Star Citizen blows past $100 million in funding, launches new Alpha 2.0

By Joel Hruska 

Star Citizen fans got a major update this weekend, as developer Cloud Imperium Games announced that a long-awaited Alpha 2.0 build was finally available. Oh, and the game — already the largest crowd-funded title in history — has now raised over $100 million dollars.

The new Alpha 2.0 module includes a number of features. The alpha allows exploration of a gas giant and its three moons, with areas for PVP combat, ruins to explore, and refueling /re-arming stations for those who want to head into dogfighting. The new alpha also allows for first-person combat on various Comm Arrays around the gas giant Crusader. New EVA options and quantum travel are also available in-game for the first time.

The trailer below showcases the new in-game exploration and at least part of the seamless experience that Star Citizen has promised from the beginning. Cloud Imperium’s goal is to create a title that allows the player to fight a ground battle, climb into their ship, fly back to a space station, travel to a distant star, and fight a pitched space battle — all in real time, with a game engine that can handle the shifts from local combat to multi-light-year travel.

The Star Citizen controversy

Whether or not Chris Roberts and the team at Cloud Imperium can deliver what Star Citizen has promised remains controversial and open for debate. Star Citizen isn’t just a free-roaming combat or space-sim game — it promises enormous scale, a fully voice-acted story mode with an all-star cast including Mark Hamill, Any Serkis, Gary Oldman, Gillian Anderson, and John Rhys-Davies.
The criticisms of the game largely boil down to two issues. First, there’s the fact that Star Citizen has raised over $100 million dollars largely on the sale of incredibly expensive packages for ships that aren’t even in the game yet. A full set of ships and lifetime insurance currently sells for $18,000, but that doesn’t even get you everything planned for the final release. While Roberts and CIG have promised that players will be able to earn the same vessels without spending real cash, it’s going to be extremely difficult to balance the demands of the players who dropped five figures on your game against those of players who paid $60 and bought a retail copy.

Long-time Wing Commander fans might see a certain similarity…

Some players have spent over $30,000 on Star Citizen to-date, and at least one game industry veteran has called for some form of industry regulation or oversight, noting that titles today are explicitly designed to scam users out of cash without ever delivering on promised rewards. Regardless of where you stand on that issue, it’s worth asking whether a game that asks for five-digit investments from regular players can ever satisfy its own hype machine.

The other concern is technical. According to a blog post by James Hicks (one of the developers on Ascent: The Space Game), Cloud Imperium’s statement that it had almost finished porting its game engine to 64-bit space last June was cause for significant alarm. While 64-bit space is almost certainly required for Star Citizen to function, there may be downsides to using it. Hicks writes:

The problem is that GPUs are crap at 64bit calculations. You either need to accept hideous performance (accept the unacceptable) or need to be painting a 32bit picture for the GPU, a snapshot based on the larger 64bit picture your game engine has… every frame. If this sounds complex, that’s because it is. Deciding to go 64bit has ramifications all down the line of your project. It complicates absolutely everything that comes afterwards…

GPUs, and therefore game engines, have a limited draw distance. This is called a “far clip plane.” Generally this will stretch, at most, a few kilometers out. You can push it further, but GPUs use even less accurate math to deal with depth, a pathetic 24bits of information. You can stretch the information out by changing the “near clip plane,” or how close the game engine will display things, to go out a little further.

But in Star Citizen, you need to be able to see your hands on the controls less than a meter in front of you and a gas giant that could be a million kilometers away.

Hicks goes on to discuss some options for solving these problems and brings a level-headed analysis to the table that’s often been lacking from the conversation. Whether Star Citizen can deliver what it promised depends in no small part on how it tries to fulfill those promises. Simply getting the game to launch status won’t be enough; gamers who paid huge sums of money to be treated like gods are going to expect exactly what they paid for. The downside of allowing people to invest $10-$30,000 in a title is that they’re going to expect treatment commensurate with that investment. And if CIG has to choose between its minority of five-figure investors or a larger pool of $60 players, it’s not hard to see who the equation favors.

Personally, I want Star Citizen to be a great game. I’ve been a fan of Chris Roberts since the first Wing Commander. But I’m not certain that anyone could deliver what Star Citizen promises, and the funding model makes me rather uneasy.