Starfleet Dental, having moved on from Star Trek Online, Star Wars: The Old Republic, and Guild Wars 2, now has its sights set on Star Citizen.
And with such a change in focus, there must be propaganda.
(Direct link to video)
Another fine Starfleet Dental video. Ample conditions and possibilities to realize national cooperation indeed! It is like Dear Leader is speaking directly to ME.
But it made me think about Star Citizen, and all the more so since the game came up in corp coms the other night.
Up until then, the game had been something of a fuzzy blur in my peripheral vision. When it came up on coms, I could just pull up some general information from my brain… space game… a Kickstarter campaign… the guy who made Wing Commander. Somewhere along the line Gaff mentioned some people in EVE were invested in the idea of the game.
But when one of my corp mates said he pledged four figures to the project and that another guy in the corp was likewise invested in the high three figures, I was jolted upright thinking, “Is this even a ‘thing’ yet?” I had to go look this up and figure out what was going on.
The Kickstarter finished up last November. They asked for half a million dollars and got over two million through Kickstarter, along with even more through direct pledges. The Kickstarter page says that they made it to the 5.5 million dollar stretch goal, though Wikipedia says they set a record by getting 4.2 million in funding. Either way, a lot of money was thrown at this project. And the money has continued to roll in, as you can apparently still get in on the action with a pledge, so that the current take appears to have topped 15 million dollars.
And Star Citizen certainly seems to promise a lot. The game is a “rich universe focused on epic space adventure, trading and dogfighting in first person.” It will be available as an MMO-like online form, a single player campaign, a private server version that is MOD-able, and as a floor wax if I read this right. All with no subscription and no pay to win.
Is there a base left uncovered with that?
They were not done yet. I am just going to list some of the key bullet points.
- A huge universe to explore, trade and adventure in
- Constantly expanding and evolving universe
- Micro [weekly or bi-weekly] updates rule!
- The conflict never ends
- Actions of the players impact the universe and become part of its history and lore
- Allowing user generated content is a key design goal
- It’s about the gameplay and your interactions with others
- Fully dynamic economy driven by player actions
- Money isn’t everything
- Space is empty but you’re never really alone
- Bigger ships offer bigger multi-player action
- Intelligent Flight Control System (IFCS)
- Dynamic Ship Maneuverability
- Ship Components matter!
- 10X the detail of current AAA games
- Everything you would imagine would move or articulate on a spaceship or a device – does!
- Range of scale never seen before in a game
- Really feel the scale of ships and space battles
And those just the ones that sort of made sense without the subsequent description. And there is more information on the main site, some of which has be distilled into various wikis.
All of which sounds totally awesome. A wondrous new dawn for the long neglected space sim genre may be upon us. If you search for related videos on YouTube or just Google the name, you will find a relentless wave of enthusiasm out there for Star Citizen, to the point that it is almost difficult to find anything concrete about the game.
Which is enough to set off alarm bells in the back of my head.
So much pent up joy for a game that won’t be in anything like its final release state until some time in 2015 by current estimates.
I can only recall past promises from other games and myself and guild mates getting too invested, pinning too many hopes and dreams, on things that never quite came to pass. Sitting in coms playing EverQuest II while gushing about how Vanguard was going to be the REAL successor to EverQuest. Brad McQuaid would save us. Or the whole cycle up to the launch or Warhammer Online. And, as pointed out elsewhere, promises of an all encompassing space sim have failed us before.
Not that I am calling bullshit on Chris Roberts, or making a claim of equivalence with that last link. The man has a enviable track record, which is a large part of what is building up the enthusiasm. But there was Freelancer, which shipped late and ended up being a different bird than initially promised. And the bar being set for Star Citizen seems unbelievably high to my skeptical eye.
But it is still tough to stifle the part of me that wants this all to be true and as good as described and that wants to throw money at my computer screen in the off chance that it might improve the likelihood of this dream coming to fruition.
Fortunately I am older and wiser than… well… younger and dumber me.
And I have other games to play while I wait for Star Citizen to come to pass in whatever form it ends up taking.
One of those games is, of course, EVE Online. I have to imagine that a good chunk of subscribers to EVE play the game because it scratches the space sim itch for them. That is certainly an aspect of the EVE package for me. So the two games seems to be, if not in direct conflict, sharing a similar demographic. I wonder what one will mean to the other when the time comes?
How about you? Are you getting invested in Star Citizen yet?
And what is Starfleet Dental going between now and the launch of the game, currently expected in 2015?
The Ancient Gaming Noob 