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Polygon posted an interview with Roberts today. Some takeaways:

  • The FPS portion of the game will be playable on the show floor at PAX East and should be released later this month.
  • Some sort of social element beyond the hangars will be released next month.
  • The first episode of the single player campaign is due this Fall.
  • The MMO stuff should be launched by the end of the year with about five or six star systems.
  • They've added a fourth internal studio, this one in Frankfurt and mostly made up of ex-Crytek folks.
  • There's a total of about 320 people working on the game.
  • They're about to pass $75 million in funding.

I also found Robert's thoughts on publishers' attitudes towards the space combat genre interesting:

"I think it's one of those things that someone just had to do it and then everyone says people want this and then all of a sudden for whatever reason the prejudice changes," he says. "There was this prejudice that no one wanted these kind of games anymore, no one was interested. Finally, I think the thing Star Citizen did was show what you could do with today's technology.

 

"All of a sudden that changed the perception then I think other people feel safer committing to it," he says.

. . .

Another example, Roberts says, is World of Tanks.

 

"I swear to god you could have gone to any publisher and says 'I want to do a World War II tank game' and they would go, 'Well, do you want to sell 5,000 copies? We're not in that business get the fuck out of here.' Now World of Tanks has 40, 50 million people registered and they bring in huge amounts of money. And now you have Armored Warfare and everyone else going into the tank sim genre."

 

 

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There's going to be a panel at SXSW open to the public, and Chris Roberts is gonna be there. I'm going to try and make it if I can, looks cool.

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I'm mostly interested in the single player campaign, so it will be great to finally get my hands on that this fall... I got one of the last few thousand alpha packages, but am really not into the Arena Commander portion of Star Citizen, since competitive shooters aren't really my thing. I'm surprised to see that parts of the MMO bit should be out by the end of this year... having all of those commanders in such a small space will give a completely different feel to Elite Dangerous :).

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Has anyone figured out how to actually get inside their ship or is that an "I've paid $5938" feature?

 

I ask because at various points over the last 2 months I've hit every keybinding that is listed while standing next to my ship and have yet to get inside it. I was one of the earliest backers, for $60 no less, and the combination of God-Awful support and what might-just-be the first community to one-up Lords Managements and San Francisco in terms of BS NIMBYism, I'm pretty well ready to write this thing off.

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I've been basically waiting for this game to run into some shit since I first heard about its payment scheme.


Doesn't seem like it may happen yet. Not saying I want it to, but things can start to get pretty ugly when thousands of dollars may have felt wasted.


Or it could be great! I don't know.

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Has anyone figured out how to actually get inside their ship or is that an "I've paid $5938" feature?

 

It should be the "F" key. That operates as the use key inside the hangar. Why they didn't just use "E" like basically every other game is beyond me. If you want to take it for a flight, you can just hit "ESC" at any time after the hangar has loaded up and select "Arena Commander".

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It should be the "F" key. That operates as the use key inside the hangar. Why they didn't just use "E" like basically every other game is beyond me. If you want to take it for a flight, you can just hit "ESC" at any time after the hangar has loaded up and select "Arena Commander".

 

A lot of games that use leaning(which I believe this does) switch it to F.

 

Also, F doesn't get me in. Far as I can tell nothing on the keyboard works but sprint and jump buttons.

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Do all ships have cockpits created? I was under the impression that only certain models have internal views and Arena access. Which ship is it?

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The first episode of the single player campaign is due this Fall.

 

Great, didn't hear that before. I was hoping they would release it as a whole but whatever.

 

Anyone remember Origin's first try / steps regarding DLC, the addon missions for WC5? Those were pretty good. I'd be happy with something like that although I'd wish for a full on Strike / Wing Commander style campaign with talking heads in shady bars.

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PC Gamer did an interesting interview with Chris Roberts during PAX

 

He seems rather more grounded now and I am definitely on board with his new goal (9 minutes in): "I think we'll make a good game"

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Cloud Imperium is running a promotion alongside SXSW Interactive that lets folks try Arena Commander until the 20th for free. You just have to enter the code SXSWFREEFLY2K15 at this URL, create an account, and download the client. Also, this week folks who have backed the game are able to try out all of the currently-completed ships.

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Played this today at SX. So it's pretty. But I gotta say, both Elite and EVE Valkyrie managed to blow me away more than Star Citizen has thus far. It looks nice, but I just have this nagging suspicion that the game can't possibly deliver on its promises.

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Played this today at SX. So it's pretty. But I gotta say, both Elite and EVE Valkyrie managed to blow me away more than Star Citizen has thus far. It looks nice, but I just have this nagging suspicion that the game can't possibly deliver on its promises.

I grabbed one of the last alpha packages for Star Citizen about a year ago, and have drawn similar conclusions to you based on earlier versions of Arena Commander. I can't have played much more than an hour in total, but I really hope this is just because I'm not into arena based shooters. It's telling that the most fun I had was during one of the "every ship is available to  backers" weeks, when I took one of the dedicated racers for a spin around the race tracks.

 

Apparently the FPS test module will  be available in the next couple of weeks, but I think that I'll give that a miss too. I'm holding out for the story campaign and persistent universe :).

 

I found the demo of the new procedural damage model impressive... and it's good news that it is actually more efficient than the old one. I doubt we'll ever see anything like that in Elite, because the triangle is one of the strongest shapes in nature :P!

 

I remain highly concerned about the emphasis on mega-ultra high-poly models and corresponding textures, because they are expensive to create and use, and won't be shown off to the best effect for 99.9% of the time. The Order: 1886 mast have spent a huge amount of time and money creating its (incredibly beautiful) assets, and it appears that the rest of the game suffered as a result... and in this game, the developers were able to make sure that you bathed in every glorious pixel, rather than flying past at hundreds of miles per hour many miles away.

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Isn't the average SC backer like $1,000 deep on the game already? I bet they assume with people ready to spend that kind of money on a game they have some powerful pixel pushing rigs. 

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Isn't the average SC backer like $1,000 deep on the game already? I bet they assume with people ready to spend that kind of money on a game they have some powerful pixel pushing rigs. 

I think that this is a situation where mean average is misleading... if you divide the amount raised by the number of backers then you certainly get around $1000 (scary!) [EDIT No you don't I messed up maths, but it's Monday, what's a factor of ten anyway?] but I think that the actual distribution leans towards a small percentage of players who have invested A LOT! I'm in for $45, and nothing will change that :).

 

Also, we have to hope that many more people will buy SC on release than have backed it so far (even though there already are a heck of a lot of backers). So I hope that SC will be scalable so that many more than the hardest core can enjoy it. This means there has to be more than fancy graphics, because I played Arena Commander with a GTX 660 before moving to a 970, and it wasn't particularly impressive

 

One thing that makes me very uncomfortable about Star Citizen is that CIG seem to be quite happy expanding the scope of the game before release, when the cost is shouldered by the backers.

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And so it starts.

 

Well maybe it does, since it involves Derek Smart I would guess they just wanted him to shut up so they refunded him. However I read some of his comments on Polygon and they seem uncharacteristically sober for that guy.

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I only backed for $25 back in the earliest days, but I'd totally take it back if they were offering. But yeah, they just wanted to make Derek Smart go away.

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Was it because he mentioned his game in the Polygon comments of the previous article the linked to (plus his tumblr of course) or was he promoting his game within the Kickstarter or forums? I seem to have missed something.

 

I suppose the complaint with the FTC would do it but that's not what Cloud Imperium cites a a reason for refund. Seems like multiple people could make that complaint if it made any different in the case of Derek Smart.

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Many seem pretty annoyed if you read the forum that poll is posted on.

Admittedly I haven't spent much time reading the Star Citizen forums at large, but after going back and skimming through the thread I'd say Polygon's assessment of the thread itself is accurate, at least.  While I don't doubt that there are at least a couple people looking to pull out somewhere in those pages, I couldn't even find a single one in my skimming.  Just people arguing that the option should be available in case someone falls into "financial difficulties".

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There's a substantial grey market where players are selling ships to other players, sometimes at a profit (another thing that makes me uneasy about this particular method of financing). Here's a fairly old, but interesting Eurogamer article:

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2014-10-08-inside-star-citizens-grey-market

 

Derek Smart is on the rampage again, asking CR to step down,  or he will instigate an audit (or something). The guy has made some good points, but that all seems drowned in a whole ocean of crazy! http://massivelyop.com/2015/07/17/derek-smart-has-fresh-demands-for-star-citizen-threatens-to-take-drama-to-the-new-york-times/

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