Star Citizen
 

I figured I'd post a heads-up because the ability to get into alpha testing for this game later this year is going to close soon.

Star Citizen is going to be a space sim game for the PC with a target release date of late 2014. The game is being made by Chris Roberts, who was the guy who made Wing Commander, Star Lancer, and Freelancer.

It might be made available for the PS4, but it will be first and foremost a PC game. It will include both a single-player campaign in the spirit of Wing Commander, and an online space MMO with regular updates. Although it will mostly be a space sim dogfighting type of game, it is being built on the CryEngine 3 which will allow for some FPS elements with fighting outside the cockpit. All the information about the game that is currently known can be found here.

One thing that is remarkable about this game is that it is intended to be a triple-A high-budget multi-million dollar game, but it is being completely crowd-funded. So far, over 162,000 people have donated an average of about $55 each directly to the developers to make it. There will be no publisher, the developers will report on their progress to their backers, release the game directly to them, sell the game to everyone else, and keep most of the profit. (Developers of a AAA game typically get less than 20%, the publishers like EA usually get most of it)

Chris Roberts thought there was an untapped market of PC Gamers who wanted a space sim that the big publishers were ignoring. He didn't want to work with a publisher (not that the publishers are interested in PC space sims anyway), so he tried crowdfunding for the game on his web site and kickstarter. He figured if he could raise $2 million, then he could hire enough people to make a decent game, and there were stretch goals (if we raise $3 million, we can do this, if we raise $3.5 million, we can include that, etc) up to $6 million. The crowdfunding exploded beyond his expectations, and they have currently raised over $8.8MM to make this game.

So, they have all the money they need. They'll be able to do everything they wanted, and you could wait until it hits steam late next year and see if its the kind of game you want or not. Again, I am just posting this as a heads-up in case there are some old wing commander fans who might want to read up on it and possibly donate to get into the alpha test (looks like that is currently a minimum of $40) before its too late and they fill all those slots.

I remember seeing a video of Chris Roberts presenting this to a bunch of people/developers/journalists (maybe last year's E3 or something?) and thinking how incredibly ambitious this project was. I can't believe they raised $8.8 million. I might have to start thinking about getting into this.

Are you investing into a nice stick? Also, I'm curious about the juice that's going to be required in order to run this game the way it's meant to be run. Judging by the videos, you're going to need a really solid rig to enjoy this game to the fullest.

Here's a pretty decent presentation. About 11 minutes in, he lays out the market they are going for. There's about 600 million PC Gamers, about 220 million of them have high-end GPU's, and about 30 million have ultra high-end rigs. They are going for the middle, where you do need a nice graphics card, but you don't need the baddest gaming rig.

The "alpha test" is supposed to be just modules, bits and pieces of the game to test out and give feedback on. By the end of the summer, they plan to release something where you can walk around the hanger, look at your ship and equipment, etc. Just really basic. In december, they plan to release a dogfighting module. Beta should be sometime in 2014, they plan to release Nov. 2014.