The world's highest funded vapourware, Star Citizen has a free fly this week

[UPDATE] There is an 'anniversary' free-fly now: November 24 through December 5

Yeah, this is a shameless plug in the outside chance someone hasn't already had a chance to experience the jpeg game that is Star Citizen. They have a free-fly this week where you can explore some of the ships in the game and check out what they've done with the $239+ million dollars they have raised to date.

If you are creating an account, you can use my referral code {STAR-FQ6B-B97S}, which will credit your account with 5,000 UEC (in game creds). If someone buys a package, I'll get a free ship! I know right? Crazy!

There's a couple of modules you can play in now:
Star Marine: FPS shooter
Arena Commander: spaceship FPS
Murray Cup: spaceship racing
Persistent universe: the game proper, bugs, warts, and all. There are quest givers, a basic trading game, rudimentary mining, and a ton of emergent gameplay, if you're so inclined.

I heard it is closer to $280 million. This game seem to be having issues. Costing more than Triple-A MMO games, originally planned for launch in 2014, but has since been repeatedly been delayed with no release date in sight.

Hold your horses,
before you get all too excited by the idea of my pointer smashing on your link,
there are some ethical questions to be resolved if you wanna make this work.

Does this mean we become friends with benefits ?
How high is the income of your household by playing this contentbugrich game on
a fulltime job-base ?
Should you suddenly want a divorce, who gets to maintain the ship ?
Shouldn´t we become much more acquainted before you make such a
personal request ?

This sounds to me like a very cheap one time transaction, im out.

posting because we have the same forum signature. rock on, brother.

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Lachdanan wrote:

Does this mean we become friends with benefits ?

I'm not giving you the key to my house. The last time I did that, she took my gaming rig and ran away with a Twitch streamer.

"

Lachdanan wrote:

How high is the income of your household by playing this contentbugrich game on a fulltime job-base ?

I can proudly say I am able to capably feed a two-mouth household as much Doritos and Dew we need to keep ourselves on our PCs 24/7

"

Lachdanan wrote:

Should you suddenly want a divorce, who gets to maintain the ship ?

Hrm... Never really considered divorce as an option. Perhaps we could seek join custody arrangements through council...

"

Lachdanan wrote:

Shouldn´t we become much more acquainted before you make such a personal request ?

Of course not! It's all part of the adventure!

For those that missed the free-fly opportunity last month, they're doing another one right now in celebration of CitizenCon and Star Citizen's anniversary.

I do not suggest you purchase anything during the free fly.
Register your account to gain access to the game *
Download the RSI launcher, download the client. (approx 51GB!). Dive into the game.

If you liked what you saw/experienced, and you want to keep visiting the environment after the free fly event, then you can decide if you want to drop some dosh on the game.

My recommendation is to pick up the cheapest package available, the Mustang Alpha ($45usd for Star Citizen only, $65 including Squadron 42, a single-player storyline/adventure). The way things are working right now, you need a 'game package' to gain access to game content. You can actually rent all the other available ships in the game by grinding out creds while playing.

If you happen to become hooked and want to upgrade your ship/buy more ships immediately, the reason to spend before the free fly is over is to pick up a limited availability ship or to get a 'bonus' (usually extended insurance). There are different paths to acquiring ships, and I can share my thoughts from my own trial and error, depending on your intentions/goals.

Feel free to ask any questions (i.e. wtf is insurance? what are CCUS? how do I get that huge ship I saw some other player had?!?!) and I'll do my best to answer in thread.

Happy flying!

Did they ever transition any parts of the game to the Vulkan API and phase out DX? I remember them announcing they would be doing that like 2 yrs ago or so, but don't know if it has happened.

If you just want to fly ships around, blow stuff up, and kill mobs, get loot, farm resources, etc, this game is pretty good:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/383120/Empyrion__Galactic_Survival/

There are servers you can join for multiplayer for coop, and PVP. Or stick to single player if you want.

You can build your own ships, or download ships others built from the Steam Workshop. You got hover vessels, small vessels, and capital vessels.

Star Citizen is never going to be finished, and it's totally pay-to-win if people can purchase ships with real money. I heard they got ships that are more powerful than 50-60 entry level player ships, that even if a bunch of new players tried to attack a larger vessel, they'd all get completely gutted by another new player who spent $1500-$3000 of real money on a badass ship. Like taking an X wing against a Super Star Destroyer when the force is not with you.

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MrSmiley21 wrote:

If you just want to fly ships around, blow stuff up, and kill mobs, get loot, farm resources, etc, this game is pretty good:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/383120/Empyrion__Galactic_Survival/

There are servers you can join for multiplayer for coop, and PVP. Or stick to single player if you want.

You can build your own ships, or download ships others built from the Steam Workshop. You got hover vessels, small vessels, and capital vessels.

Star Citizen is never going to be finished, and it's totally pay-to-win if people can purchase ships with real money.

Yeah, Empyrion is not bad. It's definitely still a bit rough around the edges and some aspects, especially crafting, are not very intuitive at first. Been in EA forever, but it's still getting fairly substantial updates about monthly or so. The price is already not bad at all for what it offers, and I imagine it will get some discount during Steam's upcoming sales.

"

aggromagnet wrote:

Did they ever transition any parts of the game to the Vulkan API and phase out DX? I remember them announcing they would be doing that like 2 yrs ago or so, but don't know if it has happened.

I'm not up to spec on the technical side of things (I just drop in/out every once in a while to monitor progress), but I believe the client supports Vulkan DX12, as I've seen tech reports referring to it.

From my own experience, they've managed to improve optimizations quite a bit, though it still chugs when there are a lot of assets in the environment simply due to how deep the z axis is and how the game maintains its seamless pov.

For reference, I'm running a GTX1080 on a Z170/7700k 16GBDDR42666 with the client on an NVME SSD and Windows swap drive on a SATA-6 RAID-0. In spaceflight I get a fairly consistent 50 to 55 fps in 1440p, which is adequate for traversal and combat. On foot in highly detailed zones (i.e. spaceports), it drops down to around 35-40, but because at the moment the ports are primarily quest/trade interfaces, it doesn't have a material impact on gameplay. I have not ventured into the FPS module myself.

"

MrSmiley21 wrote:

Star Citizen is never going to be finished, and it's totally pay-to-win if people can purchase ships with real money. I heard they got ships that are more powerful than 50-60 entry level player ships, that even if a bunch of new players tried to attack a larger vessel, they'd all get completely gutted by another new player who spent $1500-$3000 of real money on a badass ship. Like taking an X wing against a Super Star Destroyer when the force is not with you.

Yeah. I had that gut instinct wayyy back in 2010 when Chris Roberts made his kickstarter announcement, which is why I never funded it back then. But a few years ago I tried a free-fly and I was blown away by the seamless transition and how flying a spacecraft brought back all my childhood sensations of playing Wing Commander, X-wing, and Descent:Freespace.

I'm really only interested in Squadron 42, their 'single-player storyline', but yeah, scope creep and feature restarts/revisions/resets continue to push back any real release date, and it may very well end up being a perpetual alpha.

That being said, they have implemented quests (mostly fetch and mining at the moment), and there is primitive implementation of freeform (emergent play) cargo trading and asteroid mining. If you get a good server, you may find yourself spending a few hours just messing around with other players with the content that is already there.

I log in and continue to be blown away by how immersive the game is. Graphical fidelity is really high and though they keep doing a 2 steps forward/1 step back kinda thing with ship physics and the targetting system, it scratches my dog-fighting itch.

There are very large ships available for real dollars, usually limited in supply, yet they sell out very quickly. There are some very big whales that are into this pixel game...

It's not expected that a single player can realistically take on the larger ships. Larger ships have way stronger hulls and massive shields, and most small craft aren't capable of equipping weapons that would even make a scratch. It's more the realm of missle/torpedo boats to take out capitals.

The balance component of capital ships is the crew requirement. There is very little automated defence, which means a large ship requires multiple players to pilot various stations for it to be run efficiently/effectively (until they allow you to recruit NPC specialists/mercs to pilot vacant seats). More often than not, someone who owns a big ship will ask in global for crew, and those with smaller ships will simply 'enlist' to have fun in the larger ship together with other players.

I think the intention is that players will ultimately align with Organizations who would fund the larger ships, and smaller ships would play escort/fighter defence roles in big engagements (a la Eve Online, etc.).

They continue to redefine ship roles as they flesh out game mechanics, but it tends to follow traditional WWI/WWII naval warfare models. Combat itself is intended to feel like WWII dogfighting, except in space with zero gravity flight control (inertial movement, drifting/rotation via thrusters on all 3 axes).