Star Citizen footage shown at CitizenCon

As you might expect from a game that hoovers in money at a rate of space-knots, Star Citizen has its own convention. It's called CitizenCon, unsurprisingly, and at this year's vaguely dystopian-sounding CitizenCon, developers Roberts Space Industries showed off some early footage of the game's planetside features. When you tire of shooting, trading, racing, or paying real money for virtual spaceships, you'll be able to land on planets and walk around in first- or third-person, something that does look quite nice, even if the cutscene-based landing procedure disappoints post-No Man's Sky.

From what I can gather, the focus with Star Citizen is more on living in its world than being active in every part of it, hence the promise of being able to walk around your ship and look out the windows as you land on a planet, rather than physically guiding it into a planetside docking bay. As you can see above, the actual landing part is currently handled via a short cutscene, as is the moment when you pierce through a planet's atmosphere—but those bits are obviously subject to change, etc etc.

[Update: Added a higher quality official version of the video, without commentary, below]

Tom loves exploring in games, whether it’s going the wrong way in a platformer or burgling an apartment in Deus Ex. His favourite game worlds—Stalker, Dark Souls, Thief—have an atmosphere you could wallop with a blackjack. He enjoys horror, adventure, puzzle games and RPGs, and played the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VIII with a translated script he printed off from the internet. Tom has been writing about free games for PC Gamer since 2012. If he were packing for a desert island, he’d take his giant Columbo boxset and a laptop stuffed with PuzzleScript games.