You can now buy land in Star Citizen. More accurately, you can pre-purchase a certificate to claim land when the feature is implemented. The details are vague and a little confusing, but the gist is that for $50 or $100, you can buy a Land Claim License that you’ll be able to use to grab a plot of virtual real estate in Star Citizen someday. Although a couple of land masses are now in the recently released 3.0 work-in-progress version of the game, there’s no date for when the system will actually be live. According to the FAQ, players that pre-purchase these claims now will not have a significant advantage over people that wait as the claims will also be buyable with in-game money. Because the vision of the final version of Star Citizen includes “billions” of square kilometers of viable property, there will be plenty of good locations to go around, or so the developers say.
What will you be able to do with the in-game land? Building modular outposts, mining, farming, or plain old real estate flipping are listed as possibilities that may come to fruition. The stars are the limit when the game isn’t even done! The developers even supplied in-game fiction to explain the claim sales.
The UEE sells claim licenses for the same reason as any government – to raise revenue to fund public benefit programs, to liberalize its economy, to spur growth and tax revenue, and to fund the military campaign against the Vanduul.
Star Citizen has raised over $168 million in revenue from crowd-funding and early access sales.
Star Citizen is being split in two. As of yesterday, if you want to purchase the complete package, you’ll need to buy Star Citizen, the half with the persistent multiplayer universe, and Squadron 42, the half with the single-player campaign. Each game will be $45 on its own, but if you buy one, the other title can be purchased later for $15. Anyone that pledged to Star Citizen for the basic license before the split will get both halves. New purchasers get to pay for each half separately. Roberts Space Industries noted that the two games are still part of the original vision.
The package split does not change the fact that Star Citizen and Squadron 42 are part of the same game universe, or the fact that the games are functionally connected. You will access Squadron 42 through the same game client. And your performance in Squadron 42 will still have an impact on your career in the persistent universe, whether you buy both segments together or if you choose to add one further down the line.
As for why it’s being done, the developer explained that an “a la carte” presentation was always part of the plan. The modules being purchased separately allows customers to access the persistent universe or the campaign for the original $45 price while development continues.
Star Citizen’s crowd-funding has passed the $100 million mark. Along with this milestone in funding, Cloud Imperium Games announced the release of Alpha 2.0 to their backers, featuring first-person shooter gameplay. The newest build of the game includes “open-world” combat interaction in the Crusader planetary system consisting of a gas giant surrounded by three moons and two orbital stations. The latest build offers more gameplay than has been present previously, but it is still barebones in comparison to the stated goals for the final product. According to the developers, the game “will evolve as development continues” towards a final release some time in the future.
While the funding for Star Citizen shows no signs of slowing down, critics of the project continue to level accusations at the company. Game designer Derek Smart maintains that the company is being financially mismanaged, including the possibility that the whole studio is a scam of epic proportions. In a less confrontational blog post, Cliff Harris, the creator of Gratuitous Space Battles and owner of Positech Games, sees Star Citizen funding and wonders if more government oversight is needed for games industry marketing and addiction manipulation.
“They just passed $100,000,000 in money raised. They can do this because individual ships in the game are for sale, even though you bought the game. I guess at this point we could just say ‘A fool and his money are soon parted’, but yet we do not do this with gambling addiction. In fact some countries have extremely strict laws on gambling, precisely because they know addiction is a thing, and that people need to be saved from themselves.”
Access to Star Citizen’s Alpha 2.0 release is available here beginning at $45, but you can spend tens of thousands on the game should you choose to do so.
That’s award-winning actor Gary Oldman reduced to stodgy virtual form for Star Citizen. Over the weekend, Chris Roberts of Cloud Imperium Games wowed the fans at CitizenCon by showing off the above video as well as announcing the cast for Star Citizen’s single player campaign Squadron 42. Besides Gary Oldman, Mark Hamill, Gillian Anderson, Mark Strong, Sophie Wu, John Rhys-Davies, Rhona Mitra, Andy Serkis, and other actors will be turned into stiff digital puppets for players’ delight some time in 2016.
Elite: Dangerous revealed some heretofore unknown features of their upcoming Horizons expansion, and it looks like the game will be doing things Star Citizen has been promising for a while. According to Frontier Developments, Elite Dangerous: Horizons will add planetary landings, ship-launched fighters, cooperative crew modes, and a Commander Creator to render in-game human avatars. Updates to the main game will add new flyable ships, more enemies to fight, and a CQC mode that will concentrate on competitive team matches separate from the campaign. Elite Dangerous: Horizons will launch on PC later this year.
Way over on the other side of the open-galaxy space sim arena, Star Citizen tootles along with its $89 million in pledged funds, but Derek Smart continues to be a thorn in the project’s side. Not content to just threaten legal action, Smart had his lawyer draft and file a letter to the developers of Star Citizen accusing them of lying about the state of the game’s development. Roberts Space Industries was quick to respond with their own snark-filled letter letting Derek Smart know exactly where he could go. Smart continued his accusations and raised a new one – that RSI was beginning a round of layoffs to get their ballooning budget under control. While RSI has not officially responded to the latest from Derek Smart, it was confirmed that the ex-RSI people Smart named in his blog did leave the studio for undisclosed reasons.
What does this mean for Star Citizen? Hey, that Elite Dangerous: Horizons expansion looks pretty good.
What’s going on with Star Citizen? That seems to be the question du jour for many. On the surface, everything seems to be fine. Cloud Imperium Games has raised over $85 million to make their everything-in-space game. The project status looks to be on-track with the largely cosmetic hangar module and ship against ship “Arena Commander” module released to backers. So where is the doubt coming from?
After the jump, an internet urban legend rises against Star Citizen.Continue reading →
“Space is big.” Wise words from the best encyclopedia ever written. Star Citizen, the crow-funding spaceship collection juggernaut, is out to prove it. According to one of the Roberts Space Industries folks on the official forums, the client for Star Citizen will contain about one hundred whopping gigabytes of data. In response to one fan theorizing that the final client release would be around 30GB, developer “JMasker” estimated a much larger file.
“The game compression and asset removal is unlikely to yield such high gains that we will be able to reduce our client size to 30-40GB. The size and number of assets that are left to deliver means that our client size is much more likely to be 100GB.”
100GB of data for $75 million in funding. Imagine what you could get for another $25 million!
Star Citizen, the galactic fund-raising machine, has surpassed the $50 million mark. In fact, the total money pledged so far stands at $51,123,228.00 and shows no sign of slowing. The jaw-dropping budget milestone for Cloud Imperium Games’ ambitious space MMO development came as the developer opened the Constellation model of starship for sale. These larger ships can be crewed by multiple players and start at $150.00 for the “back-to-basics” Taurus. If you just can’t choose which to get, the Connie Super-Pack offers all four ships and a 10-inch physical model for only $1,000.00!
The generous revenue for Star Citizen hasn’t just been used for snazzy marketing materials for starship sales. Cloud Imperium Games revealed that racing will be added to version 0.9 allowing players to compete for the 2944 Murray Cup by zipping through space-lanes. The developer also released a teaser for the planned first-person combat mode.
Star Citizen, Chris Roberts’ return to spaceship combat, will not be releasing the long-anticipated dogfighting module this year as originally planned. The module has been pushed back “a couple of months” because the record breaking crowd-funding effort has resulted in a much larger project than anticipated. In an open communication to fans, Chris Roberts explained the delay.
I feel that the Dogfighting module, especially with Star Citizen’s greatly increased profile, needs to be more polished than a typical “alpha”. There are a lot of eyes on the game, and more than a few people wanting us to fail. Because Dogfighting is the first module that will involve significant gameplay, it has to be good – I don’t feel that we will get a pass just because it is pre-pre alpha.
Roberts promised to show off some of the dogfighting work-in-progress during a special livestream scheduled for 9:00 AM PST on Friday, December 20th. Star Citizen has raised over $34 million in funding so far.
There’s this game about collecting and driving vehicles. In this game, you start with a low-end slower ride and graduate to faster, more capable, vehicles by completing missions or racing, getting paid, and buying new movers. Now imagine that game gives you the option to skip the grind and just buy the faster vehicles with real money. How much would you be willing to pay?
After fans spied a PS4 devkit in the Roberts Space Industries studios, they speculated that a console version of Star Citizen would be forthcoming. Chris Roberts posted in the official forums to assure backers that the game would be “primarily a PC game” and not be “dumbed down” for “lesser” platforms. Roberts listed various advantages of the PC as a gaming platform, including open standards and access to the latest technology. He then went on to clarify that Star Citizen would not be appearing on the Xbox 360 or the PlayStation 3, but he did not rule out the possibility of the game being ported to the Xbox One or the PlayStation 4.
“IF the platform holders (Sony & Microsoft) allow us to update the code and data without restrictions and odious time consuming QC procedures, IF they allow our community to openly interact with each other across platforms then I would CONSIDER supporting them.”
Star Citizen has raised over $27 million in crowd-funded pledges so far.
Roberts Space Industries presents the “most popular spaceship” in Star Citizen, The Aurora. It’s the beginner package ship, also available in a sporty “Legionnaire” model that adds cool racing stripes. A sweet paint job makes anything go faster. That’s a scientific fact. The Aurora is like the Ford Focus of space travel. You can use it like a dependable, if bare-bones compact, or you can bling it up so you can hang out with the cool guys in the 7-11 parking lot.
Crowd-funded Star Citizen is supposed to launch in 2014. The game recently celebrated raising over $20 million in pledges.
Roberts’ Space Industries announced that Star Citizen blew past another crowd-funding record. The $20 million stretch goal has been achieved unlocking first person combat on “select lawless planets.” It was just a scant couple of weeks since the first person shooter stretch goal was announced along with passing the $18 million funding milestone, but Chris Roberts revealed the next stretch goal. At $22 million, the developer will add better faces to the game using Infinite-Realities‘ scanning technology.
Roberts addressed concerns that the game could become a victim of feature creep by pointing out that they have two types of stretch goals. The first kinds of features are already being implemented but need funding to complete, and the second type being features that can actually speed development.
But both types of goals are carefully considered – we don’t commit to adding features that would hold up the game’s ability to go “live” in a fully functional state. Also remember that this is not like a typical retail boxed product – there is no rule that all features and content have to come online at the same time! As you can see from the Hangar Module we plan to make functionality and content come on line as it’s ready, so you should look at the stretch goals as a window into the future of functionality and content additions we plan for the live game.
In celebration of the new crowd-funded record, players are getting an aquarium added to their hangars! Will fish collecting be as popular as it was on Mass Effect’s Normandy?
Star Citizen, Chris Roberts’ crowd-funded space game, will add first-person combat if a newly announced $20 million stretch goal is attained. The game recently hit the $18 million mark, and continues to rack up an impressive pledge amount from backers. According to a post on the Roberts Space Industry site, the new stretch goal will add shooter gameplay to “select lawless planets” and allow players to “take the fight to the ground.”
“While goals will continue after $21 million, they will take a new form representative of what additional funding can add to the game!”
While mixing first-person shooter gameplay with spaceship piloting and trading in the same game has been explored with limited success before, this marks a significant addition to the Star Citizen concept. Ship-to-ship boarding actions were added to the game in a previous goal, but ground combat would be a major gameplay change. Hopefully, it turns out better than Universal Combat.
The Letter from the Chairman continues by explaining that prices for decorative items for the Hangar module will be reduced following player input. Roberts also reminds players that the initial entry package is all they will need to experience the game.
