There’s a quote about early computer animation, which I can’t track down now, that before Pixar came along everyone was using it to swoop cameras through outerspace and up a gnat’s ass. Or perhaps it was a fly’s butt?

I’m glad Pixar used computer animation to tell great stories, but in watching the 24-minute trailer for the technology underpinning Star Citizen, I have come to realise: swooping the camera through outerspace and up to a man’s sweaty brow, at least, is actually pretty cool, too.

Here’s the video:

The StarEngine is the tech that Star Citizen and Squadron 42 are being being built within. The trailer above is captured “in engine as one continuous shot without loading screens.” In real-time? It doesn’t say, but what follows is a lot of swooping: from deep space to snow planet surfaces, city interiors to multi-crew interactable spaceships, subterranean mining operations to floating cloud cities.

Other games have done the seamless transition from space to planetary surfaces, such as No Man’s Sky, but when the camera lingers in the video above, it’s to demonstrate that StarEngine has other tricks. There’s a high level of detail that No Man’s Sky can’t match, such as some tattooed NPCs or, yes, a sweaty brow, and there are demonstrations that the solar system isn’t just for looking at, such as water that’s physically affected by skimming spaceships, and buildings that can be dynamically destroyed when shot.

Recent games have also not done the seamless transition from space to planetary surface, so you can potentially read all of this as a big middle finger flashed towards Starfield.

Of course, thoughts of Starfield just bring me back to the original meaning of that half-remembered Pixar quote. To my mind, Bethesda struggled to fill all their space with interesting stories. I like watching the video above, but I remain skeptical that Roberts Space Industries can fill their large, visually impressive, seamlessly streamed galaxy with interesting stories or activities.