Star Citizen is a game that's currently under development, and as at least one interpretation of its name implies, it's a space sim. It has the basic things you'd expect from a space sim: you can fight hostile aliens, you can fight pirates, you can be a pirate, you can buy, transport, and sell cargo, you can get missions to protect cargo ships, you can post a mission to have your cargo ship escorted (the mission may be picked up by other players or NPC's), you can mine asteroids for resources to sell. There are also ship designed for roles dealing with other ships: refueling ships, repairing ships (both can be done when at a port, but sometimes you can't or don't want to go back to one), salvaging ships (if it's too late for repair), etc.
It's a crowd-funded project, being produced by Chris Roberts, the man behind the old Wing Commander series. The following video provides a brief introduction to the idea behind the game.
Science!!!
Then, there's science and medicine. That's where the "Endeavor" comes in. I intend to have one of these ships. Here's a link dump, with the five articles featuring the Endeavor. Check them out, if you're very into science, these days.
(Be sure to come back here to sign up, after you read the articles. The "Get Started" link on this page will get you a bonus 5,000 of the in-game currency, by using my referral link.)
Now, if that got your attention, and you want more, or if you found yourself thinking, “Wow, that's a lot of reading. How about more videos?” You're in luck! Here are some "advertisements" for ships, styled after car commercials. I think they're really neat, and show the ideas behind the ships well. The actual gameplay mechanics— maybe a bit less well, because they were made very early on in the project, to help the animators get a feel for the graphics engine.
Why CryENGINE?
Because it looks really good!
This is the opening cinematic for Squadron 42 (a separate game, a single player campaign, being developed alongside Star Citizen, which is, in spirit, the successor to the "Wing Commander" series of games). The scene was rendered in-engine, so provided you have a PC that's up to the task, it's the level of visual fidelity that will be in the finished game. Assuming you know actors better than I do, you may recognize the voice as Gary Oldman. The performance is his too. They used advanced motion/performance capture systems, and an impressive cast, which also includes Mark Hamill, Gillian Anderson, and many others, for the major NPC's in Squadron 42.
“But CryENGINE is made for FPS games, not huge space sims!”
...you might be saying. Well, here's some pretty compelling evidence that says they've gotten it to scale rather well. The video below is a relatively short tech demo, and the one below that is a longer part of a presentation, showing off some of the upcoming alpha 3.0 version of the game. Note: The 2nd video is about 52 minutes long, but it's really good, so watch when you have the time. Also, yes, they use strange version numbering, with 3.0 still as part of the alpha of the game's initial development.
Okay, but how?
Tallent. They employ many of the original CryENGINE developers.
Here, I cut to the interesting portion of a recent one of their weekly live-streams, where one of their developers comes in and basically takes over the show.
As any major crowd-funded project must, they're aware of the importance of community engagement. They have multiple video releases each week, including live-streams (as seen above), general status updates (see below), and Q&A sessions, as seen below (two down) (in this case, it's with some of the writers).
A few common Star Citizen acronyms:
CIG = Cloud Imperium Games. It's the company making Star Citizen.
PU = Persistent Universe. This is the "MMO", which will ultimately be the game known as "Star Citizen".
PTU = Public Test Universe. This one is weird. It's "public" in the sense that it's being tested by backers, rather than only by CIG employees. It's not so public, in the sense that it's not available to all backers, just a subset, based upon how wide a distribution they feel would be beneficial for testing. After testing in the PTU has shown a build to be stable enough, it's then pushed to the "Live" environment, where it's available to all backers. The whole situation is further confused by the game's current state of being in alpha (early development), so "Live" doesn't mean it's the finished product, not by a long shot.
In the explanation of PTU/Live, I'm using the term "backers" to mean someone who has purchased a Star Citizen game package.
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Wait, isn't this game “Pay To Win”???
Not really, but it depends on how broadly you want to apply that term. You can spend real-world money to get more "advanced" ships, but then you're skipping the gameplay where you are on your own, in a single-seat space ship, trying to figure out how you fit into the universe. Also, there's no hard a > b > c type progression, in ships. It's all about tradeoffs. You could get a ship with more weapons, but less cargo capacity, or vice versa. You could get one with more of both, but it will probably need a co-pilot, or more, to crew it. If you're playing with friends, do you fly together, in one large ship, or do you each fly your own ships? There are pros and cons to everything. The ship you start with is likely to be one of the best ships in the game, for multi-purpose use, by a single person. There's no "end game" in Star Citizen. It's all about doing what you enjoy.
The weapons/cargo tradeoff I mentioned was an overly simplified example, but potentially quite valid. There's a lot more to ships in Star Citizen than that.
But if I want one of those more “advanced” ships, then I have to pay, right?
No! Well, not with real-world money. Once you've purchased a game package, you can earn in-game currency (by doing missions, buying and sellings goods, piracy, whatever) and then buy any additional ships you want, with said in-game currency. The game's development is funded by those who spend real-world money on it, mostly to buy ships, so it's good that some choose to. However, there's no need for any individual player to spend anything beyond the price of the game package.
Disclaimer
Please note that the game presently available is in an Alpha stage and is currently in development. Parts of the game are made available for testing and feedback. Naturally, alpha releases are a work in progress and will have bugs and other deficiencies. Community feedback is encouraged, but the final game design decisions rest solely with the developers.
