Citizenship to the stars.

So this is the game that I'm the most excited for this year, in fact it's been the game I've been most excited about since I heard about its crowdfunding campaign. I was a little hesitant to jump into a third party crowdfunding system so I waited until they went to Kickstarter. At this point I'm sure that my worries were unfounded the campaign was funded easily and at the time I'm writing this they are well on their way to an insane amount of money as far as crowdfunding is concerned.

For anyone who doesn't know what Star Citizen, I should probably summarize what it is to the best of my understanding. As I understand it the game will be like an MMO version of Freelancer or Privateer, so it's a space-sim where you can forge your own path, be it trader, pirate, bounty hunter, etc. The game will also have a first person component, with boarding and walking around on planets and inside capital ships. From what I understand when you buy Star Citizen you also receive Squadron 42 which again, as far as I understand it is a single player military campaign a la Wing Commander.

The biggest thing about this game is that it seems to hit all the highest notes of my ideal game. There is still enough of my inner child that has survived that I still remember the times I wished I was a cool interstellar space explorer, or perhaps a space fighter pilot, or space marine, intergalactic merchant or politician, maybe a Goa'uld (probably not the last one or only with mods). In any case Chris Robert's ideal game seems to coincide with many of my ideas of an ideal game. I've loved X-Wing, and Wing Commander and as far as prominent games go space flight sims have been absent from the stage for far too long, perhaps because the joystick has given way to the gamepad as the preferred method of input in gaming and the direct control feeling is no longer there. It could be because the structure of individual missions where you have to escort a capitol ship or take one out have fallen out of favor (I do think that some of the worse escort missions have taken place in these games). I do believe that Star Citizen solves some of these problems by providing other solutions to traditional space-sim gameplay.

The second part about Star Citizen that is super exciting is its inclusion of first person. The ability to board and take other ships with varying degrees of artificial gravity in place seems quite cool, as do the role-playing possibilities of sitting down and playing some holochess with your not wookie co-pilot while you're doing some interstellar travel again quite cool. Unlike a game like EVE where you have an in game portrait and are basically a ship that interacts with space stations and whatnot, you're an individual that is on a spaceship. This seems much more immersive to me and much more like the original intent behind Start Trek Online before it changed developers. I'm super into the idea of a few buds and I hopping into our one spacecraft and going on adventures rather than a bunch of us forming a fleet of ships and heading out. I don't know about everyone, but the first one seems much more visceral to me.

Keeping in mind that this is all theoretical since the game is not out yet and all we have so far is the ability to view our ships from a first or third person view as a pilot aching to get out to the black, and soon the ability to run simulated dogfights (I feel this should be innately understood but dogfights in this context refers to two aircraft and not lovable terrestrial mammals, I've had to explain this to a couple co-workers)  with each other.

I've made a tiny video tour of my hangar. The hangar module has come a long way since since it first came out. When it first came out none of the holodisplays worked, and one of the walls didn't render. It's pretty impressive how far it has come.

Before PAX East Cloud Imperium held an event highlighting the upcoming dogfighting module. The highlights of which are displayed here.

Newtonian flight makes me think I can hang for the first 5 minutes in the online community after that I'm bound to get thrashed. With that being said as long as the dogfighting module comes out before summer classes start I will give my best shot at doing a weekly livestream of some online multiplayer. Initially I was thinking that were going to announce the release date for the dogfighting module at PAX but they didn't which is fortunate for me as it allowed me to get this article out before the new module (I do worry a bit that I've typed dogfighting too many times in this blog entry and I'll be put on some sort of watch list as a result).

In housekeeping news I won't have classes for a month or so now so hopefully I'll be able to publish articles more frequently and hopefully build up enough of a backlog that I'll be able to get at least one out a week throughout my next too classes. I'm sure this is wishful thinking but the power of positive thinking is a thing right?