A year passes. The grass grows. The trees sway. The sun rises. Star Citizen is still in development. Almost a decade of spacesim development has gone from ‘cool classic genre revival’ to ‘$460 million of crowdfunding money has gone into this gargantuan and we don’t know what’s going on any more.’ Which is part cool, part horrifying. This week you get to see what that all looks like in motion, as the latest alpha build – 3.17 – is free to play for all, with full access to what seems to be a fairly varied, if fundamentally unfinished, game.
You can “explore the ‘verse” in one of 66 vehicles, presumably wander around on foot, and based on the subreddit, do stuff like fall for 20 solid minutes to your death from the new cloud city, Orison. Why? I dunno, it sounds fun. The free access period starts 9am Pacific today and runs until around 5pm Pacific May 31. Of course, if you can figure out the secret art of paying for Star Citizen, you can play past that, if you like.
In the semi-regular Letter from the Chairman segment from CEO and game director Chris Roberts last week, it was announced that the game has peaked past 2 million unique players. Roberts also makes mention of the fact that, nine years ago, the game in development was vastly different from what it is today. Given it is now likely the most expensive game of all time, and has an overall player count lower than games like Fall Guys and Vampire Survivors, that’s not especially surprising. Neither is Roberts’ claim that no publisher or developer would make this game. No, Chris, no they would not.
But hey, a lot of the funding dramas are in the past, and if people willingly want to spend the money, they can. Development may be long but updates are regular. There’s a thing to play. It might have thousand-dollar packages, but nobody says you have to buy it. And if you just want to pre-order the single-player portion, you can do that, and progress is being made.
In addition to the free play, this Invictus Week 2952, as it’s known, will feature new ships and a bunch of in-universe events. Here’s the slightly odd trailer/marketing movie.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4yXQdHzTj4
Star Citizen is due out when it’s finished. You’d hope.
Written by Ben Barrett on behalf of GLHF.
