NirMeleth - Das Eckenforum

Zitat

Greetings Citizens,


Thanks to your incredible support, we have reached $18 million less than a week after hitting $17 million!

These numbers are amazing, and the credit goes entirely to the community that has come together to make Star Citizen happen. The best news in all of this is that the Hangar Module has inspired thousands of new fans to join the effort. The bigger our community, the better the game experience will be and greater chance we will have of making Star Citizen a game that continues for many years.

When we first proposed Squadron 42 and Star Citizen, the goal was to bring back space sims and prove that PC games never died. We thought that was an important goal worthy of our effort and your support. We never dreamed that you would take that even farther and become our partners in changing how games are developed. As always, thank you.

For hitting $18 million, you unlock the “exclusive star system for backers.” There’s been some confusion about what exactly this means. To clarify, what it means is that backers that got us to the $18 million goal will have the ability to start their journey in a system that is unavailable to others as a starting point. The only home base hangars there will belong to those that supported us early in the process! It would be immersion-breaking if backers couldn’t eventually share the jump coordinates of the system with other users… but no one else will have the option of starting a character there.

Reaching this point also means that it’s time to reveal our penultimate planned stretch goal, the $20 million level. While goals will continue after $21 million, they will take a new form representative of what additional funding can add to the game!

$20 million

First person combat on select lawless planets. Don’t just battle on space stations and platforms… take the fight to the ground!


I would also like to take a moment to follow up on the Voyager Direct poll from Saturday. As you know, we put the solution in the hands of the community. It was a surprise that the largest group (43%) were happy with the way the store had been set up.

That said, as I mentioned on Saturday, I personally felt that perhaps some of the store items were overpriced relative to other ones and with 29% of backers that answered the poll (statistically the poll had enough respondents to be representative of the full Star Citizen population) thought that prices for certain items were too high I feel that’s a large enough block of our community to not ignore. Starting immediately, the prices for the decorative items like the posters and buggy will be reduced. If you paid the original price for these items, you will receive the difference in the form of additional UEC credited to your account in the near future (it will take a little time to develop the correct script, but we will have your accounts credited soon.)

We are making the following price changes as a result of your feedback:

Cot – 2,000 UEC (was 5,000 UEC)
RSI Zeus Model – 5,000 UEC (was 10,000 UEC)
Lamp – 2,000 UEC (was 5,000 UEC)
Greycat PTV – 15,000 UEC (was 20,000 UEC)
Posters – 1,000 UEC each (was 5,000 UEC each)
(Note that we have not included the workbench; that’s because it will be a useful gameplay element in the future. It will be needed for pilots seeking to overclock their own ship components!)

We created the decorative items as an easy way for you to support the game and as a result their prices do not impact the overall economy. I believe that is one of the largest points of confusion about the store: in the Star Citizen world it seems unlikely that a poster would cost the same amount as a laser cannon. The prices for ship upgrades will not change, as they represent the final price we imagine they will be in the game: a laser cannon you buy today will be one you have access to in Star Citizen when it launches. Much of our system, including the daily purchase limit and the overall balance limit is intended to prevent users from stockpiling money before the game goes live and have an undue impact on the economy.

Also you should know that the current “dollar” price of a ship does not reflect its actual in-game value in UEC, so comparing the value of a gun against the UEC equivalent of an Aurora is not an accurate comparison. We intended backers to get a benefit for backing early rather than waiting for a finished game and one way was by obtaining ships that ultimately will be more expensive once the game is “live”. A $25 Aurora may cost 75,000 UEC in the finished universe!

As the game world takes shape, we will balance your starting credits – which is one of the reasons we are not allowing you to spend them on Voyager Direct items at this present time. If we find that you don’t have enough to begin the game (you should be able to start off buying a full load of cargo and several missions worth of fuel and landing fees and the higher packages should allow you to buy a couple of basic weapons in addition) then we will increase the amount included.

This balancing act is an ongoing process and I’m sure there will be adjustments along the way BUT we’re committed to delivering a game that doesn’t require grinding, is fun and balanced while allowing us to generate enough ongoing revenue to support the servers and continued content without requiring a subscription.

As we already are planning on implementing the ability to have “test” items and credits for the Dogfighting Module we’ve decided it is not worth re-prioritizing work by our web and game teams to bring this feature in earlier. As much as we appreciate everyone’s enthusiasm to help out not enough people requested this option to make it something we felt we needed to do right now… but when the time comes, we’re going to need help balancing how it performs in combat!

Finally, let me again stress that any purchases you make beyond your starter package are optional.

We deployed the Voyager Direct store before there was a way to earn credits in the game for two reasons; one, to allow people an additional way to support the game without having to buy ships (which are much more significant investments!). The second reason was to allow us to deploy a lot of game items as they are created allowing them the possibility to be used in the various modules that will need them – Hangar, Dogfighting, Planetside. We wanted these to be priced in game credits to underline the fact that everything available through Voyager Direct is ultimately a game item that will be purchasable with game credits that can be earned via gameplay when Star Citizen launches.

I hope this makes everything clear.

Zitat

Greetings Citizens,

It’s hard to believe we’re here again already in just over a week! Star Citizen Backers have brought us to an astounding $19 million! Stretch goals we thought would take months to reach are being unlocked every week. Thanks to you, the dream of a true AAA PC game without the restrictions of a publisher has become a reality.

At $19 million, you have unlocked the following goals:

Know your foe with a Jane’s Fighting Ships style manual free in PDF form to all pledgers.
Manage Space Stations – Players will compete to own and operate a limited number of space stations across the galaxy.
RSI Museum will air monthly, with a new game featured each time!
The manual will be available with the launch of the game. RSI Museum will start next month with an in-depth look at Freelancer!

We are also excited to reveal the $21 million stretch goal, a major gameplay feature we have been hoping to include with Star Citizen and the culmination of several recent stretch goal unlocks!

Salvage Mechanic: Salvage isn’t an aside: it’s a career, with its own mechanic, story tie-ins and universe-shaping endgames. Search the galaxy for a host of valuable and interesting secrets using both the flight and FPS components. Discover the secrets of the ancient Hadesians, locate valuable components and cargo… or go down in history the first to make contact an entirely new alien race!
In honor of this goal, we are pleased to present the first concept art of our female explorer. For our first female character we didn’t want a cheap pinup; we wanted a badass space explorer who can hold her own on the fringes of civilization!

What’s next? At this pace, it even seems possible that we will achieve these goals just in time for the first anniversary of Star Citizen’s unveiling, on October 10th. (Either way, we have some surprises in the works for the community to celebrate that day!)

Some Citizens have asked if $21 million will mark the end of the funding campaign and the stretch goal unlocks. The answer is no: For a couple of key reasons –

The first is that goal of achieving $20M in development funding will actually be reached approximately at $23 million in funds raised. This is because we display the gross amount of funds received, but out of this we had to pay Kickstarter (approx. 10% of funds raised), Paypal/Credit card providers (approx. 4-5%), we have to reserve the fulfilment costs of the physical goods you have pledged for (over $1M right now) and finally the costs of building and maintaining the RSI site (which is a significant but very worthwhile investment, more so as some of the planned features like “organizations” rolls out).

There are also additional running costs beyond the development to be contemplated – customer support for the growing community, the cost of delivering terabytes of data and longer term hosting servers for the dogfighting and then later the persistent universe itself.


Finally there is one very important element – the more funds we can raise in the pre-launch phase, the more we can invest in additional content (more ships, characters etc.) and perhaps more importantly we can apply greater number of resources to the various tasks to ensure we deliver the full functionality sooner rather than later.

Star Citizen Packages will remain available as we continue to spread the word and build this community. A bigger community means a healthier universe population when the persistent universe goes live.

In the spirit of asking YOU what you want, we would like your input on our pledge counter and future stretch goals (see poll below).

As always, your feedback will shape the future of the campaign.

The team and I would like to thank all of you in being the best community in gaming and allowing us to follow both your and our dream in building the Best Damn Space Sim Ever!

-Chris Roberts

Zitat

Greetings Citizens,

I’m proud to announce that the Star Citizen community has brought us to $21 million in crowd funding just shy of our first anniversary! Your support is now allowing the project to expand on ideas in ways we didn’t originally think possible. Every additional pledge makes Star Citizen a better experience. At the $21 million, you unlock the full salvage mechanic, which allows us to produce the assets needed to make salvaging an in-depth game mechanic akin to exploration or piracy!

Salvage Mechanic: Salvage isn’t an aside: it’s a career, with its own mechanic, story tie-ins and universe-shaping endgames. Search the galaxy for a host of valuable and interesting secrets using both the flight and FPS components. Discover the secrets of the ancient Hadesians, locate valuable components and cargo… or go down in history the first to make contact an entirely new alien race!

In addition, we are unlocking a new $23 million goal: the addition of a Xi’an Scout as a playable asset in the game. We’ve recently begun putting together concept art of Xi’an worlds, which got us thinking about the game’s Xi’an ships: how can we make them play differently than the standard human ships? We have a few ideas and with this stretch goal we can put them into the game! In addition to alien designs and interfaces, the Xi’an craft will feature a totally different maneuvering system.

Xi’an ship design will be focused on a vertical aesthetic and maneuvering jets that can combine to thrust in multiple directions. Gimbaled, larger-than-normal thrusters sit on the four points of a star in the centerline, allowing each thruster unobstructed hemispherical coverage. The Xi’an scout can rotate on all axes and direct four thrusters to the rear or front! Because of this configuration the Xi’an ship has superb linear maneuvering abilities on all axes. This extra maneuverability comes at a cost however. Xi’an ships favor maneuverability over heavy armament or defensive protection.

Instead of picking up an alien ship that simply looks different, it will feel different!

Here’s the description:

Xi’an Scout Unlocked! The Khartu is the light attack craft of the Xi’An military. Contrary to Human ship design, the Khartu doesn’t have a traditional main thruster, instead featuring an array of maneuvering thrusters on articulated rigs. This design allows for incredible agility, making them the bane of UEE pilots, who bestowed the nickname ‘Quark’ because when all of the thrusters are firing, the ship looks like a spark flying through space. The Xi’an Aopoa corporation also manufactures an export model, the Khartu-al, for sale to human civilians as a dedicated scout/explorer. The export model features the same Xi’an maneuvering rig, but control surfaces modified for human use and a more limited armament. (Designer: Aopoa)

Players can travel to a Xi’an commerce world to pick up the export version of the Khartu… or they can track down the military version in less-than-legal ways! Either way, we think that adding truly alien Xi’an ships at launch will create an even more immersive universe.

As always, thank you all for your tremendous support. Please continue to spread the word about Star Citizen. You’re making this all possible! I hope you will join me on Thursday for our anniversary livestream, where you’ll see some of the latest and greatest work we’ve done to date and get a sneak preview of what’s coming soon.

- Chris Roberts