EDIT: Youtube recordings are now up.

Alpha 3.0 number replaces 2.7 which brings procedural planets into the game.
Currently the game is at 2.4.1 with 2.5 releasing in the next few days.
2.6 will bring the long awaited Star Marine FPS module.

Another big Gamescom event is kicking off for Star Citizen. This year they have community streamers doing events throughout the Gamescom week as well as the main presentation by CIG on Friday.

Stream Page

Details are here:

https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/15451-Gamescom-2016-Details

Free Fly Week: Grab a chance to play the game for free this week until August 22.

https://robertsspaceindustries.com/promotions/Gamescom-Free-Fly-2016

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Just watched the Gamescon presentation. The game is coming together well.

Damn, this looks crazy! Will GB do a quick QL for this??

There is an in game demo starting around the 2 hr mark on that archived twitch stream. Going from atmosphere to walking on a planet's surface looks super cool.

This is making me want a cooler ship! I only have that Aurora I received as a backer.

Just watched the last bit of that Gamescom stream. That actually looked pretty good. I was one of the skeptics who thought the whole thing was impossible but it's difficult to watch this and not downgrade it to just improbable. I think that's a pretty good sign for a game of this scope.

Them showing off a lot of the "difficult" bits of what this game is supposed to be shows some confidence and now the remaining two big questions are if they can fill it with enough interesting content and if they can optimize the performance enough to carry their feature set on the scale they're aiming for. Though I suppose by the time this is "properly" released we'd be like one or two graphics card generations down the line right?

Updated with the youtube videos.

It's looking pretty good so far. But my God, what is with the audience hooting and hollaring over every little thing? Tone it down a notch, folks.

No Man's Sky 2 looks great so far.

Nothing wrong with being enthused. Also the fact that it finally seems like it's gonna come out.

It looks pretty damn rad.

@ghost_cat: When it's out (in like 2 more years).

I was hoping to see an Unfinished but I don't think Drew was able to get it working back when he first tried it. Vinny seems interested in it though so maybe he'll do an unfinished of it.

I'd say the game is far enough along now to do an unfinished but then again it's still sort of a tech demo at this point.

Holy shit it looks good, though it concerns me that the least interesting part of that demo was the space combat. Everything but the gameplay looks stellar and I cant help think they went about developing this from the wrong direction.

While the detail is quite impressive I cant see how they can replicate this across hundreds of planets and space stations without it feeling superfluous, they can talk all day about modular building blocks but ultimately its too much work to give every piece this level of attention. They may eventually pull this off but I expect it to take half a decade longer than their target, i'm willing to bet there isn't much more than this built for the persistent universe.

I know im alone in this but I really wish they would have shrunk that massive universe into like a single solar system and made the story about a war between two planets, give me 3 or 4 highly detailed planets that ill never forget not 500 meaningless ones, im tired of the promise of infinite quantity over quality.

I still only expect to get a solid 7/10 single player campaign, if that's all it is ill be happy, anything more is gravy.

I share Jeff Gertsman's thoughts on Star Citizen that he briefly got into on this week's Bombcast. Especially the part about Star Citizen being in no position to throw stones at No Man's Sky because they actually released a game.

I hope this game is good and they have shown some impressive looking demos. My biggest question is how will all these pieces fit into a cohesive end product that consumers can actually purchase and enjoy? People give No Man's Sky grief for broken promises but they greatly pale in comparison to the scope of promised content in Star Citizen.

I haven't heard this weeks Bombcast sadly, but it's nice to hear it was brought up at least. I've been a backer from the start, but I've been staying pretty hands off for a while (I do jump in every once in a while and see what's new). It's certainly not a game yet, but it shows some good bits and pieces of many mechanics working together at the moment.

Obviously Star Citizen (the multiplayer game) is the part that has taken off and gets the attention, but I really hope that a lot of that can get switched over to Squadron 42 (the Wing Commander style single player game) that should be arriving first. I'm completely talking on my personal experience and feelings here, but "flying" and combat right now all feel pretty good, and removing all of the multiplayer sandbox mechanics and netcode necessary should take away a lot of the complexity and problems that people see and watch in all of the current demos.

Given the multiplayer game is several years away still at best, I hope with Citizen Con upcoming on October 9 brings a lot of attention back to the original product that started this whole thing.

@bartok: I agree, they are shooting for the moon, in a different galaxy, with a civil war era rifle while standing on a tightrope :P

One good point I think Austin or Patrick made was that NMS suffered from zero knowledge of gameplay progress during its development whereas SC is quite an open book in comparison. So every feature CIG gets ready is shown to the public which gives them an opportunity to respond. A luxury that Hello Games didn't have under Sony. Hence the massive backlash when huge aspects as advertised were missing. So long as CIG keep hitting development milestones then WYSIWYG.

Not to mention Elite is also slowly plodding along with gameplay ambitions similar to SC's scope with FPS mechanics, multicrew ships and proper atmospheric planets.

@lunnington: I'd say waiting for alpha 3.0 would be good idea for an unfinished, that'll bring planetary surfaces and whatnot. I'd love to see running coverage of the releases, but I don't think there's that much interest.