Star Citizen Wiki

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Note: Please do not add speculation to Star Citizen articles. This wiki only accepts facts!

Overview

Star Citizen is an upcoming space trading and combat simulator video game for Microsoft Windows and GNU/Linux[1] in development by Chris Roberts and Cloud Imperium Games. Star Citizen will consist of two main components: first person space combat and trading in an MMO-style Persistent Universe and modifiable, optionally cooperative private servers including a branching single player campaign known as Squadron 42.[2] The game will feature Oculus Rift support.

Both Star Citizen and Squadron 42 are set in a 30th-century Milky Way centered around the fictional UEE (United Empire of Earth). A strong focus will be placed on player interaction, with player behaviour influencing and being influenced by a dynamic economy system.


This wiki is currently in heavy development. For more information about the game, please check out the official Draft FAQ here. There is also an Unofficial FAQ posted by user Lozenger and collaborated on by the Star Citizen community.

Unofficial Dev Q/A site run by BoMby can be found here UEE News Network

Please try to keep everything nice and neat! This main page is for general information. If you have a lot of detailed information to post, consider creating a link to a new page (using double brackets: [[ ]]) to store all the info.

We are in dire need of sources! Please consider helping out by locating specific developer posts that support information on this wiki and linking them as sources. There are a lot of developer posts on the forums, on the RSI facebook page, both official and unofficial FAQ, and kickstarter page. Happy editing!

Development

Development started in 2011 on a modified version of CryENGINE 3, and has an expected release date of sometime between 2014 and 2015. The game will initially be localized to English, French, German and Spanish with plans to handle other languages afterwards. Chris Roberts currently plans Star Citizen to remain DRM free[3].

The current (known) development team for Cloud Imperium Games consists of:

  • Chris Roberts (Lead designer)
  • Eric "WingMan" Peterson (President of Development)
  • Ben Lesnick (Community Manager)
  • Martin Galway (Audio Director)
  • Josh Strike (HUD/ Scaleform designer)
  • David Opreska (Environment Artist)[4]
  • Ryan Church (Conceptual Artist)
  • Jim Martin (Conceptual Artist)
  • Aaron Frost (Staff Writer)
  • Shawn (Front-End designer)
  • Dave Haddock (Loremaster/Writer)
  • George Oldziey (Music Composer)[5]
  • Pedro Macedo Camacho (Music Composer)[6]
  • Wayne (Site Admin)

Developer comments

A lot of the information on this wiki comes from comments made by the developers. Sometimes the developers make great comments that contain useful information, but doesn't exactly fit into the wiki (yet). If you have a great developer comment that deserves to be read, but doesn't really fit here, please add it to the developer comments page!

Story

In the single player campaign, the player joins Squadron 42, a legendary volunteer unit assigned to the UEES Paul Steed (CV 023) of the 2nd Fleet of the United Empire of Earth Navy.  The player will spend time in warzones and rise through the ranks, eventually earning UEE Citizenship..[7][8][9]

For a summary of events leading up to the game, see the wiki article on the Timeline.

Gameplay

Star Citizen will feature gameplay similar to other Robert's space sims, abandoning the traditional MMO 'click to kill' system in favor of skill-based, space shooter mechanics. Ship upgrades will factor heavily into combat, but player skill will ultimately determine game performance.

Star Citizen will have multiple game types, ranging from a permanent, persistent world similar to contemporary MMOs to an offline, single player campaign with drop-in-drop-out cooperative play. The game will include the option for private servers, and will offer modding tools for these servers at some point after launch.[source?] These mods will not work in the persistent universe.

Physics

Star Citizen will feature an accurate newtonian physics engine. Ships will come equipped with lateral thrusters that are required to turn the ship and reverse acceleration. The game engine will also simulate damage to these systems, making it possible for players to lose a thruster and have their flying inhibited accordingly.

Navigation

The primary methods of propulsion are thrusters, warp drives, and jump drives. Players will use existing and known jump paths to travel between systems. Players will have a chance to discover new jump paths, and even entirely new systems. When a player discovers a new path, they will have to navigate the jump path manually before it can be saved into their navigation computer. Players can then have the new jump point named after themselves and sell its location on the galactic market. Players can choose between optional "assisted flight" computers for flying longer distances, and manual flight.[source?]

Combat

Ship combat will rely mainly on piloting skill and ship balance. When two ships enter combat, they are seamlessly instanced into a battleground. Other ships can dynamically join and leave this battleground, up to 100+ ships (depending on game design). The game will use this dynamic instancing to spread out ship battles and reduce server load. For example, if there are 1,000 ships fighting in orbit of a planet, the game will try to split it into 10 instanced battles of 100 players each.

Quote from Chris Roberts about ship balance in combat: “There is no undefeatable MMO RPG style build in Star Citizen as we don't have character stats that affect your damage. Instead your skill as a pilot is key. In addition the ship design / abilities is very rock, paper, shotgun so every build of ship has a weakness. And in case you're worried that we're going to make the basic missions boring to encourage you to buy credits; We're not! trading and flying missions are the core of the open world experience. They're the fun parts and there is no way I am going to deliberately nerf them to encourage people to pay Zynga style. It's a big reason I'm building this game outside the publisher system.[10]

Death Penalty

This topic is largely undecided and still being discussed by the developers. The current consensus is leaning towards a ship's destruction meaning ship loss, unless you have some kind of ship insurance. The developers have yet to settle on anything final.[source?]

In 'the death of a spaceman' the developers also describe how characters can be 'perma-killed' after sustaining a high number of defeats in battle, but all property of the character can be given to another to prevent extreme progression loss.Template:RSIID

Economy

The Star Citizen economy will be based around the United Earth Credit, earned in-game or from backer donations. Developers have discussed the possibility of micro-transactions, but have asserted that these transactions will only buy United Earth Credits, as opposed to the common MMO model of having one game currency and one micro transaction currency.

The in-game economy is dynamic and player-driven, with supply and demand factoring heavily into vendor prices. Vendors do not generate items, and instead must obtain them from factories, which must in turn obtain the raw materials from mining facilities. Vendors or factories place requests on system mission boards to transport finished products or raw materials to construct all the items they sell. If shipments are interrupted, vendors will raise their prices until they run out of stock. If they are consistently interrupted, the vendor will place a mission to escort trade ships on system mission boards.Template:RSIID For more information, see the RSI video on the Star Citizen economy.

Ships

Ships

Star Systems

Systems

Multiplayer

While Star Citizen itself isn't an MMO (it will also have single player and private multiplayer modes), there will be a persistent massive multiplayer universe (MMU) offered to players. This persistent universe will be similar to Freelancer's multiplayer servers, but on a much grander scale. To reduce server costs, Star Citizen will use dynamic instancing to limit the number of players that can interact at once, while still offering a unified game world. As Chris Roberts put it, "if there were 10,000 people in orbit around Earth, that'd be 100 different instances of 100 different people." If instancing does happen, players will be able to travel between instances and join other players. Dynamic instancing has been said to apply to spaceship combat as well as planet side rooms such as bars and orbit areas of space. You can follow your friends or other 'Persons of Interest' (POI) by tagging them with a yet unknown in-game system. This will allow you to follow people for missions through multiple instances. Friends may also join you in a battle instance if they are in your system, or if you have a multi-crew ship like the Constellation (4 crew max) then your friends can drop in, run around the ship as in a FPS and man the turrets, the cockpit, or the fighter. The full implementation is still under development on how it will be applied to other aspects of the game.

Players will also have the option to host their own multiplayer universe on a private server. These private servers will support mod capability, and the developers are even interested in implementing the best private modifications into the official MMU server. It is unknown what level of functionality private servers will have compared to the MMU server.

The main story campaign will support co-op multiplayer, meaning it will be available to play at least on private servers, if not the the main MMU server. This information needs further clarification from the developers.

System Requirements

As of August 29, 2013[11], these are the system requirements for the Hangar Module.

  • Operating system: Windows 7 or 8 64-bit
  • CPU: Dual Core CPU Intel: Core2 Duo 2.4Ghz AMD: Phenom X2
  • 8GB of RAM
  • NVidia Geforce 460GTX or AMD Radeon HD5850 DirectX 11.

While these are accurate for the current build of the game, it is highly likely that these requirements will lower as the team further optimizes the game.[12]

RSI forum user CynicalCyanide has compiled a guide that further details the system requirements.

Subscription Model

Star Citizen uses a similar model to ArenaNet's Guild Wars 2 where players only need to purchase the base game to play all of the content.  Star Citizen will not require a monthy subscription fee nor will it require players to purchase in-game addons.  It is possible that the game will support microtransactions for in-game currency to help with funding, however anything purchased through microtransactions can also be purchased through in-game currency.

During the fundraising stage, $30 and above donation packages will grant access to the full game at launch, and $40 and above packages will grant access to the full game, as well as alpha and beta stages and modules.[13][14]

Funding

Star Citizen is mostly crowdfunded by donations from Kickstarter and Cloud Imperium's website, avoiding major publishers to reduce overhead costs and maintaining creative control.  The Kickstarter began on October 10th, 2012 and was successfully funded on November 19th, 2012.  During that time, the team far exceeded their $500,000 goal and earned $2.1 million from Kickstarter alone[15], for a total of $6,238,563.  The majority of raised funds come from CIG-constructed donation packages, called pledges, that are filled with in-game and out-of-game rewards ranging from starting credits, citizen cards, pledge ships, custom skins and more. Pledge packages can still be purchased at the pledge page .

On March 10th, 2014, Star Citizen crossed the $40 million threshold.[16]  Pledges can still be made at the Star Citizen Pledges page.

See also: Crowdfunding campaign

Stretch Goals

We intend to build the game that Chris Roberts described at GDC Online regardless, but without additional funding we are going to have to do it one piece at a time, starting with Squadron 42, rather than as a single larger production.

–Star Citizen Development Team [source?]

To encourage funding, CIG has also tied some of their game features to stretch goals. The purpose of these stretch goals is to promise features (and game-as-described) that will be finished within a two year time period.  While stretch goals usually don't guarantee any features that haven't met their goal, CIG plans to implement all stretch goals regardless if they are met.

All previous and current stretch goals are listed on the Stretch Goals page.

External links

Official Sites

Fan Sites

Screenshots

   

References

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