The ongoing pledge drive for Star Citizen has broken through the $10 million barrier.

The total comes from a mere 184,225 people, which means an average pledge of around $54 each — quite a reasonable amount of money for what Star Citizen is promising.

Nearly $8 million of that total has come from pledges on the Star Citizen site itself, with the Kickstarter tally continuing to fall behind.

It’s safe to say that a very large number of GON staff and readers are looking forward to Star Citizen, whose creator has said some very positive things about the majesty of PC gaming and hardcore games. What do you think?

Star Citizen is a hugely ambitious game, as it should be — and their ship component and customisation system shows exactly that.

Speaking to PC Gamer, Star Citizen lead Chris Roberts revealed that the game was being built to complement the mindset of gamers like that — PC gamers who take pride in building their own machines.

“That literally was a major part of it,” said Roberts. “I was shocked. We did a survey of users and I think we had about 10,000-plus respond—maybe more, close to 20,000. It’s a pretty large sample compared to generally when you do surveys, and 82 percent of them built their own PCs.”

“I think in PC gamers you’ve got this sense of—I don’t know whether it’s the same in car culture where people tweak and tune their cars. So that was actually a big part of the inspiration. In a normal RPG game, it’s like your character you customize and the armor and whatever, and yes we’re going to have a little bit of that, but really it’s your spaceship.”

You can read the full interview and see a bunch of new screenshots and concept art over at PC Gamer.

Source: PC Gamer

Roberts Space Industries has released a detailed new blog post explaining the methodology they’ll be using to underpin their starship customisation system in Star Citizen.

Spaceships in Star Citizen will have a variety of slots for customisation, including hull, power plant, avionics, afterburners, shield generators, intake, and more. Balancing your power and heat loads by choosing the right equipment for the draw available to you will be a key part of planning your ship, with too much power generating too much heat which must be somehow dispersed.

Stealth ships will also be required to run on low power, as high power draw leaves a bigger, more trackable energy signature — it’s not just as simple as ‘installing a cloaking device’. You will of course be able to tinker with your ship’s power draw and ‘overclock’ it, much as you would with your current PC, but you can expect there to be disastrous results if you’re not careful.

The ultimate goal of the system, claims Roberts, is to keep in mind that: “Even the most decked-out ship can be bested by a skilled pilot in a lesser craft. Our job was to create a system that honored this promise: one where upgrades meant building a ship that speaks to your personal preferences rather than one that’s simply the acknowledged all-around best option.”

If any of that sounded good to you, read the official blog post with all its graphs and diagrams, and get excited.

Source: RSI

If you’re one of the many who donated to Star Citizen, either through the Kickstarter or through the funding drive on the website, congratulations! Thanks to you, the game has now blasted through $8 million in funding, and if it wasn’t already the biggest crowdfunding game on record then, well, it sure as hell is now.

The announcement means that Star Citizen has actually gained another $1.75 million since the Kickstarter campaign closed in November — which must no doubt somewhat upset some of the other Kickstarters which have (Kick)started and failed in that intervening time. More than $500,000 has been raised in the last two weeks alone.

“The amount of support we are seeing from our fans is nothing short of amazing,” claimed Roberts in a press release. “Our backers are totally connecting with the development team and it just gets them so excited to come in to the office every day and work to make the next great space sim.”

Source: Massively

Chris Roberts, creator of Wing Commaner and shortly of Star Citizen as well, isn’t a big fan of the way modern gaming molly-coddles you with frequent autosaving. In a big ol’ blogpost, Roberts writes that “I hate the current game trend in single-player games where the game auto-saves every two seconds, and if you die you just start a few steps earlier.”

“This makes you a lazy and sloppy player,” he says. “In Wing Commander or Privateer, you had to complete the mission to move on. There were no mid mission saves. This created a sense of anxiety towards the end of the mission if you were badly damaged and your shields were low, but if you managed to limp home successfully, you felt a sense of accomplishment. Without the risk of losing something you’ve worked hard towards, the sense of achievement is cheap.”

So, what is his ideal solution for Star Citizen? Well, at the moment they’re leaning towards a system where, if you manage to bail out of your downed ship, and nobody blasts your ejected avatar, you’ll end up back on the last planet you docked on with a new ship (minus any cargo or upgrades, unless you insured them). If you don’t eject in time or someone shoots your avatar up, you’ll wake up in a medbay, with scars or even cybernetic limbs depending on where you were hit or how you died. Do this enough times, and your character will permanently die, respawning “attending the funeral of your fallen character from the eyes of the beneficiary you specified when originally creating your character”.

Check out the seriously big blog post and Q&A for yourself over at the official site.

Chris Roberts, founding father of Wing Commander and now Star Citizen, has used an interview with NowGamer to express his belief in the PC’s innate technological superiority.

“I think consoles will be there and they’ll do decent business but I don’t think that the next generation of consoles will be as big as the last generation,” Roberts told NowGamer in an extensive interview about the merits of Kickstarter. “Essentially,” he pointed out, “I can build a high-end PC now that’s much more powerful than the new consoles that will be announced this year.”

Asked if he would ever bring Star Citizen to next-gen consoles, Roberts answered: “No, I’m not totally against [Star Citizen] being on a next-gen console if those systems are open. The hardware in the next-gen consoles will be good enough to run Star Citizen, maybe not at the highest level, but it’ll be at a mid-level. ”

“But the biggest problem is the openness. On the PC we control the communication with the fans and we control the update cycle and we can rapidly deploy content, as soon as we can on a closed system, which is what Microsoft says it is with its Xbox Live or PSN. We’ve got to go through a whole approval process and it gums up the works and doesn’t make it easy.”

Roberts also expressed his interest in being able to create an ongoing story with those continuing updates. “I don’t want to work on a game for two or three years and it comes out and everyone likes it and it gets good reviews and then, bam! You’re done and you’ve got to start working on your next game. For me, I’m much more interested in working on a living, dynamic universe.”

Source: Nowgamer via

With 22 Can’s GODUS struggling yesterday to approach its goal, Star Citizen‘s Chris Roberts — whose funding drive was almost painfully successful — has taken to Kickstarter to encourage backers of his game to also reach out and support the reinvented god-sim.

“I’m not the biggest God Game fan, but I played the original Populous and Black and White, and Peter Molyneux pretty much invented this classic PC category,” claims Roberts. “I think it’s great that he’s going back to his roots with GODUS and you can clearly see that his team really cares about what they’re doing.”

(more…)

If you’re one of the seventeen people left on Earth that either haven’t heard about or haven’t pledged towards Roberts Space Industries record-breaking Star-Citizen crowdfund, then you should be too late — it finished up late on Monday night with $6.2 million.

But wait! “It’s become clear that there’s a sizeable number of people that were unable to pledge, or adjust their pledges due to the difficulties with the RSI site,” writes Chris Roberts. “Many people tried repeatedly over the weekend, only for the site to crash at various points during the check out. Some people switched to Kickstarter, but there were also a large number of people that Kickstarter wasn’t an option and so they have been left high and dry.”

“The focus of our campaign was, from day one, involving the fans and trying to give them as many options to support us as possible. The last thing we want to do is punish any of you, and so we have decided to adapt our plans and offer a grace period for all current members of the RSI community.”

Head on over to the Roberts Space Indistries website to get all the deets.

Source: RSI

Yesterday we reported that Star Citizen was already the biggest crowd-funded game on record, but those last sixteen hours have pushed it well and truly over the line.

Closing out at $6.2 million, Star Citizen has now unlocked over 100 star systems to explore on launch, as well as a full orchestral soundtrack for the game. The largest ship in the game, the Bengal Carrier, has now been unlocked for persistent universe play as well.

Good news for Wing Commander fans: a Squadron 42 mission disk, “Behind Enemy Lines”, will be available to all backers on release. Styled after “The Secret Missions” expansion from the original Wing Commander, “Behind Enemy Lines” will be a 16-mission campaign add-on. To celebrate, why not enjoy this video that shows the game transitioning from concept art to 3D reality?

Source: Star Citizen

Thinking of backing Star Citizen, the ambitious PC-championing space-sim from Chris Roberts of Wing Commander fame? We are, and we have — in fact so many people have backed the game, either on the official site or the Kickstarter page that it’s now the biggest crowd-funded game on record with over $5 million raised.

So what does this new milestone mean? Well at $4.5 million, the game is now going to have full flight sim controller support: flight chairs, multiple monitors, Track-IR, MFD and more. The largest playable ship in the game has also been scaled up to the new Destroyer, an additional base type and an entirely new alien race have been added.

Now, at $5 million, the game will also include a tablet companion app to check on your inventory, commission or find missions and get the galactic news feed, increased community updates, at least one celebrity favourite voice actor returning from Wing Commander, and a guaranteed 70 star systems to explore on launch.

Pledging as little as $37 gets you access to the alpha and beta, so get cracking!

We don’t need to tell you that here at games.on.net we’re big fans of what Star Citizen is promising, but our appetites are only increased with the release of some test footage out of the unfortunately-named RSI.

“The laser effects, explosions are all placeholders,” writes Roberts, “and there will be significant work done here, as well as some very cool shield effects I have cooking up in the background. My goal with the visual effects is to use a lot the techniques and looks used in film work, which are now possible with DX11 and modern day PCs.”

“In an ordinary game’s development cycle, this would be something we would share internally or with the publisher… but we’re showing our backers instead, since you’re the ones making Star Citizen happen!”

Source: RSI

Here at games.on.net we’re pretty unabashedly excited about Chris Roberts’ return to PC gaming with Star Citizen. But why is he so keen to embrace PC gaming rather than move to consoles? Well, it’s mostly because he feels that to do so would really limit the possibilities.

“You can’t do that much with 512MB [of RAM on a console], so that constrains a lot of your game design,” said Roberts to Ars Technica. “If I’m building a PC game, I’m going ‘Yeah, you need 4GB on your machine.’ Of course you’re not going to get all 4GB because Windows is a hungry beast, but you’re getting a lot more than 512MB so it kinds of open up what you can do, what you can fit in memory at the same time, and it changes your level of ambition.”

“I’m looking at the high-end [hardware] today being the ‘Normal Gamer’ level in two years time,” claims Roberts. “It’ll be kind of like Wing Commander used to be. If you had the extra memory, if you had the 386, it was a better experience, but you could still play it on a 286.”

Roberts also took the opportunity to slam apathetic console ports from lazy developers. “I have a high-end gaming rig, but I’ve also got all the consoles, and if someone is making a game for a console first, and it’s being ported to the PC, I’m always buying it for the console. I don’t want a buggy port of a console game on my PC that doesn’t really show my PC off.”

Source: Ars Technica