Mageknight

I only briefly got back into Destiny around Rise of Iron's release, just enough to poke my nose around (didn't even do the raid!). Glad to see I'm not missing much, these changes are confusing to put it lightly. All I can think of is that everyone's mental energy is 100% dedicated to polishing Destiny 2 to get it ready for an E3 showing this year (and release in the fall) and they can't really be bothered to worry too much about the current state of the game.

Hey duders! Mageknight here, creator of the Giant Bomb Space Duders, our Star Citizen community. I've been quiet for a while (uh... Jeez, has it been two years already?) - mostly because rapidly vibrating over concept renders doesn't make for a great community experience. That said, we're going strong at 114 members at the time of this writing! Not bad.

But! With the advent of the Alpha 2.0 Public Test Universe, we're rapidly approaching Star Citizen's existence as... Well, an actual, honest-to-God game. That you can play. Potentially with other duders! Which means it's time to start spooling up the Community Drive! I'll try to be more directly in contact with you guys, bringing you updates on what's going on with the game as well as our fledgling group of pilots.

Community

With all that in mind, I'm going to try out something that seems to be popular: a Discord server! For those of you who don't know, Discord is the hot new 'VoIP platform for gamers' - with IRC-like chat, multiple text/voice channels, and other nice features - as well as being multi-platform, with desktop/mobile/web apps. You can join the server by clicking here. Hopefully it'll be a nice way to keep in contact with fellow Space Duders as we get excited about the next flyable ship or bemoan crashes, and will build our little community's structure going forward into the Persistent Universe's development.

The Game

The biggest news is that the Star Citizen Alpha 2.0 is available to everyone with Alpha access. This is the version of the game that unifies all of the development modules into a singular game package; it is effectively the seed that will become the final Star Citizen game. It includes the gas giant Crusader, the station Port Olisar, and some surrounding environs to explore as well as a handful of missions. It's cool to poke around in, but it still has a ways to go before it's even really playable, so don't get your hopes up too much. It's nice to be able to have tangible evidence of progress in any case!

Shortly after, there was a dev livestream where they talked about what's coming up: namely that the Freelancer is going to be flyable and the Saber is going to be hanger-ready in 2.1 (they both look pretty neat!) and that there are also some cool-looking MISC Reliant variants coming, including a planetary research platform and a... News van? You can see all the upcoming ships right here. They also announced that Star Citizen is going to be featuring procedurally generated planet surfaces with seamless space-to-surface transitions; the trailer for that is embedded below.

That's all for now - feel free to talk in the comments. See you 'round the Verse, duders.

Ah, I thought I covered all the logos. I'll look into it, thanks for the heads up.

EDIT: Did a quick hack job on the main logo to make a small icon; unfortunately the low contrast makes it look a little muddy. The icon size is 24px square if anyone else wants to give it a shot. Honestly, if anyone thinks they're a real hot shot with graphic design, I'd be happy to let you take over the 'branding' stuff (that's actually what RSI calls it!).

I'm not gonna start a new topic for this, but since they never added any announcement/community features to the Star Citizen groups and I'd like to start building up the community around now (since the Persistent Universe is probably going to be a thing in the next 12 months or so) I'm going to try running a Discord server for us. You can find it at this link.

I've also continued to keep an eye on recruitment and continuing to accept applications, so feel free to apply if you buy in or haven't do so yet!

You'll have to buy everything, unfortunately. Because Bungie built off stuff that requires DLCs I & II in The Taken King, they're making everyone buy them to even be able to play it. 'Luckily' they also released a Legendary Edition that includes the original Destiny (unfortunate, but you can pass it off to a friend I guess) and the first two DLCs for $60.

Is it worth $60, though? I'd say yes, personally, but maybe I like this game too much! You'll be fine picking up your old Gunslinger - with The Taken King they introduced a new quest system (among other things) that will guide you through The Dark Below and House of Wolves, and with the purchase of The Taken King I think you'll get an item that puts you up to the start of TTK's story and progression if you want to skip the first two DLCs.

And yeah, the 18 gig patch includes /everything/ in the game right now.

@aptos@thuggish Yo! We're still going. The Mumble server is kind of a mess right now because it's kind of turned into our dumb little clubhouse (because people just stopped showing up at some point).but we definitely still exist. Same goes for the Steam group, but it's pretty quiet because, again, nobody showed up to anything we tried to run.

I've definitely seen Discord, but what does it bring to the table that Mumble doesn't have? At this point I'm going to have more "gaming voice programs" than anything else on my computer - Teamspeak, Mumble, Gamevox, etc. etc. I really don't want to go hopping from one hot program to the next!

12v12 custom games sound like a good way to handle community games. In the past we've experimented with inhouses and often times the skill gap is really wide and... Lots of salt ensues. A goofy custom game mode that gets a bunch of people in and having fun would be super awesome.

You can probably safely skip The Dark Below (though you're missing out on a handful of cool items, and I guess Crota's End is cool the first time), but House of Wolves is pretty great (especially if you're still rocking vanilla gear). It's easier than ever to get into endgame content with the new progression system.

I'll vote for #2! Lookin' pretty fine, good work duder!

No Tengu? C'MON.

I'm gonna buy this and I'm gonna hate every minute of it. But it looks SUPER PRETTY and the new class stuff sounds like it might be fun for a time, so I'll be there when it launches.