Alpha 3.0 is behind the corner and could be released for evocatis already in a week. Any evocatis here?

I recommend to watch CIG's latest AtV.

"Star Citizen: Around the Verse - Crafting Procedural Moons" - YouTube: v=DbEKn6gN4Qk

what the heck is evocatis?

Still trucking along? Good for Star Citizen. I heard a few grumblings from the Derek Smart camp about recent money troubles but I took it with a grain of salt because you know Derek Smart. Star Citizen might not live up to it's lofty expectations but what they've shown makes it seem like the game is coming together albeit much slower than initially projected.

They are the first testing group outside of CIG who are testing under NDA. Usually others testers follows quite soon after Evocati phase.

@bartok: Star Citizen is doing great. Sure, there are constant attacks from certain group of people but if you follow CIG's YouTube channel, read weekly Schedule Report and test the alpha versions, you get pretty good picture how the project is progressing.

The game is enormous and complex so it takes some time to get finished. If things goes fine there should be quite a lot to play already in Alpha 3.0.

I just want them to draw a line and reach it.

I'm still fairly sure this games a huge ruse.

Isn't 3.0 meant to be like a huge game changer?

@mrcraggle: Alpha 3.0 seems to be a huge game changer due the new techs it will bring to PU; planetary tech, item system 2.0, loot system 2.0, subsumption, etc.

It seems they wants to release Alpha 3.0 in Gamescom which is one out of four of bigger events they participate yearly.

Monthly Studio Report: June 2017

So this game is still early access or did they ever release a "finished" build? I remember when this was supposed to come out soon after elite dangerous. Seems like it would be better to make a finished product and then add expansions with all this extra content they are working on instead of doing it all at once but i guess it's making them money

@oursin_360: There are benefits and detriments to both approaches. Look how limited something like WOW is by having to bolt everything on to a 15 year old game.

That being said, I agree that completing SOMETHING and then moving on would have been a better way to go. I am sure there are people who bought expensive packages a long time ago who have stopped following the game or even died at this point. Whatever they deliver will be a disappointment at this point, and is unlikely to really take off.

Frankly I think they should have made Star Citizen 1.0 with a more limited feature set and then expanded it in the sequel. Let people import their ships and progress so they don't feel cheated.

@oursin_360: There's no extra content really. They're making a huge space opera. Planets and space stations and star systems etc. are all important. Until that is all in place, they can't really release a game. If 30% of the game is set on planets, releasing the game before you get the planets makes little sense.

Elite Dangerous is a sandbox with zero story. Star Citizen is a space epic. Can't just release it in chunks, aside from the alpha style release they have done.

@oursin_360: They are working on two games; Star Citizen and Squadron 42. Star Citizen is a MMO and Squadron 42 is a single player game divided into a three episodes (first one should have about 20 hours of gameplay).

Star Citizen PU Alpha 3.0 will bring quite much new content and many new game mechanisms and features over current Alpha 2.6.3 - Star Citizen Wiki

I personally think their current way of develop game works very well. The backers are able to test the alpha versions, give CIG valuable feedback about the features/mechanisms and of course file bug reports.

The game will be enormous and having ~30% ready could easily means hundreds of hours of gameplay and more way more content than what most of the AAA games has these days.

It is a crowdfunded game and of course things can go bad. I wouldn't recommend anyone to back the game if they have any doubts about CIG able to finish the product. CIG keeps free fly weekends time to time which gives an excellent opportunity to check how the game has progressed and if it would be worth of support before release.

The most expensive digital game package for Star Citizen is $18,000, and is doesn't include everything!

@cyberbloke: Could be something organizations and "big names" would buy.

Are you looking forward to play Alpha 3.0?

@spacegg: Have you tried 3.0 yet? how is the procedural planetside stuff?

Last time I played was right when 2.6 came out I think, I was quite impressed by the sense of scale and the ship combat, but there was not much to do at all.

The most expensive digital game package for Star Citizen is $18,000, and is doesn't include everything!

yeah... it's pretty ridiculous, I bought a 60 bucks gamepack and a stand alone ship when they first launched the campaign in 2012, then I sold the ship for 3 times the price I paid a couple of years ago, so it's all good!

@onarum: Alpha 3.0 has not released for testers yet and unfortunately I'm not Evocati either.

Alpha 2.6.3 PU has about 2 hours of missions but otherwise it is more or less messing around with other players. The current version also includes Arena Commander for dogfighting and Star Marine for FPS.

Alpha 3.0 will be a huge overhaul to every current game mechanisms (which are just placeholders at the moment) and it will have many new ones. Additionally there will be "mission givers" and it uses first iteration of new mission system.

I'm a backer but not Evocati.
Everything just got pushed out another week or two as of yesterday I believe. PTU 3.0 date is now end of August.
Looking forward to 3.0 but not holding my breath.

I threw 30 bucks at Star Citizen in the very beginning, so I guess technically I am a part of this whole thing. I just wanted a decent space trading/fighting/flying game that was persisitent and that I could play with friends. It has been YEARS since I have cared about what is going on with it. Is it anywhere near completion? When will it be a game that we can all play together? It just keeps going and going and going..... Apparently there are many teams of people hard at work on this game but a very cynical and hopefully wrong part of me feels like it is just a jobs program that will never yield any genuinely fresh and fun results.

@splodge: I by no means follow it regularly, but for what they are showing it feels like this thing will take at the very least 2 or 3 more years to be done... maybe Squadron 42 (the simple, mission based, single player part of it) will come earlier than that, I'm not sure.

@splodge: Isn't that how game development works in general? Games are being developed for years but normally behind the closed doors so we don't know how they are progressing (Beyond Good & Evil 2, Cyberpunk 2077, TES 6, GTA 6, etc). With crowdfunded games like Star Citizen we are able to follow how the development progress from the beginning and in SC case even more so.

Star Citizen is already playable with other players although the game has only more or less placeholders at the moment - it is still pretty impressive.

@spacegg: Publishers tend to give you a death-line and there reasons for that, they don't want it to become a bottomless pit. My fear with crowed-funding is that bottomless pit, and people not getting what they wanted and them ( the company) going to a publisher to get the game in a "finished" state.

@soulcake:

I totally agree with you but I think what you described is exactly why crowdfunding is an excellent addition to publisher driven model. There are risks is crowdfunding and everyone who are supporting those projects should know what they are - you are probably not going to get a finished product at all or it is very different what was originally planned.

But the games what comes via crowdfunding are pretty different than what publishers are interested about these days; Pillars of Eternity, Torment: Tides of Numenera, Star Citizen, Elite Dangerous, DUAL Universe, etc. Without crowdfunding we wouldn't have games like those.

As we saw this years E3 it seems there is no a game like Star Citizen in development on big developers / publishers and most likely we are not going to see one either. That's probably one of the reasons why people are supporting Star Citizen - there's no other way to get a game like that.

To me it doesn't look like Star Citizen has been under development exceptionally long time as game media says all the time. If you make much simpler games like The Witcher 3, GTA V, TESO, etc. the development is faster and requires less money. Bigger and more ambitious the project is, more time it takes and more it costs.

CIG keeps backers pretty well informed how things are progressing (except about SQ42). As in software development normally there are suprising problems, blockers bugs, etc. which affects the progress and schedule.

Schedule Report

Monthly Studio Reports

Weekly videos: YouTube.com Star Citizen

Weekly posts

When you look at the sheer volume of tasks CIG have completed so far it's not surprising to me there are a few setbacks in the mix. 3.0 is a monster.

The topic of Happy Hour on this Friday is Alpha 3.0 game systems. Interesting topic. Last time Will talked about scanning he got lots of feedback from the community. Maybe we could see a next iteration of scanning system if it will be included in Alpha 3.0

*Squuuish*

The latest episode of Bugsmashers! gives a quick look how handling packages / crates looks in upcoming Alpha 3.0. They have mentioned how long time crates can be left over the planet surfaces before they vanishes but unfortunately I didn't find the specific time just now. Nevertheless, it is going to be pretty interesting what kind of smuggling etc. gameplay one can do with crate (loot system 2.0) mechanism. The system requires still some polishing but that comes later in beta stage.

Here's a small teaser what to expect from this Thursday's Around the Verse: "Derelict ships and an update from our LA studio!"

Basic derelict ships and debris fields are part of Alpha 3.0 so this episode should be something to look forward. They make possible to add quite variety of different kind of missions so they are pretty nice addition; scavenging, cargo and information stealing, etc.

edit: The full video is now online along with a small trailer

Today we are going to get a closer look how cargo kiosk UIs looks and works in Alpha 3.0 - teaser

Just a basic economy between players should add many new mission possibilities into the game. It is interesting to see how economy will change the gameplay later when AI is included and economy gets more versatile. According to their plan the economy should be relatively complex and have a big affect to game world overall.

edit: The full episode has now been released - Star Citizen: Around the Verse - Kiosks and Commodities

PC Gamer wrote a small article about Alpha 3.0 - First man on the moon: hands-on with Star Citizen Alpha 3.0

It is refreshing game media to focus on the game instead of drama around it. There is a constant stream of information about the development and the game, a playable alpha versions, possibility to visit at the studios, meet developers in Bar Citizen meetings, etc. so it has been a bit shame those possibilities has not used more.

This week's AtV - Star Citizen: Around the Verse - Cyclone and Ship Persistence - tells pretty interesting information about ship persistence in Alpha 3.0 and later patches. It will will bring many new interesting gameplay possibilities and will add depth to many current ones.

I like how actions will have more and more consequences and one has to take care of their characters and ships.

Did you just create an account here to advertise for Star Citizen? That's what it seems like.

@bladeofcreation: Yea this thread feels like a twitter press campaign.

That wasn't my intention at least. They pushes lots of information about the development of the game every week and personally I find it interesting and relevant for the discussion. Well, unfortunately we have no much discussion here yet but maybe that will change at some point.

We've already had a dry run to test the outrage levels when No Mans Sky came out, it will be interesting to see the internet melt when Star Citizen is released.

At least we are able to play (Star Citizen) alpha and beta versions before the release. The current Alpha 2.6.3 gives already some idea how the game will be but of course Alpha 3.0 even more so since it includes many new techs. CIG has Free Fly sessions time to time so anyone can try the game for free. Additionally they pushes lots of information about the development and the game every week so people can follow how things are progressing. This is why I find it important to share these information so people can discuss about them, try them out, send CIG feeback, file bug reports, etc.

No matter what CIG does there will be disappointed gamers for sure. There will be no game which pleases everyone. Gamescom is coming near which means there will be annual "scandal news" coming as well :) ...

I just wanted a new Freelancer/Wing Commander FFS. Not this bloated, endless Ur Game they are trying to build.

@hayt: Do you think Squadron 42 could be a better choice than Star Citizen for you?

There will be many features and gameplay possibilities I will most likely never do either (like pirating or racing) but I'm glad I have change to do them as well. For example winning some extra money by doing some race gambling.

I personally don't consider lots of gameplay possibilities as bloat. People wants to do different kind of things anyway. There are many games I would like to be much more versatile than then are now but since the games are relatively simple there no much you can do (GTA, Elite Dangerous, TES, etc.)

There were pretty interesting shows last week where they for example gave some more information for example how secondary views works in Star Citizen. There are plenty of places it will and can be used. There should be live TV-news in Star Citizen which you can watch from TVs for example in bars. This implementation should be an important step to make that feature possible. If I remember right there was an image in their Twitter of a hardware setup how to make a video stream and turn it into the game on the fly as avatar.

If there will be no blocker bugs delta-patcher will be released at the same time as Alpha 3.0, which would be a huge improvement. Easily one of the most important changes in Alpha 3.0 to me. With delta-patcher CIG is able to push small updates instead of enormous GB size of chunks.

Their latest Monthly Report and weekly updated Schedule Report includes plenty of interesting information about Alpha 3.0 and future features. Upcoming Around the Verse change sounds very promising as well - even more detailed information about the development.

CIG has submitted two AtV since Gamescom which both contains interesting and important topics.

Stamina and status system seems to improve first person gameplay greatly and will finally bring more tactic gameplay to FPS. Of course it is not just about FPS but affects gameplay in many different areas.

It is also great to see how much effort they put to their mission system. Missions will be hand made and procedurally generated which should make them scalable and make sense in changing game world. Sounds interesting but we will see how it all works out once Alpha 3.0 is out.

Star Citizen: Around the Verse - Stamina and the Actor Status System

Star Citizen: Around the Verse - Choice & Consequences, the Mission System

Giant Bomb is playing it smart by staying the fuck out of this whole Star Citizen situation only commenting on the game briefly every now and then on the podcast when a demo makes the rounds at stuff like Gamescon.

@bartok said:

I don't know what "Star Citizen situation" there is but I agree that there is no need to talk about AtVs and other shows. They are meant for people who are interested to follow the development of Star Citizen or game development in general. As a person who is interested about Star Citizen these shows are pretty incredible. I would like to see other companies doing the same.

Star Citizen Alpha 3.0 is now available for about 800 Evocati testers.

Star Citizen Patch 3.0.0 (from unknown source so take it with grain of salt)

Here's couple of videos explaining some new features in Alpha 3.0:

Star Citizen: Around the Verse - Flight Plan: Air Traffic Control

Star Citizen: Around the Verse - Usables: The Universe at Your Command

Star Citizen: Around the Verse - Manned Turret

I like how CIG goes details and depth first before amount of size of the universe. Alpha 3.0 looks very detailed already even without many core gameplay features like mining. Mining should be included in Alpha 3.1 and I hope it is much more than just pressing down a mouse button like in many other space games.

Please you know full well that there is controversy surrounding the development of Star Citizen. Whether it's true or not isn't the point but it's there. To make matters worse crowd funded projects fall apart all the time and yet none have raised the ridiculous amount of money that Star Citizen or been as epic in scope.

My opinion is that CIG aren't scamming anyone out of their money but they are suffering from extreme feature bloat and have severely underestimated the time and money it was going to take to implement this stuff into what was already an overly ambitious pitch for a game. I also believe that in the next year CIG will push for more money from their fan base so they can finish the game and this cycle will continue periodically until the game eventually comes out as a full retail release. Likewise I believe Star Citizen will eventually come out as a finished game but not until 2020 at the earliest. Finally I believe the finished product won't live up to the lofty expectations that were promised but will still be a good game. It will eventually be patched and updated into the game that more resembles what was promised from the start but by that time most of the player base will have moved away from Star Citizen to another space game that was made in a quarter of the time and with a quarter of the budget. Sorry for the negative thoughts and I hope I'm wrong.

@bartok: Well, I'm happy that Giant Bomb has stayed away from all those controversies but I think they could cover Star Citizen development time to time just you wrote earlier. They did mentioned Star Citizen recently in Beastcast but unfortunately the hosts were not very familiar with the game so the discussion wasn't that interesting.

I'm fine with negative thoughts and opinions. I agree with you about some points like Star Citizen PU being released in 2020 at earliest but overall I think I have more positive thoughts about the development and future of the game. To me Alpha 3.0 looks very impressive (probably the most impressive game I have ever seen) which gives me more faith that CIG is able to finish the game as they planned.

... of course the project can fail but I definitely hope it will not. There are many other interesting space games in development (Hellion, X4, DUAL Universe, etc.) but unfortunately none of them is like Star Citizen.

Heck I think even 2020 is being pretty optimistic... that said I'm eagerly awaiting for the 3.0 public release so I can play around a bit.

It is interesting to see how much gameplay can Alpha 3.x offer just in one star system (Stanton). Since the project is so ambitious only a small amount of planned features implemented can offer lots of interesting things to do.

Here's a new monthly report: Monthly Studio Report: September 2017

Some early 3.0 footage from the PTU test servers...

I'm purposely avoiding watching any gameplay videos, I could even get into PTU right now but I'd rather wait till the proper public release, for it to be as smooth as it can be.

Don't feel like starting a new thread but apparently you can now buy parcels of virtual land for $50. I wonder what virtual good they will sell next to keep this space train a rolling. As an outsider I find this all so fascinating like reading about EVE Online drama despite never playing but with Star Citizen there is currently no game and there is a chance there may never be one.

@bartok: Virtual Chests where you can put in all the clothing you "virtually" bought.