Star Citizen is getting American Sign Language emotes

Star Citizen developers have collaborated with one of their community members to create a series of American Sign Language emotes for deaf and partially deaf players.

At 13:30 into the video animation director Steve Bender says "We have a lot of community members who are hard of hearing or maybe deaf and they don't interact with the game in the same way that someone who hears voice would do so."

"I'm really happy for the community to have this opportunity to be able to roleplay and to express themselves in the way that they see fit," Bender adds.

At the moment we can't quite think of another game that includes ASL emotes in this way. It's a classy inclusion by Cloud Imperium—it's always great to see developers taking steps to improve accessibility in their games.

The space sim has been in development by Cloud Imperium Games since 2011 and has raised over $200 million since funding started in 2012. The total spent on the game so far has almost reached the same figure, making it one of the more costly games in development, especially when you consider it doesn't have a release date—though the singleplayer Squadron 42 is reportedly going into beta testing in the latter part of 2020.

Sarah started as a freelance writer in 2018, writing for PCGamesN, TechRadar, GamingBible, Red Bull Gaming and more. In 2021, she was offered a full-time position on the PC Gamer team where she takes every possible opportunity to talk about World of Warcraft and Elden Ring. When not writing guides, most of her spare time is spent in Azeroth—though she's quite partial to JRPGs too. One of her fondest hopes is to one day play through the ending of Final Fantasy X without breaking down into a sobbing heap. She probably has more wolves in Valheim than you.