Star Citizen, the MMO that never ends, is adding a new studio to its development pipeline. Canadian company Turbulent, which Cloud Imperium Games acquired a minority stake in last year, is launching a new operation based out of Montreal dedicated to creating new features, locations, and entire star systems that will be added to the game "on an ongoing basis."
Turbulent has been involved with the development of Star Citizen for years, but primarily behind the scenes, on things like the Star Citizen support site and backend technology. This announcement is for a separate, dedicated studio that Turbulent and Cloud Imperium hope to expand to 100 developers over the next three years.
"I am extremely proud to officially announce the creation of a Star Citizen development team in Montreal at Turbulent," co-founder and chief technical officer Benoit Beausejour said. "Montreal has an amazing talent pool of developers and a rich video game history, and we couldn’t be happier to add the very best local talent to work with the CIG family on the focused goal of building worlds for this unprecedented persistent universe."
Cloud Imperium chief development officer Erin Roberts said that the Star Citizen studio has been partnered with Turbulent for eight years, beginning as a web developer and then expanding to work on "publishing and platform capabilities."
"Their hard work and efforts have been integral to our success," Roberts said. "It’s a natural progression of our close relationship that we have now asked them to build out a dedicated content team from Montreal’s finest developers to help us create entire new star systems for the Star Citizen Persistent Universe."
Star Citizen's persistent universe will be separate from the singleplayer Squadron 42, but they are still connected: They'll both be accessed through the same game client, and some of the actions taken in Squadron 42 will will have an impact on the MMO portion of the game. A closer look at how they'll interact, and how they diverge, is available at robertsspaceindustries.com, although it's still anyone's guess as to when that might actually happen.
The latest Star Citizen "free fly" session kicked off last week and runs until December 2. Star Citizen crowdfunding has now surpassed $323 million.
