making women playable in the game this weekend.

Character customisation is a tough element to balance, with many players spending hours tweaking their perfect hero only to easily deform their progress due to overcomplicated options. Cloud Imperium Games has worked hard to build on top of its original presets to offer more options when customising characters, including the ability to select female officers.

“It involved creating an entirely new ‘rig' for female characters to make them physiologically distinct from the male characters, something most games don’t try to attempt for player characters,” explained head of development Chris Roberts in a press release.

“Once we finalized the female character, we had to retrofit our entire universe: ships, animations, clothing, armor, and weapons to make sure they all worked with the female character rig as well as the male rig. The advantage of this approach is you always get realistic looking players, not immersion breaking ‘monsters' that sometimes can be created using more traditional techniques.”

While there are shared elements between the two, such as hair, the new character creation screen places flexibility in the hands of players to personalise their character. Players will be able to use the three ‘source heads’ to alter features across the brow, eyes, cheeks, nose, mouth, jaw and crown, with a “near-infinite pool” of customisation. Once a player is happy with one feature, they can lock it so that feature isn't changed while customising the remainder.

Elsewhere in the update, there are updates to the Star Marine FPS module, the introduction of in-atmosphere gravity for pilots to deal with and AI-controlled bounty hunters to be on the lookout for. More can be found on the Star Citizen website.

KitGuru Says: I actually really like the look of Star Citizen’s new character creation pool, even if it is still in need of more variety, supposedly promised by the developers. The detail is incredibly crisp and it doesn’t look like there are any ways to truly mess your character up.

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