KitGuru KitGuru.net – Tech News | Hardware News | Hardware Reviews | IOS | Mobile | Gaming | Graphics Cards
What does $100 million buy you in game development? So far it's purchased the fans of Star Citizen a second Alpha, as with the continued expansion of the number of backers – now over one millon – and ever increasing pledges, that astronomical total has now been reached. The celebratory Alpha brings a lot of prevous releases together, to give a much better representation of what the final game will really be like.
In this second Alpha, players find themselves aboard a space station orbiting the planet Crusader. From there they can explore on foot, go on EVA where they use their spacesuit's small thrusters to control their position and orientation, or head to the hanger and jump in a ship. If players choose that last options, they can climb aboard alone or with friends and head off to do much, much more.
There's random encounters to discover, involving exploration and combat; quantum, high-speed travel; the planet Crusader to investigate, as well as it's three moons; three distinct space stations to look into; a repair station to utilise and a number of comms arrays that may be hiding something worthwhile (thanks PCG). There's also first person shooter combat that can take place just about anywhere. [yframe url='http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xf4zCCjBwOA']
There's also a few newly flyable ships, including the Constellation, the Retaliator and the Vanguard, the former of which is perfect for those looking to explore the system with their friends. This will also likely be good news for those that paid for those ships previously and haven't been able to do much but look at them in their hangar until now.
The Alpha is however, an Alpha, so it should come as no surprise that there are some known issues with it. For those wishing to furnish themselves with that knowledge, there's a full list of known bugs along with the feature list.
Discuss on our Facebook page, HERE.
KitGuru Says: Did you guys put much money down for Star Citizen? As much as I think the game looks great, I can't bring myself to splash out on some of those ships. They're very pricey.
A Second Alpha? No. Its Alpha 2.0. More features are added and tested. I would expect Kitguru to know how development works. Its still one alpha, which is the phase you add features in. From 1.3 to 2.0 we went from arena fighting to having a planet and its moons to fly around and do missions in. From here more of the solar system will be added, then other systems connected by jump points.
Why is it that gaming journalism can never do proper research?
Just to help ease confusion for non-backers, the naming system for Star Citizen has been a bit wonky. Originally the Alpha stages were going to be called Arena Commander 1, 2 and 3. Each number was meant to represent certain huge milestones: 1- The first flyable dogfighting, 2- Multicrew ships (Where we are now) and 3-Capital Ships (300m-1000m sized ships).
Last year when Arena Commander 1.0 released, news sites got confused and inaccurately clickbaited with “Star Citizen V1 has released!”. Drama ensued and eventually the naming system was changed to be Star Citizen Alpha X.YZ so that news groups wouldn’t be able to misunderstand the word Alpha.
Those of you that don’t know, during special events, the price of the starter pack (game, goodies, ship, etc) was $30. This would no doubt be repeated, you just need to watch for special days.