“It is up to you to choose what sort of a game you want to play, whether it is spaceflight itself, first-person shooting sequences or economic and social tasks that help characters achieve their goals,” John Erskine noted.
“Our goal is to create a universe that appeals to people. In Star Citizen quality is a top priority. We offer lots of different activities and each of them has its own depth,” he added.
When asked what kind of features users could expect from Star Citizen and whether it was going to introduce something surprising that would make it different from other such engines available on the internet, John Erskine said that there were many things they had done before.
“One major thing that we expanded is essentially the engine’s mathematical capability. It’s called ‘64-bit precision’ and allows a player to start a point in space and fly seamlessly from one end of the solar system to the other without having to reload screens and change from one zone to another.
It’s not like you teleport from point A to point B,” he continued.
Star Citizen was crowdfunded and financially it is a very efficient model. All the money that is generated from the consumers’ pockets goes into the development of the game. The developer normally gets only 15 and 20 cents out of each dollar earned.
“We’ve been very open about our development process and the progress of the project. We produce video content. We have a very nice website and an overwhelming amount of weekly updated content about the game’s development. All this is very advantageous where it comes to crowdfunding,” John Erskine explained.
Answering a question whether space exploration games really inspire today’s kids to become scientists, astronauts, to do something, which deals with space exploration, or whether they are just entertainment products, Erskine said that Star Citizen a pretty serious entertainment.
“Our spaceflight model is as accurate a simulation of Newtonians physics in a zero-G environment as we can make it. It inspires people to go and understand more about how an airplane or a spaceship flies.”
“There are a lot of things this [crowdfunding campaign] has caused people to think about that you would normally never think about in a video game,” he said in conclusion.
The makers of “Star Citizen” coined the term “first-person universe” to describe their game. The project was launched by Chris Roberts’ company, Cloud Imperium Games, with the help of thousands of gamers. In 2012 Roberts, who is also known for the 1990s space games series Wing Commander, launched a crowdfunding campaign – first in a blog, and then on Kickstarter.
Within the following five years the campaign generated more than $150 million, at one point even taking the title in the Guinness Book of World Records as “the most-funded crowdfunding project anywhere”.
Star Citizen is currently in its testing stage and developers are planning to release a major update in the summer of 2017.
Even though this game will remain in development for several years, many players are already putting parts of Star Citizen to the test. So for those who like “sandbox” games, and prefer to expand their in-game world to distant galaxies and unexplored planets, this project is a must-see.
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