Star Citizen Ditches CryEngine for Amazon’s Lumberyard Years Into Development

There’s also a big update ready for all backers.

The ambitious space game Star Citizen is four years into development and suddenly switching game engines. Developer Cloud Imperium Games announced in a press release that the studio is now using Amazon’s Lumberyard game engine instead of Crytek’s CryEngine.

Side note: Who the hell is responsible for the name Lumberyard? Lumber… yard…

“We’ve been working with Amazon for more than a year,” stated creative director Chris Roberts, “as we have been looking for a technology leader to partner with for the long term future of Star Citizen and Squadron 42. Lumberyard provides ground breaking technology features for online games, including deep back-end cloud integration on AWS and its social component with Twitch that enables us to easily and instantly connect to millions of global gamers. Because we share a common technical vision, it has been a very smooth and easy transition to Lumberyard. In fact, we are excited to announce that our upcoming 2.6 Alpha release for Star Citizen is running on Lumberyard and AWS.”

This news comes shortly after Crytek announced it was closing five studios around the world due to financial troubles. It doesn’t look like this affected Star Citizen at all. “We are totally not dependent on them for anything at this point,” communications director David Swofford told Polygon.

Star Citizen, the spiritual successor to the Wing Commander franchise, is widely considered the most successfully crowdfunded project in history. It has brought in over $139 million from over a million backers since October 2012.

The previously mentioned Alpha 2.6 patch is available to all backers now.

From the update announcement: “Alpha 2.6 includes the first iteration of Star Marine, our dedicated FPS module, as well as significant updates to the rest of the Star Citizen experience.”

You can read the full patch notes here.

Check out the gameplay trailer for the patch below!