If there is one thing that developer Cloud Imperium Games has been nailing in their still early alpha days for Star Citizen, its aesthetic charm. Whether you are exploring the surface of a planet, getting lost in one of its sizable cities of exploring a hub in outer space – if you ignore the buggy NPCs performing all sorts of unusual actions, you will encounter some of the nicest environments and structures in any game to date.

Moving from the totalitarianism environments previously depicted in Lorville and Area18, New Babbage on microTech will be the first city introduced in Star Citizen featuring a cleaner slightly more chic aesthetic. While the city will not be explorable in full until Patch 3.9 which is due to go live at the end of this quarter, the planet and work-in-progress of the city exterior was made available in Patch 3.8.

Exploring New Babbage - Take That (In-Game) Snap Daily Photo 1

These are a few photos I took today while flying around the exterior of New Babbage in an Origin Jumpworks 315P pathfinder ship, while PTU testing out some of the new features introduced in Patch 3.8.1. The most interesting one relevant to Take That (In-Game) Snap is the ability to switch off the film grain effect which is enabled by default. This was a good move on Cloud Imperium Games’ part, and I hope they give players a higher level of control over any effects they introduce in the future. Now if only if it were possible to take higher quality in-game screenshots without the use of an external tool…

Gotta admit though, I am so eager to run around New Babbage later this year!

Exploring New Babbage - Take That (In-Game) Snap Daily Photo 2

Take That (In-Game) Snap Daily Photo is an off-shoot of the upcoming Take That (In-Game) Snap article series. This looks at, celebrates and critiques how video game developers have implemented professional photography-like systems into their games. It will cover how the systems handle, just how accessible they are and, where applicable, how a modding community might be making these tools even better. With this Daily Photo spin-off series, I will be sharing individual photos from the games either covered or soon-to-be-covered in the series.