Most know I'm a huge proponent of Star Citizen, and have been following its development since mid-2013. Even with all of my fan-boyism though, it still took 18 months of watching and reading before I made my initial pledge in Aug 2014. I'm also an equally strong believer in sensible "buyer beware" practices, especially when it comes to paying for pre-orders, and for "games" that don't actually exist.
On that basis, I fully support the sentiments expressed in the last few posts -
if you feel unsure about pledging to SC now (or any game for that matter), don't do it.
That said, couple of points to highlight the state of Star Citizen at the moment:
> We are essentially talking about 2 separate but related games here: Star Citizen is the originally pitched MMO space-sim game. Squadron 42 is the separate single-player campaign/mission-based game that was added to the SC universe once they realised how much money they were raising.
At the moment package pledges will get you access to both. There is talk that the games will be split fairly soon, and that future pledges will be for one or the other. Ultimately you will be able to buy and play one or the other, or both.
SQ42 story, gameplay, etc., similar to many AAA campaign driven games, is being kept under wraps as much as possible at the moment to maintain a little of the "surprise" element. We are being trickle-fed occasional snippets of marketing hype (like the Gillian Andersen clip I posted earlier) as they build up to a release for Squadron 42 "sometime in 2016".
Star Citizen the MMO is not going to be released at the same time. Personally, I'd be pleased with a late-2017 release. However, Star Citizen is what the presently available Alpha release is all about, so...
In terms of the Star Citizen MMO:
> The game is very much in an Alpha state at the moment. SC-Alpha 2.1.0 is on the live servers, 2.1.1 is on the test servers. The devs have loosely committed to trying to release at least one major level patch per month so we're expecting Alpha 2.2 sometime in Feb.
> The alpha release is far from optimized to make the game run as well as we'd like. It's certainly not "unplayable", but it is definitely a alpha-level test release right now. Expect slow frame rates, crashes, weird clipping and graphic issues, huge patch downloads, etc. That said, just because you may have pledged to the game doesn't mean you have to frustrate yourself with sketchy alpha play. Nothing you do in-game now will carry forward to the the final release. There may be some benefit to beta play, but we're a long way away from that point.
> The alpha release is very, very far from being feature complete. There is certainly a lot more available to alpha test players to do than the original Arena Commander dog-fighting module though: test versions of the basic FPS, multi-crew ships, EVA, social environment, revised flight mechanic models, and quantum travel are all in-game now. Arena Commander is still there as the stand-alone dog-fighting and ship racing test environment too.
> As far as server response and concerns about lag are concerned: too early to tell at this stage just how good/bad the final game will be to play in South Africa. CIG are using Google Compute Engine servers and services - we're probably equidistant between the Belgium and Taiwan (or Singapore?, I can't remember) farms, so our mileage may vary significantly.
Here's a very fair and reasoned review of the state of SC from LevelCapGaming. Bare in mind that this clip was made running alpha 2.0. A number of the issues noted in it have since seen improvement in 2.1.
It really all comes down to deciding for yourself whether you're prepared to risk spending $45 now to lock in your access to both Star Citizen and Squadron 42 games sometime in the future. Or if caution is a better option for you and you're okay with possibly having to spend $60 for each of the games separately once you've seen them released and are still interested in playing them.
