2014 might be the year of Elite Dangerous, especially if we’re talking about space games, but it’s starting to look like 2015 could be the beginning of the rise of Star Citizen, the game being developed by the other space game legend, Chris Roberts of Wing Commander fame.
Star Citizen hasn’t been without development issues. With a reported war chest of $68 million, the 700,000 backers don’t have particularly much to show for it. They have pictures of concepts of ships that will likely be in the game and the ability to walk around a hangar. Then around July of this year, Star Citizen released the Arena Commander module. It had some initial issues with connectivity problems, but these were eventually ironed out.
With the 1.0 update, Arena Commander now has game lobbies, a friends list system and has tripled the number of ships you will be able to fly. The ship numbers have been inflated somewhat as they include different variants of the same ships you are already accustomed to flying in Arena Commander, which would seem like a bit of a cop out, but you will now be able to pilot the base models of the Cutlass and the Avenger as well.
There are also new components you can get to further customize your ship’s load-outs with different guns, missiles and missile racks. Robert Space Industries is also pushing out new HUDs that promise to be more detailed and visible depending on ambient brightness by automatically adjusting HUD brightness. The HUDs are promised to be unique with each ship, with the Aurora trailblazing the new type of HUD. Missiles have also been revamped to be much more flexible and powerful, including a new Rattler type missile which releases a bunch of Venom missiles after firing.
Star Citizen is deep in development with lots more to come including a FPS module, which is the next most likely module to be unveiled for testing, and a planetside module. At the current rate of development, don’t expect to see a cohesive Star Citizen game that incorporates all the different modules until 2016, perhaps even 2017.
Are you looking forward to Star Citizen? Let us know in the comments below!
