Star Citizen Hits Another Ridiculous Milestone

Cloud Imperium Games finally released alpha 2.0 for Star Citizen, which includes the new persistent universe module. Following fast on the heels of the alpha 2.0 launch, RSI and Cloud Imperium games announced that they had surpassed the $100 million milestone in crowd-funding.

Massively OP posted up the new alpha 2.0 trailer along with news that Star Citizen is the first independent game with a $100 million budget.

The trailer introduces players to some of the long-awaited modules that Cloud Imperium Games have been working on in the past couple of months. Originally they were just going to release the Star Marine module for Star Citizen, which would have been a basic first-person shooter deathmatch or team deathmatch module for players to pop in and shoot each other with a handful of different weapons.

However, after some controversies involving some backers and allegations, the developers hunkered down and instead of releasing the Star Marine module they opted to release the fully playable PSU... or the persistent universe module. This has been dubbed alpha 2.0 and it features the spawn point called Port Olisar. The Olisar is a giant space station where players will spawn and move about to buy equipment or call their ship to port. It's a very elaborate setup given that every player will spawn at the port, for now, and head to a terminal within the space station to call on their ship. After calling their ship they can then proceed to head outside and climb aboard.

The highlight of Star Citizen is that it truly is an open-space sandbox. Players can actually steal other player's ships and use them for nefarious means. It's also possible to ram into other ships and destroy them or smash them hard enough to knock them out of orbit.

In one video a griefer used his smaller ship to smash into the player's much larger ship and it blasted off the platform. The player floated into space after his ship and was able to open the hatch and climb inside. The only thing that prevented him from recovering his ship was a clipping glitch where he floated out of the hull before he could get to the cockpit. That's the story of alpha builds.

The persistent universe module also features some missions that players can partake in, including item retrieval or repairing abandoned stations or fixing ships. The multi-crew aspect of the game has also been implemented so a crew of players can fly around the universe and go on missions together as a team. It's all really impressive.

The launch of public alpha 2.0 and the subsequent videos pouring out from the Star Citizen community showing off all the cool ships, the new procedural destruction system, the new missions, the quantum drive technology and the Port Olisar helped contribute to pushing Star Citizen's funding over the $100 million mark.

I imagine that the next milestone for the game will be the refinement of the FPS module and the eventual release of the single-player campaign with the all-star Hollywood cast... Squadron 42.