Cloud Imperium Games's Star Citizen has always been an ambitions project, but Chris Roberts and its team proved it once more by announcing the Genesis Starliner.

The Genesis is exactly what it says on the tin, a passenger transport ship with no real compat abilities and no defined "role" within the usual gaming tropes. With it, you won't go around blasting pirates, you won't mine asteroid for resources or defend carriers in danger. It's basically a blank canvas, as mentioned by the team:

One of our dreams when planning Star Citizen was to go beyond the typical space sim experience. We’ve built a lot of ships along traditional lines: fighters, bombers, battleships and carriers all have a natural (and fun!) gameplay role in a world at war. Ships like the Orion, the Carrack and the Reclaimer all come naturally, too: mining asteroids, exploring new worlds and the like are all types of gameplay that fall naturally into our universe. But with the Starliner, we’re introducing something new: a ship that doesn’t have a naturally apparent style of gameplay.

We’ve said it again and again over the past two years: we want Star Citizen to be a living, breathing world. Which means spending resources building out (and building up) ships that would exist in a real world, even when they aren’t combatants or adventurers. Our job with the Starliner was to determine how passenger travel in the ‘verse would be both fun and necessary… and then to build out a ship worthy of that system. Designers have spent a lot of time working on the realism: everything from safety features (detailed below) to a plan for how to make passenger travel fun, interesting and rewarding for those who choose to fly the Genesis!

The Genesis is available for purchase for $488, but of course it will be purchasable in-game without spending your hard earned dollars right now. If you're curious on how the ship is being designed, you can also check out the interesting design document posted by the folks at Cloud Imperium.

Personally, I find the idea extremely intriguing, probably because I've always been a roleplayer in MMORPGs, and the Genesis basically looks like a roleplayer's dream come true.

It'll be interesting to see how the community will welcome  and use it, but in the meanwhile you can see quite a few pieces of concept artwork below.