Yeah I happened to find that. In one corner of the hangar there was this white "pod" or something, which apparently is a simulator. From there I could access the Arena Commander, and basic training. I took that, started, ran to my ship (in the simulator) etc., but I had to stop for now.

So far it all felt pretty professionally done, maybe there will be some kind of game at some point, who knows what. It felt a bit fake in the simulator that the instructor kept repeating the same line "What are you doing? Get over there." or something over and over again, when I followed him to his ship, instead of going to my own ship. It broke the immersion that it would have been some real person. :)

Oh and I also found a way out of the "waiting room", outside I found some weapons shop (inactive?) etc. I didn't know how to open the door to get out of the waiting room.

I'll try that basic training later, but oddly I just got an urge to play Freespace instead. :) I just want to see first does it ran passably on space for me. The indoors is tolerable with medium details at 1280x720.

The resolution selection is a bit... odd though. E.g. the text size doesn't seem to change if you change resolution, so the lower resolution you select, the less readable all text etc. becomes. It doesn't "zoom" the text and such like normally if you select a lower resolution. Only in1920x1080 the tiny text was sharp and (barely) readable, for instance the key bindings.

But now I have to go to eat, dinner...

LOL I almost forgot to try the game again during this free trial period, I felt more like playing Freespace instead and totally forgot about Star Citizen. :)

Anyway, I continued the basic flight training tutorial today. At least the tutorial feels quite professionally done, I liked how the game supports both a mouse and a flightstick at the same time and even detects which I am using at the moment, and changing the context sensitive instructions based on that. Like when I changed to a flightstick on the fly, then it kept telling me which button or axis to use on it, not the mouse.

The graphics look nice in space and at least run smooth enough for me on my gaming laptop (NVidia GeForce GTX 670M, at 1280x720 resolution and medium details I'd think it is around 30 fps or so, just a guess).

However, the true nature of the game came during the tutorial with a big bold "CONNECTION ERROR! CONNECTION FAILED!" error, at which point the game aborted. Apparently even during the tutorial you have to have a constant internet connection, and a small hiccup in my WiFi internet connection apparently killed the game.

I guess I am done and I can just as well uninstall it. It feels promising the little I've tried it and at least I've been proven that the developer has done something about the game, but most probably I won't be paying for a space MMO that requires a constant online connection even for a mere simulator tutorial that I would have thought is an offline experience (is it? I didn't see other people flying there too.).

Back to games like Freespace 1-2, the X series etc... I wouldn't mind seeing a single-player campaign with that technology at some point, though.

Well actually the single player campaign is planed, that's actually the only reason why I backed it as I don't care about MMOs, and it should be offline and DRM-free, that is If they keep their promise of course (YES! I am looking at you Elite Dangerous!).

They should have released a beta/alpha for it last year but... well let's just say that keeping deadlines is not exactly their forte...

Star Citizen isn't just an MMO, it is a single player game, multi-player battle arena, and an MMO. There are many game modules altogether, however being in development they haven't yet completed all of them.

Star Citizen isn't vapourware. The project's amazingly successful crowd funding ($90million and growing daily) spawned an insane number of stretch goals which in return have extended not only the budget, but the entire scope of what they hope to achieve with the game and the time it will take to complete the development of it all. Their development blog contains progress reports ongoing over time, including some very impressive videos of things they have been up to. More recently I watched one showing Mark Hamill and others working on motion capture and voice acting for the game.

This game is not only heavily in development, but it is likely the single largest game of this genre and scope ever attempted to date by anyone, and in the hands of some of the most capable and trusted in the genre's history. There are some gamers out there that funded the initial kickstarter expecting a game in 12 months or whatever and some of them are upset and badmouthing the project now with varying degrees of public visibility, but if one looks into what they're actually doing it looks like they are progressing along just fine, only with much larger goals and game coming out at the end, and an ETA that is further out in the future than their original much smaller scoped plan.

From what I've followed, it looks like this game will come out at the end of 2016 at the earliest, and probably in 2017 being more likely. Been a long time coming now, but IMHO games of this scope don't really happen ever, so waiting a few years for them to get it right rather than just shipping the much simpler initially planned game is going to be probably a once in a lifetime type thing for a space combat game like this. There are a number of other space games out there that each have their merits of course, but none of them remotely come close to the scope of what they're trying to do with Star Citizen from what I've seen so far. I'd much rather see it be an epic game and take it's time to do it right than to rush out as a "me too" clone of other things that exist out there already but that's just me.

My fondest memories of games like this were playing the Star Wars X-Wing series of games and the various Wing Commander games in the 90s. Nothing before, during or since that has come close to reproducing the thrills of those particular game series for me. Now we have Star Citizen being developed by Chris Roberts who created Wing Commander in the first place and has hired as many people as he was able to muster who worked on the Wing Commander and Star Wars X-Wing games among many others over time. Just that alone has me more excited than what any other company out there is working on with or without something to show for. :)

Games like this only happen out of pure passion, and going against industry norms. Patience. :)

The single player campaign is called "Squadron 42", but it is not yet available for testing I don't believe. Last I read these remaining elements missing from the entire Star Citizen whole will be out later this year for testing at least. I've been holding out waiting for the whole experience personally as I'm not keen on early beta testing of incomplete games. Definitely excited about the whole experience though, especially the idea of playing the game in VR. :)

You talk the talk.


We've yet to see if this thing walks the walk..


(I'm skeptical)

I've seen absolutely nothing to date that would suggest they're having any kind of struggle with the game, and nothing to suggest it wont get finished and released. There are some paranoid bloggers out there that may have forgotten to take their medication and whatnot, but there will always be that out there. Be as skeptical as you like though, that's easy to do with anything that is an unreleased product. I'll be maintaining enthusiasm and excitement towards the game up until I actually see some concrete evidence that it isn't going to meet my expectations however.

It has broken 100 million last year. a quick check show it stands at 107+ million

My wallet will wait until that then. I kinda wish they would have made two separate games with the technology, the offline single-player only game, and then the space MMO with the same technology. The latter could have even been a free-to-play with microtransactions (like Team Fortress 2, World of Tanks etc.), but then I am unsure how a f2p game would work as a kickstarter. Maybe so that backers get some online purchases free or something...

The technology itself left a positive taste in my mouth. I was kinda expecting a broken mess full of glitches etc., but the little I tried (admittedly, only moving around in the base and the hangar, and flying part of the simulator tutorial) it seemed to work fine and usually felt professionally done (except the way the tutorial instructor kept repeating the same line over and over if I followed him instead of going towards my own ship, but that is a minor thing, just reminding it is just a game after all...).

Yeah it was pretty big for a free trial, but it took me like 6½ hours to download it, which is ok I guess. At least it was downloading at full speed. I think my 10Mbit/s cable modem connection included in my housing costs is a pretty standard internet connection here. 50-100Mbit/s is considered fast at this point (I could have that too if I wanted to pay extra monthly).

Of course there are the data caps. If I had been in rural Thailand with the mobile connection which is limited to 4GB data per month, naturally I wouldn't have wasted 7 months' download quota on one free trial. Then again, then I would have severe problems downloading The Witcher 3 as well...

I could see myself playing it on my 3½ years old gaming laptop. It felt "smooth enough" (which to me is usually like around 30fps, maybe even a bit less at times) as long as I was ready to play it at 1280x720 resolution with medium details. It looked fine then, but if I wanted to play it on the sharper 1920x1080 resolution, it would be too jerky.

The free trial didn't seem to offer much of options to fine tune the graphics, so you could only select the resolution, and the detail level (low/medium/high). I'd expect it to have more options later, like switching off graphics options you feel are useless or wasteful, and keeping those you consider more important. At this point it didn't give me that control.

At this point the problem with the resolution though was that all the text was apparently meant for the 1920x1080 resolution. Usually in games when you change the resolution to lower, the text gets bigger, but not in this case. The text remained at the same size, but became unreadable the lower resolution you selected, as if it is the same small text filtered through a lower resolution. I hope they change that, or at least make the text bigger by default.

But yeah, I am not really interested to the MMO or even the multiplayer part at this point, unless they become free-to-play maybe. I would primarily be paying for a good single-player game, so waiting for that before I open my wallet. At least now I feel they could bring out something good, as long as they can keep going and don't totally run out of money etc. (with 100 million, I certainly hope not, and I'd hope they concentrate on few things at a time, finishing something tangible so that non-backers have some reason to buy the game, rather than lots of unfinished things and nothing in a playable state).

Amazing isn't it. Last I checked it was around 90M. Keeps growing with no signs of slowing down. To me that indicates both an extreme demand out there for this kind of game as well as high reputation and strong level of trust in the company to meet its stated goals. The fact it keeps growing suggests that those who have confidence in the project greatly outweigh those that lack confidence IMHO.

There's really no reason I can see why they wouldn't be able to finish the project with the amount of cash pouring in as it is. If they're spending the money slower than its coming in then naturally any problems that arise can be fixed by time or money or both, and they've got an ample supply of money, and an ample supply of time so long as the ample supply of money keeps coming in.

That's why I have confidence in the project personally. The reputation of those involved, and they have money and time on their side.

Not sure why people think that it's just an MMO when they've published the specs of the whole project and it clearly shows the importance of the single player Squadron 42 campaigns. The only thing majorly different about Star Citizen that I can see is that they're really putting a tonne of information in the public eye that would normally be hidden from public view with any game of this scale from any other company. The public is not used to seeing that information, and is quick to make broad judgments and criticisms of such a company without really knowing what they're talking about. :) This is why companies generally DO NOT share their detailed inner workings with the public.

Needless to say, video game projects can only be broken down into so many parallel sub-projects at a time, and development has to proceed in linear phases with as much being done in parallel per phase as can be done. They needed to build their engine before building out the various game modules, and then work on each of the other steps in an order that are dependent on each other. The MMO persistent universe isn't even available last time I checked and it seems that will be the last thing to be completed. The single player Squadron 42 wasn't ready last I checked either, and developing a story and campaigns would likely be the next most complex thing to the MMO module. The arena combat thing would seemingly be much easier since no campaign scripting and story etc. need be present for that sort of thing, and the hangar and other stuff all fit into timeframes that make sense developmentally in project management IMHO.

Perhaps the MMO is simply the most talked about online even though it doesn't yet exist (that I'm aware of) because it is the most highly anticipated?

As for the size of the game, that's not a big deal. Massive epic games broke the 30GB barrier long ago, and this game aims to be quite epic in nature so I'm actually surprised that it is as small as 30GB to be honest. IIRC, Grand Theft Auto 5 is like 60+GB. The game is also deep in development and most likely not even remotely optimized yet either. Developmental stuff generally is larger than a finished project due to debug code, and various other things that are not optimized and finalized.

The answer to the first depends on what they publish as minimal/recommended system requirements but they wont likely do that until the game is nearly complete and their optimizations are done. It's impossible to estimate system requirements reliably before that's done. The game does support VR so the requirements for that will likely be very steep, but on a non-VR system I would speculate that they'll be on par with whatever the latest generation of Cryengine games are requiring. As for the second question, the company and its developers would categorically answer "yes". Any other answer is pure speculation, feel free to speculate. :) I see zero evidence to suggest that it wont be completed however, not even any really weak evidence.

I dont mean size in general. More fact downloading 30GB just for a demo/trial.. the time factor and data usage.

did anything ever result from the Escapist thing with SC?

I wasn't interested at all in the MMO, not wanting to be competing with "pros" or screamed at by angry kids when I just want to play at my own pace (well, all of you who don't like MMO's get the idea), but I backed the game after I read this: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/12770-Chris-Roberts-On-Multiplayer-Single-Player-And-Instancing

The important summarised points are at the end of the article:

1. "The key to all this is to allow player choice – you want to play alone you can, want your friends to join you in co-op we allow that and if you want to be challenged by other real players you can do that. The special part is that it can all happen in the same holistic universe."

2. "The same instance system underpins the single player Squadron 42. If you’re playing off-line, your computer will be acting as the server and client, there will be no opportunities for friends to join and everyone will be an NPC."

So unless they fail to deliver their promises, there's a completely offline single-player campaign, Squadron 42 (although you can choose to play the campaign online with friends as wingmen if you want), and you could play the "MMO universe" just with NPC's, your friends or everybody if you want. These were the selling points for me.

Now that Chris Roberts article is 3-4 years old, and I haven't actively followed development (huge forums, people taking it too seriously for my taste, and too much time to consume lots of videos, articles, etc every week), but a quick search and glance over the place tells me that this is being implemented (and raged over, as expected :-D) as a "PVP slider".

I hope you'll be able to set the slider to 0 and not have to interact with any angry kid while delivering your cargo around the galaxy. If not, at least there will be Squadron 42 to enjoy in solo mode.