Ok... it all started with Chris Roberts who designed the game Wing Commander if any of you remember that one.
SC began as a crowd funded only game and has worked its way close to $200 Million. Just this month alone it has made $3.2 million. All this is made from ship sales. That's a lot of ships !! Currently 1.9 million people have pledged for ships.
You can get in the game for $45 starter package whish will include a single ship and a few other things. Where you go from there is pledging for ships you might like, from small Single-seaters to massive destroyers that require a large number of people to fly. Ship types range from fighters to cargo ships, explorer types to mining, luxury yachts to racers. Single player or multi player ships come in each type of ship.
The game it self will start off as Squadron 42 which is a single player game. They expect this to have maybe 3-4 expansions. Later the full blown game will be released with what CR calls the Persistent Universe which will be a one world server that includes everything, all star systems etc. All players will live and play on one huge game world. This is where we get to fly the ships we pledged for.
This youtube describes the PU pretty good.
Ok so.. hey I don't want to spend all my time flying space ships around, what's in it for me ?
You want FPS type game play ? its here and called Star Marine. You can have friends drop you on a planet to fight with others using vehicles and all sorts of things. If you fly a assault ship you can fly up to a huge destroyer, blow a hole in the ship and your FPS guys can jump in and fight it out with the players maning the ship.
Just some vids on ships and sizes.
For Cargo types we have the Hull series. Currently I have a Hull C and E.
So with each ship type than can be multi-player what does that mean ?
Ships can have stations, like captain, engineer, weapons officer etc. But man, what if I don't have that many friends to play or people are not only line and crap, no one wants to man the gun turrets because its boring. Fear not, you can hire NPC's to man those spots. Take away is big multi crew ships might be a problem to fully man and using NPC's to fill spots might get costly. There are other options not yet in the game.
The main enemy in Star Citizen are the Vanduul, they main things we will be fighting. There is also PvP, Priates etc.
Current state of the game is Alpha and very soon to have patch 3.0 come out which will bring a lot of nice new features. 3.1 is what I am waiting for as it brings several ships I am waiting for.
What can you do now ?
There is free flight, just you and your ship to fly around and get used to.
Fight Vanduul is waves of ships coming at you.
Star Marine where you can fight others FPS style.
Move to your hanger and check your shinny new ships out.
Or head to Port Olisar, a giant space station. Recall a ship you want to fly and take off and explore.
Right now we only have Port Olisar and a few waypoint to fly around to, its good fun as you can find people who want to fight.
In 3.0 we get some planets and more space. We will be able to land on planets, get out and explore, fight, pull our dune buggies out and race around.
The game still has a long ways to go before even Beta hits but its in good shape and lots of fun even in this Alpha. SQ42 should hit soon also.
I like to read about the tech behind the game. Originally it started using Crytek game engine but soon out grew that (yes it could play Crysis). They moved to Amazon Lumberjack a little over a year ago. The game uses a massive amount of processing power so Lumberjack made sense.
One of the big issues they had at first was View Ports. Crytek did not like View Ports at all and they ran in to a game block. View Ports are like your sitting in your ship flying around, you look to your left to see your friends ship but cannot see your friend looking back at you. With lumberjack you can. Say you have 5 friends playing on your one ship, each can look out a window and see others in different ships looking back at you.
The next problem was instance size. At first we were limited to maybe 8 people in one instance. That was not going to work as some ships might need 30 people in one ship. Lumberjack fixed that. Each ship is now its own instance inside the main instance. Naturally the more ships in a system the more instances it will need... Instances can be spread across servers to make things even bigger.
Currently the biggest ship they have demonstrated flying is the Idris, a sort of mini carrier. They want to be able to handle several Idris class ships plus a bunch of single player ships in one instance. The issue they have now is networking. Picture 30 people in one ship from all over the world fighting others from all over the world... yeah it gets complex.
So what the heck is this Sabre Raven that you get with the new Optane drive ?
Its really nothing special, a single pilot stealth ship specializing in EMP warfare. It will fly up to a ship and EMP it dropping its shields, now your friends can have at it. It will be a collectors items and many will want it as it will not go on sale.
If you want to learn more simply head over to youtube, search Star Citizen and the latest videos from Citizencon 2017 should come first. There is some pretty good stuff in those videos and show the current and planned state of the game.
My current ship line is...
Orgin 600i Luxury
890 Jump
Drake Dragonfly
Carrack
Hull A, B, C, E
Constellation
Sabre Raven
Arbiter
Super Hornet F7C-M
NOX
Starfarer Gemini
Sabre
Dang... I have a problem HAHA