homepage Forums Miscellaneous Outer Space Simulation & Combat Games Star Citizen Star Citizen update

This post outlines a lot of features:
Star Citizen Explained

For those of you who haven't been following, Star Citizen crowd funding is now at about $15M!
The new website is up and the game is looking really sharp. A quick rundown of recient news:
-Tentative release date is 2015, hanger module is going to be out Fall 2013, Alpha testing starts winter 2013, and beta in 2014.
-Male or female character role.
-Currently there is about 20k alpha slots still available.
-Persistent universe, free content updates, dedicated official servers, TIR and Oculus Rift support, made with Cryengine3.
-While it is a 'space combat' simulation, other roles are encouraged, encluding explorer, merchant, mining, bounty hunter, pirate.
-The alpha/dog-fighting module is slated for release in Fall 2013.
-The Hanger module is going to be release around Aug 28, 2013 where you will be able to see and interact with the ships in your hanger.

Star Citizen


See you in the 'verse!

Sounds pretty cool. So how does one get in the Alpha? Can I just buy the actual game itself or do I have to pledge hundreds of dollars?

I was going to wait until the actual release but I might give it a go what the heck. I'm a huge space sim nerd way back to X-Wing.

If the alpha testing is this fall, that's not too bad. I think that was in the package I picked up a while back.
The website is pretty nice.

So this and Elite Dangerous are going to go head to head. Interesting.

You can get access to Alpha and Beta with the $40 Digital Mercanary package:
https://robertsspaceindustries.com/pledge/133-digital-mercenary-lti

The $30 Digital Scout package is the same, but without the Alpha and Beta access:
https://robertsspaceindustries.com/pledge/134-digital-scout-lti

If you want to buy into the game at this point you really should paypal someone with the game the money and let them buy it and gift it back to you. 1) it will be 5-10 dollars cheaper and 2) you will get Life Time Insurance instead of the 6 months they are selling now.

Or you can buy it in game and gift it to someone with LTI and they can break the package down to credits and then use those credits to buy the package with LTI and gift it back to you. There is like a 24hr waiting period using this method since you cant break a purchase down once you buy it right away. You have to wait x number of days/hours (I think it is 24hr).

what does the insurance do? and I'm still very confused to this day, is the game an MMO with SP or you can experience it all in SP while having opportunity to go online? and how does it work if it the latter, I mean if you acquire something while offline or online will it appeared on the counterpart mode?

I'm more interested in X Rebirth vs Star citizen on Gamescom next week. I hope it'll be cold war type of thing, where each tries to impress even more than planned with gameplay demos and presentations.

ED doesn't have any demos or anything to show, while these two can really go at each other.

Its complicated but...

When you first start the game you have two options. You can go through sq42 (military campaign) or you can go straight to SC (MMO). If you go through sq42 you will earn money and etc that you can use when you start the SC (MMO). If you choose not to do sq42 then you will be broke and have no ship and in order to get one you will have to crew other people's ships and do various jobs to earn money for your first ship.

Now every game package comes with a starter ship so in essence you will not start poor as you will start with the starter aurora. If you have 6 months insurance (what is selling right now) then for 6 months if your ship gets destroyed the game will replace it for free (not cargo or upgrades though). So if you start the game you will have a ship for 6 months more or less. After 6 months though you will be shipless if you start a new game or your starter ship gets destroyed.

LTI (Life Time Insurance) takes that 6 months and extends it forever. So you will never have to start the game without a ship.

As for the online vs offline thing. What you do in the two does not carry over afaik but the ship insurance will probably apply to both online and offline. There has been some talk though that you will be allowed multiple characters but the insurance will only apply to one character at a time. So if you have two guys and one starter ship it belongs to one of your two guys and the other guy will start shipless.

Also there is a outer space forum with lots more info for SC.
http://simhq.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/forums/359/

Um...I think it safe to say that when it comes to simplicity of design SC gets a fail.

I've read this stuff multiple times since it was first announced and I still don't really grasp it.

I just want another Wing Commander/X Wing type of game. I couldn't care less about an MMO, and tacking one on to a game like WC/XW seems like at best one side will get far less attention than the other and at worst neither side will get enough.




The Jedi Master

Simple is the last thing they want. There are plenty of WC-like games out there, and this guy wanted to build his dream game. People agreed and he's raised 15 million or so now. Simple games like WC probably wouldn't do as good now as they did back then, people want more depth now. Not to mention there's money in MMO's, not so much in stand alone games.

There are?? That were released since 2010? Please name 3.

Well, I can at least be assured that I will be giving up gaming far sooner than most other people, since the apparently inevitable shift to MMOs will alienate me 100%.





The Jedi Master

I checked out the site. The 40 dollar option seems interesting. So if one of you guys gift me that option I can get lifetime insurance for free on that ship?

Let's say I don't go the insurance route...how do I play the game without a ship? Can I get paid as a crewmember on another person's ship? Or join a military and use their ship or something? Or is their 3rd person gameplay that isn't in space?

This game is still pretty far off from official release. Kinda crazy to think there's guys who have invested thousands in a game they have yet to play. I hope they can deliver expectations are going to be crazy high.

If someone with LTI buys you a package it will have LTI.

How do you play without a ship? You sign on a crew another person's ship, you take out a loan to buy a ship, you sign on for a military tour of duty to earn money for a ship. I am sure there will be other ways also. There is also 3rd person non ship gameplay but we dont know how much. There is at least boarding actions so you could sign on as a boarding marine .

It is crazy how much people have spent on the game but for a lot of people this is a dream game and the game would never be made without people investing those thousands. Hell the new X game didnt even have first person stuff until after SC announced. I bet a lot of space game change things up a bit because of SC. (and hopefully SC wont suck.)

uh sooo... in SC there is no such thing as X-Rebirth SP mode? I mean the ability to explore and play in the universe completely offline? just the linear squadron 42 mode and after that game over, you thrown out of the game and forced to online?

can you also do hybrid mode? sometimes you want to do squadron 42 then take a break and go online?

it sounds too complicated to program lol.

Derek Smart would be spinning in his grave*

*If he was dead.

As far as I remember the persistent universe part is part of what will be moddable, and you should be able to run dedicated servers for just you and your friends (or possibly just you I guess). That's what I remember from the early days though, and it was a key point which dragged my friends in the pledging (we just want to play on a server together, like we did in the Freelancer good old days).

From what was described, you can access the Squadron 42 from within the persistent world, so you should be able to jump from it to online (or local dedicated server) indeed.

You can play the whole MMO thing as a SP game or as a coop game or you can go online and play it as an MMO but the sp and mmo are separate (the stuff you get in either wont transfer between them.)

You can also play the sq42 military campaign in SP, MP Coop or as a connected MMO experience.

From what they have been talking about though you cant go from sq42 to mmo then back to sq42. You enlist for a Tour of Duty and if you leave during your Tour of Duty you are AWOL. After your ToD you can reenlist or go into the MMO and at any point you can reenlist again.

So it might be best to have a MMO character and a Military character.

They are going to start with the hangar module that you can walk around and climb into your pledge ships. Then they are going to do a dogfighter module where you can just fly the ships and fight but there is no mission or open sandbox world. Then they are going to do the semi-linear sq42 release and then finally after that the MMO release.

Each phase builds on the previous phase and by the time the MMO is out you will probably be tired of the sq42 missions.

The insurance thing is a real rip off..you buy a game then have to pay insurance for the major feature you payed for..i.e a ship to fly in. Crazy.

Losing your ship is a pretty popular mechanic in this type of game and a lot of the other games dont give you a feature where you can buy insurance to replace your ship. So I really dont see how you can knock this game for providing more / better features than others in the genera?