Star Citizen - PC Community (Build: Star Citizen Commercial Sells You On A MISC Ship, 08 Jun 2014 19:30:00 GMT79ef0c18-1c65-4225-984f-fdaeab0f0862:6839756Kyle Hilliard49<p><img src="" style="max-width:610px;" border="0" alt="" /></p> <p>Star Citizen&#39;s trailers don&#39;t play out like video game trailers. Instead, they play out like car commercials, and the latest tries to see you a MISC ship.</p> <p>You&#39;ll learn about the ship&#39;s fuel efficient engines, shock-proof cargo area, and its impressive turrets which make short work of greedy pirates. It&#39;s the perfect ship for freelance transporters.</p> <p>(Please visit the site to view this media)</p> <p>Star Citizen has, to date, raised more than $43 million in funding, and <a target="_blank" href="">recently launched its Arena Commander mode to backers</a>.</p><div style="clear:both;"></div><img src="" width="1" height="1">PCStar CitizenPreviewSimulationGameplay Trailer Announces Arena Commander Mode Now Available To Backers, 04 Jun 2014 14:24:00 GMT79ef0c18-1c65-4225-984f-fdaeab0f0862:6831581Kyle Hilliard13<p><img border="0" style="max-width:610px;" src="" alt="" /></p> <p><a href="" target="_blank">As promised last month</a>, Star Citizen&#39;s Arena Commander mode is now available to backers, and a new trailer shows off its impressive visuals.</p> <p>It came a little later than originally planned, and only by a few days &ndash; something the team over at Roberts Space Industries prefaced might happen when it announced the release date.</p> <p>You can check out a new trailer for the game highlighting the newly released arena commander mode, which shows off where the game&#39;s more than $43 million in funding has been funneled. Star Citizen is a beautiful game.</p> <p>(Please visit the site to view this media)</p> <p>For more on the release, head here for the <a href="" target="_blank">game&#39;s May update</a>. For more on Star Citizen, you can <a href="">head here to find a hour-long presentation</a> detailing the game&#39;s development alongside some impressive gameplay footage.</p> <p><i>[Source: <a href="" target="_blank">@&rlm;RobertsSpaceInd</a>]</i></p><div style="clear:both;"></div><img src="" width="1" height="1">PCStar CitizenPreviewSimulationRoberts Space Industriesarena modecrowdfundedStar Citizen Video Showcases Dogfighting And The Difficulty Of Developing An Ambitious Space Shooter, 20 Apr 2014 18:19:18 GMT79ef0c18-1c65-4225-984f-fdaeab0f0862:6747013Kyle Hilliard11<p><img src="" style="max-width:610px;" border="0" alt="" /></p> <p>Robert Space Industries and its ambitious space shooter, Star Citizen, were at PAX, but if you weren&#39;t able to attend, it has posted its presentation, plus a little extra, online.</p> <p>You can check out the 30 minute video below which shows the game&#39;s new dogfighting mode in action, and also details the difficulty of developing the game and identifying bugs. Most of this video was streamed on Twitch at the time it was presented, but it does have some extra content at the end not previously shown. You can check out the video below.</p> <p>(Please visit the site to view this media)</p> <p>For more on Star Citizen, check out the <a target="_blank" href="">Anvil Hornet Lineup</a>, <a href=";y=2013&amp;m=06&amp;d=22&amp;WeblogPostName=new-star-citizen-video-tries-to-sell-the-game-to-you-like-a-car&amp;GroupKeys=">a recent trailer</a>, and read why the game stood out to us at PAX East by <a target="_blank" href=";y=2014&amp;m=04&amp;d=15&amp;WeblogPostName=5-to-watch-from-pax-east-2014&amp;GroupKeys=">heading here</a>.</p> <p><i>[Source: <a target="_blank" href="">Roberts Space Industries on YouTube</a>, via <a target="_blank" href="">GameSpot</a>]</i></p><div style="clear:both;"></div><img src="" width="1" height="1">PCStar CitizenPreviewSimulationchris robertsRoberts Space Industriesdeveloper diarymillionspace combatStar Citizen Developer Diary Marks $30 Million In Funding, 24 Nov 2013 18:38:00 GMT79ef0c18-1c65-4225-984f-fdaeab0f0862:6431612Kyle Hilliard37<p><img src="" style="max-width:610px;" border="0" alt="" /></p> <p>Star Citizen has passed another funding goal, hitting the $30 million mark. Developer Roberts Space Industries have also released a new developer diary detailing the challenges of reinvigorating a lost genre.</p> <p>You can check out the developer diary for the game below. Each funding hurdle means new features for the game, and passing the $30 million mark adds a huge space yacht ship to the game &ndash; The Origin 890 JUMP. There are only two more stretch goals to meet for the game. The $31 and $32 million marks will each add new ships to the game.</p> <p>For more on Star Citizen, you can our interview with the man behind the project, Chris Roberts, by <a target="_blank" href="">heading here</a>.</p> <p>(Please visit the site to view this media)</p> <p><i>Thanks to Doug Maley for the news tip!</i></p> <p><i>[Source: <a target="_blank" href="">Roberts Space Industries</a>]<br /></i></p><div style="clear:both;"></div><img src="" width="1" height="1">PCStar CitizenPreviewSimulationchris robertsRoberts Space Industriesdeveloper diarymillionspace combatNew Star Citizen Trailer Introduces The Anvil Hornet Lineup, 23 Oct 2013 02:47:44 GMT79ef0c18-1c65-4225-984f-fdaeab0f0862:5615332Kyle Hilliard41<p><img src="" style="max-width:610px;" border="0" alt="" /></p> <p>Robert Space Industry&#39;s Star Citizen has raised over <a href="">$21 million in funding</a>, and if the latest trailer is any indication, the money is getting put to good use. Turns out $21 million can buy some very impressive visuals.</p> <p>This video, which keeps in line with <a href="">Star Citizen&#39;s car commercial theme</a>, shows off the Anvil Hornet line of spaceships. You can check out the impressive trailer below, and learn more about the game by heading to the <a target="_blank" href="">official website</a>.</p> <object height="343" width="610"> <param name="allowfullscreen" value="true" /> <param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always" /> <param name="movie" value=";force_embed=1&amp;;show_title=1&amp;show_byline=1&amp;show_portrait=1&amp;color=00adef&amp;fullscreen=1&amp;autoplay=0&amp;loop=0" /><embed src=";force_embed=1&amp;;show_title=1&amp;show_byline=1&amp;show_portrait=1&amp;color=00adef&amp;fullscreen=1&amp;autoplay=0&amp;loop=0" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" height="343" width="610" /> </object> <div style="clear:both;"></div><img src="" width="1" height="1">PCStar CitizenPreviewSimulationKickstarterrobert space industrieshornetStar Citizen Reaches $18 Million In Funding, Adds First-Person Combat Stretch Goal, 08 Sep 2013 23:20:00 GMT79ef0c18-1c65-4225-984f-fdaeab0f0862:4330100Kyle Hilliard89<p><img src="" style="max-width:610px;" border="0" alt="" /></p> <p>In a recent update on the Roberts Space Industry website, the developer announced that $18 million have been raised towards the creation of Star Citizen.</p> <p>The $18 million mark was reached only one week after the game had raised $17 million. Along with the announcement, a new stretch goal or the game was also revealed. If the $20 million milestone can be reached, first-person combat on &quot;select lawless planets&quot; will be added to the game.</p> <p>For more information on the game, and to get on board, head to the official <a target="_blank" href="">website</a>.</p> <p><i>[Source <a target="_blank" href="">Roberts Space Industry</a> via <a target="_blank" href="">Joystiq</a>]</i></p><div style="clear:both;"></div><img src="" width="1" height="1">PCStar CitizenPreviewSimulationspacehipfpsfirst personRoberts Space Industryspace2017website18Interview: Chris Roberts Charts A Course For Star Citizen, 13 Mar 2013 23:30:00 GMT79ef0c18-1c65-4225-984f-fdaeab0f0862:2654491Matt Bertz22<div class="paginated-post" rel="4"><div class="paginated-post-page" rel="1"><p><img border="0" src="" style="max-width:610px;" alt="" /></p> <p>Once a glorious genre filled with popular titles like Wing Commander and X-Wing, space combat simulators have fallen on hard times in recent years. With no game offering the kind of experience he and other fans crave, Wing Commander creator Chris Roberts is taking it upon himself to resurrect the genre. After a decade-long haitus from game development, he recently left his Hollywood pursuits to jump back in the cockpit of a starfighter. He built a prototype of his dream game using the CryEngine 3, formed the&nbsp;Cloud Imperium Games Corporation, crowdfunded an operating budget for an new studio via&nbsp;<a href="" style="font-size:12px;">Kickstarter</a><span style="font-size:12px;">, and raised additional venture capital funding to fuel the creation of Star Citizen, his space combat simulation comeback.&nbsp;</span></p> <p>We recently sat down with Roberts to discuss why he came back to video games, the freedom of the crowdfunding model, the ambitious game ideas contained within Star Citizen, and the PC specs the game may require.&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>I&#39;ve seen you around conferences like D.I.C.E. the past couple years. Were you pitching your game before you decided to go the crowdfunding route or were you just kind of re-integrating into the business?</strong></p> <p>Definitely not with Star Citizen. That seriously was never something I wanted to pitch the traditional route because I didn&#39;t see the benefit of doing it with the EA or something. It&#39;s not necessarily in their DNA. Riot Games wasn&#39;t pitching League of Legends to EA.&nbsp;</p> <p>I worked for a year on a prototype and I was spending a lot of time looking to find out what I wanted to do when I was reentering. I had a very serious conversation about coming back, but I ultimately decided I didn&#39;t want to go the traditional route that you would expect me to go, because I felt like it was a real opportunity. There&#39;s a whole aspect to moving more digital, and it felt that was open and a lot more like the early days of the industry when you had to make the rules as you went along.&nbsp;</p> <p>It was kind of exciting, like we did mission packs for Wing Commander when nobody was doing that. That was basically a precursor to DLC. It only happened because I built Wing Commander and I couldn&#39;t fit it all on a floppy disc. So I had to cut some ships, and Wing Commander was this big hit but the next one was going to take some time. I thought, &quot;Well, I&#39;ve played D&amp;D and there&#39;s all these campaigns or modules, so why don&#39;t we think of packaging up a bunch of ships, doing 10 to 12 missions, and selling it as like a little pack?&quot; Not full price - whatever it was, $20, and the sales and the marketing guys were like, &quot;That will never work, you can&#39;t sell something that cheap into retail.&quot; We eventually persuaded them to go for it, and we thought maybe we&#39;d sell like 10,000 copies or something. I think we sold 400,000 copies, which back in 1990-91 was pretty crazy numbers.&nbsp;</p> <p>I kind of feel like there&#39;s a lot of that right now, a new frontier so to speak, with the digital frontier. There&#39;s an ability to connect directly with your player. [With] the old retail model you didn&#39;t because you would work on the game off in your own little world, then after finishing it it you&#39;d throw it over the fence to the marketing and sales guys who&#39;d get it out there. You would see people responding to it in time, but then you&#39;d be off working on the next thing. I like this idea of directly having more of a live connection to everybody that&#39;s playing the game.&nbsp;</p> <p>[Taking into account] all of those things I just spent some time considering my options. I came very close to doing another Wing Commander, but ultimately this was sort of what my end game was going to be. Even if I didn&#39;t do another Wing Commander I wanted to use that to build the technology that would become Star Citizen and I sort of decided, &quot;Well, if that really is my end goal, and if I have the opportunity to start there instead of end there, let&#39;s do that.&quot; Originally I was thinking Star Citizen would be a combination of VC-funded and crowd-funded, but more in the Mojang Minecraft way. Not necessarily as I&#39;ve done it now, but maybe something that is a part of the functionality and you release it and people pay a less amount of money and then ultimately you use that funding to keep you going. Then when crowdfunding became more of an accepted thing, the people sort of said, &quot;Ooh, it&#39;s not scary or anything,&quot; I thought that could be a better route to get this done.&nbsp;</p> <p>I&#39;d already spent six or seven months on the prototype. Then from that February to maybe October I was finishing the prototype and laying the groundwork for the campaign, because it wasn&#39;t -&nbsp;maybe there are some campaigns that throw something up and see if it sticks, but I treated it like a proper launch. I worked really hard to have a great demo lined up, did a whole press tour before to make sure there&#39;s a bunch of press that broke at the same time, did the live streaming event, and actually had a teaser site live before I did the announcement. We also aggregated a bunch of Wing Commander, Freelancer, and Privateer fans, so a lot of work that went into the marketing and the launch platform. It wasn&#39;t like, &quot;Hey, I&#39;ll put something up and hope people discover it.&quot; Crowdfunding is a lot of fun, but it&#39;s definitely a lot of work.&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>In the traditional publisher dynamic, developers respond to one entity that has a general, clearly articulated vision outlined in a contract. With crowd funding, you potentially have hundreds of different perspectives, all of which might be demanding something different. Is that a scary master to have for a developer?</strong></p> <p>It can be scary, but I actually prefer having that direct communication with the people that matter, because all a publisher does is says, &quot;I think a lot of people would buy the game so I&#39;m going to fund the money for it because I&#39;m going to sell it to millions of people down the road. Because I&#39;m funding the money, I&#39;m going to keep the majority of the profits and I&#39;m going to control it.&quot;&nbsp;</p> <p>By not having that, you get some control back, but in the end, you&#39;re not delaying all those people out there [from forming their opinions]. Ultimately people are going to have their opinions, so I would rather engage in a conversation sooner than later. The way I look at it is I know I&#39;ll never make all the people happy all the time -&nbsp;it&#39;s impossible. So I just use the feedback as a barometer. I use it to help inform me, like what are the areas that people care about, what are the areas that people think are important, and what are the things that people hate about certain games or whatever. I use that. But I&#39;m not really doing it like listening to one individual, especially on forums because there are a lot of loud people. You always find that people make the mistake and think this is the majority of the opinion, and then and you run a poll. We run a lot of polls on our site and you find out it&#39;s not the majority.</p> <p><strong>Yeah, the loudest person doesn&#39;t always represent the real concerns.</strong></p> <p>Yeah, so we do a combination of listening to what people say on the forums, throwing ideas out there to see how people respond to it, and running in-depth polls. We never use it to ask them how to design anything, because when you design stuff you always have these issues where you have this limited amount of resources. For me it&#39;s like, &quot;Okay guys, what&#39;s more interesting to you - more ships or more systems?&quot; You can say, &quot;I can put some resources here or I can put them over here.&quot; I can see how they could go for both of them, and one or the other isn&#39;t going to change my vision for the story, so and that&#39;s the best scenario. With the community, you get a good gage of what they find really important. It&#39;s probably the best focus group you can get. These are people that care so much about this kind of game that they&#39;ve given money two years before they are going to play it. That&#39;s better than a marketing focus group where they found 30 people on the street who say they like this certain game.&nbsp;</p> <p>That&#39;s kind of what it&#39;s used for. As long as you treat it that way and know that there&#39;s always people like -&nbsp;&quot;Chris Roberts, I thought he was going to build this and he&#39;s building this. F--- him.&quot; That&#39;s just what it is. You&#39;re going to get some of that. The way I like to respond to people like that is, &quot;Hey listen, why don&#39;t you wait to play it. If you still don&#39;t like it, that&#39;s cool, but don&#39;t make assumptions.&quot; Because there are always a lot of assumptions. You say, &quot;Okay, here is the mechanic,&quot; and someone takes that and spins it off into the worst possible disaster scenario, then of course everything&#39;s going to be bad. You generally have all that; I just think the difference is a lot of developers just ignore it.&nbsp;</p> <p>Even if you go on the Blizzard website, there&#39;s a lot of people angry about Diablo or whatever. There&#39;s a lot of complaining, but on the Diablo site the customer service employees see all that, and the developer is probably not even paying that much attention to it. I think that always exists, it&#39;s just whether you&#39;re deliberately paying attention to it. I want to pay attention to it. On my team, everyone has to spend an hour a day in game and an hour a week engaged with the community, forums and chat rooms, so they feel like they are interacting with the community and talking with the community so they know these developers actually exist.&nbsp;</p></div></div><script type="text/javascript">PaginateGrid();</script><img src="" width="1" height="1">PCStar CitizenPreviewSimulationchris robertsKickstarterSpace Combat Is Finally BackRoberts Space IndustriesChris Roberts Ventures Back Into Space With Star Citizen, 10 Oct 2012 16:46:00 GMT79ef0c18-1c65-4225-984f-fdaeab0f0862:2283385Jeff Cork28<p><img src="" style="max-width:610px;" border="0" alt="" /></p> <p>Wing Commander creator Chris Roberts teased his next project <a title="last month" href="">last month</a>, and now he&#39;s providing some actual meaty details. Space sim fans, meet Space Citizen. As Roberts proclaims in a video, he&#39;s not buying into the doom and gloom proclamations that PC gaming is dead.</p> <p>&ldquo;In recent years, game designers have stopped innovating and pushing the boundaries of what you can do in this genre,&rdquo; says Roberts. &ldquo;I plan on bringing that kind of development mentality back into PC gaming and space sims in particular.&quot;</p> <p>His project, Space Citizen, has been in development for a year, and now he needs players&#39; help. He&#39;s turning to crowdsourcing to raise $2 million for the last stretch. He says the model is perfect for what he&#39;s trying to do, essentially a spiritual successor to his iconic space-sim series Wing Commander, because it eliminates the need for publishers and allows the studio to pour all of that cash into development. Don&#39;t expect to see this one on consoles or mobile devices, either.</p> <p>&ldquo;There is a lot of noise out there regarding social and mobile games right now, and I think PC gamers are feeling a little left out of the mix. But the PC is still incredibly capable of presenting an experience that doesn&rsquo;t take a back seat to any other platform out there, including consoles. With my game, I want PC gamers to stand up, be counted and get excited again about all the great experiences their computer can deliver.&rdquo;</p> <p>(Please visit the site to view this media)</p> <p>Players take on tours of duty within the game, following a mission structure that should seem familiar to Wing Commanders. Those sections play out in a generally linear fashion, though players will have the opportunity to take different paths at various points. When they aren&#39;t committed to a formal job, however, pilots can explore the vast universe and make their mark. For instance, if you explore an obscure section of deep space and find an out-of-the-way jumpgate, that navigation point will be named after you, and other players will see it. The game will require a subscription, though it will be a one-time purchase, and not a month-to-month expense. Roberts promises regular updates and additional content rather than blasting players with major updates every year or so.</p> <div>For more information on the game, visit the <a target="_blank" title="official website" href="">official website</a>, where you can watch an in-depth video on the development goals, see some in-game assets, and pledge your cash to the project if you think it&#39;s something you&#39;d like to play.</div> <p>&nbsp;</p><div style="clear:both;"></div><img src="" width="1" height="1">PCStar CitizenPreviewSimulationwing commanderchris roberts