Hasta La Gadget!

The lead designer of the classic Wing Commander video game, Chris Roberts, is making a comeback and is developing his own space-based MMO title called Star Citizen. In order to raise funding to develop the game, he’s been calling on fans to donate money in order to see the game get made and released. While Roberts has said he only needs $2 million, the fundraising campaign ended with a total of $6.2 million raised.

Roberts has been accepting donations on the game’s website, as well as on Kickstarter. Kickstarter alone raised over $2.1 million, while the rest was donated on the game’s official website. The campaign on the game’s website ended ten days ago with a total of $4.1 million raised, while the Kickstarter campaign ended today.

Roberts said that he’s “completely overwhelmed, humbled and grateful for the support from everybody who backed Star Citizen.” He also addressed all the naysayers out in the world who thought PC gaming was dying, by stating that the fundraiser “sent a statement to the rest of the gaming world that PCs and space sims are very much alive and kicking.”

The first 200,000 backers who donated at least $30 to the project will be given alpha access to the game sometime within a year. No details were given as far as if or when the game will have an early public beta version, or when gamers should expect the final release to be available for purchase.

[via Joystiq]

Star Citizen raises $6.2 million in crowd-sourced donations is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Star Citizen, the upcoming space-based MMO being developed by Roberts Space Industries, will only be releasing for the PC. This might seem like a suicide move since console game sales have always been dominating the market over PC game sales, but the lead developer and designer Chris Roberts says there’s a reason that they’re releasing the game on only the PC platform.

Essentially, Roberts says that the hardware requirements for Star Citizen exceeds that of current-generation consoles like the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3. He also claims that high-end PCs today are “already more powerful than what a next-generation console is going to be.” Roberts is aiming high with the hardware requirements for Star Citizen, but he expects them to be standard for a PC when the game releases in two years or so.

While Roberts doesn’t disclose what the hardware requirements might be for Star Citizen, he mentions that if he’s developing a PC game, users are going to need at least 4GB of RAM in their machines, and while his games wouldn’t use up all 4GB (because Windows needs some allocated for itself), he says that they’ll require a lot more than the 512MB of RAM that most current-gen consoles run on.

Roberts also slightly disses other game developers who port their console games to PC. He says that “if someone is making a game for a console first, and it’s being ported to the PC, [he’s] always buying it for the console.” However, he goes on by saying, “I don’t want a buggy port of a console game on my PC that doesn’t really show my PC off.”

[via Ars Technica]

Star Citizen can’t be run on current-gen consoles, says developer is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Star Citizen, the upcoming space-based MMO from Roberts Space Industries, has reached its Kickstarter funding goal of $500,000, and it still has 26 days left to go. Star Citizen features the work of Chris Roberts, the infamous designer behind classics such as Wing Commander and Privateer. Roberts is making a comeback into the video game industry with Star Citizen.

It’s important to note that Star Citizen’s Kickstarter campaign is merely just a secondary funding location for the development project. The game’s official website has already earned around $1.35 million from donors, meaning that the project has now earned roughly $1.85 million in total. The project’s goal is to $2 million, which shouldn’t be too hard to do at this point.

The game’s official website has 16 days left to go before they close donations, and its Kickstarter campaign has 26 days left to go as previously mentioned. Coming up with just a measly $150,000 in that amount of time shouldn’t be too much of a problem for the Chris Roberts and the rest of the development team.

Just a couple weeks ago, the funding project reached the $500,000 mark, so it’s amazing to see how much money that has been raised since then. Based on how much cash that the project has already raised, I’d be surprised if the total amount donated didn’t exceed $2.5 million or even $3 million, but we’ll have to wait and see what Roberts and the gang end up with in 26 days.

Star Citizen reaches $500,000 Kickstarter goal is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

We’ve known for a while now that Star Wars: The Old Republic will be going free-to-play, but at first, neither BioWare nor Electronics Arts wanted to get into details when it came to restrictions for free players. Today, we might be finding out why the companies kept these details a secret for so long. BioWare has listed the free-to-play limitations on the SWTOR official site, and as it turns out, players who don’t want to pay anything to play are going to have a lot of restrictions to deal with.

In fact, the only thing that free players will have full access to is story content, meaning that they’ll be able to level their character from 1-50 and experience class stories in their entirety. Aside from that, though, you’re going to have use Cartel Coins or subscribe in order to get the full Star Wars: The Old Republic experience. For instance, free players will only be able to participate in three Warzones, Flashpoints, and Space Missions each per week, and they’ll be locked out of Operations entirely. In order to do more than what’s allowed, players will need to purchase weekly passes.

Character creation will also be limited for free players, as will the number of inventory slots. Free players won’t have access to the cargo hold until they shell out the Cartel Coins needed to unlock it, and even then, the space in the cargo hold with be limited until players pay more Cartel Coins to expand it. Fast travel cooldown will be longer for free players, and they’ll only have one available Crew Skill slot, with the option to buy more slots with Cartel Coins.

While all of that is sure to make players at least mildly upset, BioWare has put in place one restriction that might make their anger boil over: free players won’t be able to equip most purple items. Sadly, if you want to equip some of the best items in the game, it looks like you’ll have to pony up for a subscription or purchase a license from the Cartel Shop. Whereas once we thought that going free-to-play would be a great idea for Star Wars: The Old Republic, after seeing all of these restrictions BioWare and Electronic Arts are placing on free players, we’re not so sure that’s the case anymore. What do you think?

Star Wars: The Old Republic free-to-play limitations detailed is written by Eric Abent & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

If you remember classic games such as Wing Commander and Privateer from the 90s, then you might be happy to hear that the designer from both games is making a triumphant return by working on a new space-based MMO called Star Citizen. Legendary game designer Chris Roberts spent the last several years producing movies like Lord of War, Lucky Number Slevin, and The Punisher.

Roberts says that Star Citizen will “change the way people perceive games for the PC” and it will “breathe new life into space combat games.” The game will feature a sandbox world like most MMOs, but it will also have an offline single-player mode like we saw in Wing Commander. There will also be support for user-generated content and various modding tools.

Star Citizen will be set in a futuristic style, but will resemble the Roman Empire in some ways. It will focus around the idea of “citizenship”, which must be earned through various civic duties and military service in the game. Roberts says that Star Citizen “is meant to be everything you ever dreamed you could have in a Space-Sim.”

The game is also said to have “10 times the details” of current mainstream titles on the market, which is why Roberts is only offering the game on PC. He mentions that PC gamers like being on the cutting edge, so he plans on giving dedicated PC gamers their fair share of awesome graphics.

The game has already been under development for the past year. However, in order to move on with further development, the company is looking for $2 million in crowd-funded donations. The first 200,000 backers who give at least $30 will be able to play an early alpha version of Star Citizen, which should be ready sometime next year. When the game finally does release to the public, it will be available for $60 with no additional monthly fees.

[via Ars Technica]

Wing Commander designer returning with new space MMO is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.