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from the this-game-cost-how-much-to-make? dept.
The space simulation game Star Citizen has reached $100 million in crowdfunding:
Star Citizen continues its reputation as one of the most highly-anticipated, yet controversial games around, mainly because the ambitious space-based game has a large amount of crowdfunding but no final release date. Even with many uncertainties for the game's future, people are still giving the developers money. This past weekend, another milestone was reached as the total funding for Star Citizen passed $100 million.
The timing worked out perfectly, as the game's alpha was updated to version 2.0 this weekend. The latest version finally included some features that early backers thought would come earlier, such as first-person shooting, multi-crew ships (which also means new ships specifically for multiple players), and a new planet to explore (along with some moons and space stations).
[...] The funding for the game started in September 2012. One month later, backers raised $2 million. Since then, the developers put stretch goals if various levels of funding were successful, such as a facial capture system at $22 million, or a new salvage ship at $32 million. However, the goals stopped after the $65 million mark. The last reward allowed developers to work on a modular feature for "any suitable ships" in the game, so that pilots can swap interior and exterior parts to build a spacecraft suitable for combat, mining, bounty hunting, or whatever hobby they wish to partake in the large in-game universe.
The seemingly endless amount of money also allowed the developers to enhance the game's single-player campaign, titled Squadron 42 , with a cast of celebrities such as Gary Oldman, Mark Hamill, Gillian Anderson and Andy Serkis.
(Score: 4, Informative) by kurenai.tsubasa on Tuesday December 15 2015, @04:04PM
I haven't given 2.0 quality time yet since I'm not quite done with Fallout. The universe is fairly interesting. There's an entire timeline from the 2000s up through when the game starts in the 30th century. There's been some work fleshing out the general feel of the politics happening in the senate, particularly the Polo initiative, the big recent event being the attack on New Corvo on Aremis/Vega II [wikia.com] and the call for war. There was also a transmission [robertsspaceindustries.com] I read that indicated that the government allowed the attacks to happen or perhaps even conspired with the Vanduul to arrange it.
Also check out the starmap [robertsspaceindustries.com]. There are also regular transmissions describing the different systems in moderate details along with random crap like a transmission that went out to employees of a major mining corporation about safety first.
Gameplay wise it's too early to tell. One problem that players have noticed is that attempting to fly, at least in the earlier releases, with a HOTAS is a non-starter. Unless something major has changed with that, mouse users will dominate ship-to-ship combat (and probably FPS, because, well, everybody knows mouse+keyboard is the only way to play an FPS). I can also confirm. I found myself unable to actually hit any other ships until I switched from HOTAS to mouse. HOTAS is still fun for racing.
A bit of Squadron 42 presumably, a tutorial, was in place before this release. I would say it was moderately buggy, but hey. Look at Fallout 4! I'd say about the same level of bugginess, and integrating custom control mapping into the dialog wasn't quite working correctly.
The space physics is top notch. In fact, that's been one thing so far that has consistently blown me away. When flying, it's clear you're not flying an airplane. Each thruster is simulated, and you can tell when one's been destroyed. I don't know if there's much more to be said here. Head over here [robertsspaceindustries.com] and scroll down to the intelligent flight control system overview.
In general, things were looking shakey there for a while, but everything that's happened over the past few months has made me very excited that this thing really will come together and will be what Freelancer was hyped to be.