Thursday, September 26, 2013

Letter from the Chairman: $20 Million!

Greetings Citizens,

Star Citizen fans have set yet another record in crowd funding: $20 million pledged to make sure this game is made by developers instead of publishers. It’s especially fitting to me that we reach this goal today, on the anniversary of the release of the original Wing Commander. Thanks to the support of this incredible community, Star Citizen embodies everything I dreamed of doing with that series, and opens up the potential for so much more. Each of you has helped to make this possible and you are allowing us to create a game the way games should be created. Thank you!

At the $20 million mark, you unlocked the following stretch goal:
  • First person combat on select lawless planets. Don’t just battle on space stations and platforms … take the fight to the ground!
What this means is that we’re expanding the FPS mechanic we’ve already created for the ship boarding system to apply to more areas of the game. Join an ongoing battle on a contested world, launch an attack on a pirate base, come to the rescue of distant colonists and fend off Vanduul raiders … the possibilities are endless.

In addition to this stretch goal, we have an extra reward for the community: a fish tank decoration for your hangar! In the grand tradition of Starlancer, here’s a little bit of nature to break up your high-tech hangar. Your fish tanks will be added to your accounts very soon and will be included with the Hangar in an upcoming patch. Included in your fish tank is a rare gold Midas fish, found on the planet Cassel in the Goss System (pictured above). Star Citizen will allow you to add more fish to your tank by exploring distant planets and collecting new species.

In the last stretch goal letter, we asked the community to decide how to handle the funding counter after we reach $21 million. 87% of you voted to keep the counter going. That is one of the most clear cut answers we’ve had from the community. As a result, we will continue to announce stretch goals that reward our early backers and enhance the game in ways we had not originally deemed possible.

 The first of these goals, for the $22 million mark, is as follows:
  • Facial Capture System. We’ve researched a technology that uses a series of cameras to capture real heads and import them into the game. This will let the team more easily create a variety of realistic characters. In addition, the technology is mobile enough to allow us to take it on the road and capture select fans during special events! You can learn more about this technology at Infinite-Realities.
There has been some concern about “feature creep” with the additional stretch goals. You should all know that we carefully consider the goals we announce. Typically the stretch goals fall into two categories;

The first are goals that involve features we already have planned or have implemented, but we couldn’t create content because of budgetary constraints. The first person combat on select planets is a great example of this type of goal. We already have FPS combat as part of the game in ship boarding, and we already have most of this already functional thanks to CryEngine, as we essentially have Crysis3 functionality out of the box. But creating all the environments and assets to fill them is a huge task, so we were planning on not doing any planetside combat initially, simply because of its cost, with the idea that we would slowly roll it out once the game is live. But with the additional funds we can now afford to create some of this content earlier rather than later.

The facial capture system is an example of the second type, where we identify technology and equipment that will make the game better and allow us to be more nimble and economically efficient in continually creating content for the ongoing universe that we are aiming to support. The motion capture system and sound studio were goals that feel into this category.

But both types of goals are carefully considered — we don’t commit to adding features that would hold up the game’s ability to go “live” in a fully functional state. Also remember that this is not like a typical retail boxed product — there is no rule that all features and content have to come online at the same time! As you can see from the Hangar Module we plan to make functionality and content come on line as it’s ready, so you should look at the stretch goals as a window into the future of functionality and content additions we plan for the live game.

Hangar Additions 

We also have another poll for the community. As you know, we are continuing to develop the Hangar Module. You have been incredibly helpful in identifying bugs for the team to fix … but hangar development isn’t going to stop there. The Hangar Module is the first brick that will lead to Star Citizen and we’re going to start expanding outward in a variety of different ways. In the short term, we’re filling out the hangar! That means more equipment, more interactivity and more areas designed to turn it from just a place to keep your spaceship into your personalized home.

We’re asking for what you would like to see next in three areas of the hangar: extra rooms (add more space to the hangar), decorations (add more objects to the existing space) and augmentations (let you customize the existing space). All of these are on the horizon in some form, but we want to base our development schedule around what the community most wants to see.

As always, thank you for your support. In the past year, this community has gone above and beyond in extraordinary ways over and over again. Your dedication, your creativity and your passion for Star Citizen continues to amaze us. Please keep spreading the word: you are making Star Citizen a reality.
-Chris Roberts

Tuesday, September 17, 2013

Diablo 3 Auction House to be Shutdown!




When we initially designed and implemented the auction houses, the driving goal was to provide a convenient and secure system for trades. But as we've mentioned on different occasions, it became increasingly clear that despite the benefits of the AH system and the fact that many players around the world use it, it ultimately undermines Diablo's core game play: kill monsters to get cool loot. With that in mind, we want to let everyone know that we've decided to remove the gold and real-money auction house system from Diablo III.

We feel that this move along with the Loot 2.0 system being developed concurrently with Reaper of Souls™ will result in a much more rewarding game experience for our players.

We're working out the details of how the auction house system will be shut down, but we wanted to share the news as soon as we made the decision in order to give everyone as much advance notice as possible. Please note that the shutdown will occur on March 18, 2014. We will keep everyone informed as we work through this process.

Josh Mosqueira and I wanted to provide everyone with a little more information behind this decision, so please have a look at the video, and stay tuned to this site for further updates in the months ahead.


Monday, September 16, 2013

Letter from the Chairman: $19 Million!

Greetings Citizens,


It’s hard to believe we’re here again already in just over a week! Star Citizen Backers have brought us to an astounding $19 million! Stretch goals we thought would take months to reach are being unlocked every week. Thanks to you, the dream of a true AAA PC game without the restrictions of a publisher has become a reality.

At $19 million, you have unlocked the following goals:
  • Know your foe with a Jane’s Fighting Ships style manual free in PDF form to all pledgers.
  • Manage Space Stations – Players will compete to own and operate a limited number of space stations across the galaxy.
  • RSI Museum will air monthly, with a new game featured each time!
The manual will be available with the launch of the game. RSI Museum will start next month with an in-depth look at Freelancer!

We are also excited to reveal the $21 million stretch goal, a major gameplay feature we have been hoping to include with Star Citizen and the culmination of several recent stretch goal unlocks!

  • Salvage Mechanic: Salvage isn’t an aside: it’s a career, with its own mechanic, story tie-ins and universe-shaping endgames. Search the galaxy for a host of valuable and interesting secrets using both the flight and FPS components. Discover the secrets of the ancient Hadesians, locate valuable components and cargo… or go down in history the first to make contact an entirely new alien race!
In honor of this goal, we are pleased to present the first concept art of our female explorer. For our first female character we didn’t want a cheap pinup; we wanted a badass space explorer who can hold her own on the fringes of civilization!

What’s next? At this pace, it even seems possible that we will achieve these goals just in time for the first anniversary of Star Citizen’s unveiling, on October 10th. (Either way, we have some surprises in the works for the community to celebrate that day!)

Some Citizens have asked if $21 million will mark the end of the funding campaign and the stretch goal unlocks. The answer is no: For a couple of key reasons –

The first is that goal of achieving $20M in development funding will actually be reached approximately at $23 million in funds raised. This is because we display the gross amount of funds received, but out of this we had to pay Kickstarter (approx. 10% of funds raised), Paypal/Credit card providers (approx. 4-5%), we have to reserve the fulfillment costs of the physical goods you have pledged for (over $1M right now) and finally the costs of building and maintaining the RSI site (which is a significant but very worthwhile investment, more so as some of the planned features like “organizations” rolls out).

There are also additional running costs beyond the development to be contemplated – customer support for the growing community, the cost of delivering terabytes of data and longer term hosting servers for the dogfighting and then later the persistent universe itself.

Finally there is one very important element – the more funds we can raise in the pre-launch phase, the more we can invest in additional content (more ships, characters etc.) and perhaps more importantly we can apply greater number of resources to the various tasks to ensure we deliver the full functionality sooner rather than later.

Star Citizen Packages will remain available as we continue to spread the word and build this community. A bigger community means a healthier universe population when the persistent universe goes live.
In the spirit of asking YOU what you want, we would like your input on our pledge counter and future stretch goals (see poll below).

As always, your feedback will shape the future of the campaign.

The team and I would like to thank all of you in being the best community in gaming and allowing us to follow both your and our dream in building the Best Damn Space Sim Ever!

-Chris Roberts

Friday, September 06, 2013

Letter from the Chairman: $18 Million!

Greetings Citizens,

Thanks to your incredible support, we have reached $18 million less than a week after hitting $17 million!
These numbers are amazing, and the credit goes entirely to the community that has come together to make Star Citizen happen. The best news in all of this is that the Hangar Module has inspired thousands of new fans to join the effort. The bigger our community, the better the game experience will be and greater chance we will have of making Star Citizen a game that continues for many years.

When we first proposed Squadron 42 and Star Citizen, the goal was to bring back space sims and prove that PC games never died. We thought that was an important goal worthy of our effort and your support. We never dreamed that you would take that even farther and become our partners in changing how games are developed. As always, thank you.

For hitting $18 million, you unlock the “exclusive star system for backers.” There’s been some confusion about what exactly this means. To clarify, what it means is that backers that got us to the $18 million goal will have the ability to start their journey in a system that is unavailable to others as a starting point. The only home base hangars there will belong to those that supported us early in the process! It would be immersion-breaking if backers couldn’t eventually share the jump coordinates of the system with other users… but no one else will have the option of starting a character there.

Reaching this point also means that it’s time to reveal our penultimate planned stretch goal, the $20 million level. While goals will continue after $21 million, they will take a new form representative of what additional funding can add to the game!

$20 million

  • First person combat on select lawless planets. Don’t just battle on space stations and platforms… take the fight to the ground!

I would also like to take a moment to follow up on the Voyager Direct poll from Saturday. As you know, we put the solution in the hands of the community. It was a surprise that the largest group (43%) were happy with the way the store had been set up.

That said, as I mentioned on Saturday, I personally felt that perhaps some of the store items were overpriced relative to other ones and with 29% of backers that answered the poll (statistically the poll had enough respondents to be representative of the full Star Citizen population) thought that prices for certain items were too high I feel that’s a large enough block of our community to not ignore. Starting immediately, the prices for the decorative items like the posters and buggy will be reduced. If you paid the original price for these items, you will receive the difference in the form of additional UEC credited to your account in the near future (it will take a little time to develop the correct script, but we will have your accounts credited soon.)

We are making the following price changes as a result of your feedback:
  • Cot – 2,000 UEC (was 5,000 UEC)
  • RSI Zeus Model – 5,000 UEC (was 10,000 UEC)
  • Lamp – 2,000 UEC (was 5,000 UEC)
  • Greycat PTV15,000 UEC (was 20,000 UEC)
  • Posters – 1,000 UEC each (was 5,000 UEC each)
(Note that we have not included the workbench; that’s because it will be a useful gameplay element in the future. It will be needed for pilots seeking to overclock their own ship components!)

We created the decorative items as an easy way for you to support the game and as a result their prices do not impact the overall economy. I believe that is one of the largest points of confusion about the store: in the Star Citizen world it seems unlikely that a poster would cost the same amount as a laser cannon. The prices for ship upgrades will not change, as they represent the final price we imagine they will be in the game: a laser cannon you buy today will be one you have access to in Star Citizen when it launches. Much of our system, including the daily purchase limit and the overall balance limit is intended to prevent users from stockpiling money before the game goes live and have an undue impact on the economy.

Also you should know that the current “dollar” price of a ship does not reflect its actual in-game value in UEC, so comparing the value of a gun against the UEC equivalent of an Aurora is not an accurate comparison. We intended backers to get a benefit for backing early rather than waiting for a finished game and one way was by obtaining ships that ultimately will be more expensive once the game is “live”. A $25 Aurora may cost 75,000 UEC in the finished universe!

As the game world takes shape, we will balance your starting credits – which is one of the reasons we are not allowing you to spend them on Voyager Direct items at this present time. If we find that you don’t have enough to begin the game (you should be able to start off buying a full load of cargo and several missions worth of fuel and landing fees and the higher packages should allow you to buy a couple of basic weapons in addition) then we will increase the amount included.

This balancing act is an ongoing process and I’m sure there will be adjustments along the way BUT we’re committed to delivering a game that doesn’t require grinding, is fun and balanced while allowing us to generate enough ongoing revenue to support the servers and continued content without requiring a subscription.

As we already are planning on implementing the ability to have “test” items and credits for the Dogfighting Module we’ve decided it is not worth re-prioritizing work by our web and game teams to bring this feature in earlier. As much as we appreciate everyone’s enthusiasm to help out not enough people requested this option to make it something we felt we needed to do right now… but when the time comes, we’re going to need help balancing how it performs in combat!

Finally, let me again stress that any purchases you make beyond your starter package are optional.

We deployed the Voyager Direct store before there was a way to earn credits in the game for two reasons; one, to allow people an additional way to support the game without having to buy ships (which are much more significant investments!). The second reason was to allow us to deploy a lot of game items as they are created allowing them the possibility to be used in the various modules that will need them – Hangar, Dogfighting, Planetside. We wanted these to be priced in game credits to underline the fact that everything available through Voyager Direct is ultimately a game item that will be purchasable with game credits that can be earned via gameplay when Star Citizen launches.

I hope this makes everything clear.

Wingman's Hangar Episode 37


Thursday, September 05, 2013

Issue #8 – Venice, Scenarios and Augments

The team is hard at work on both Issues #8 and #9.

I’m really excited to see all new and deep game and content systems moving closer to launch. Both the Augment and Scenario systems are completely fresh features to The Secret World.

Issue #8 begins in the sunken Council of Venice chambers in Venice, before leading players into the scenario system where they will need to earn their Field Agent certification before being allowed to enter Tokyo.

I had a chance to test the most recent iteration of the scenario system and I was incredibly pleased with how it is coming along. There was a moment when my character, attempting to herd survivors into the Hotel Wahid, was caught out by a sandstorm which swept in: reducing visibility in the entire area and damaging my character. I was forced to find cover to survive, but the survivors I was escorting weren’t so lucky!

The random elements create a powerful difference in the experience and force you to adapt strategies on the fly. During one game, half of the survivors I was protecting revealed themselves as cultists and began slaughtering the rest. Not knowing exactly what is going to happen creates a level of challenge for even experienced groups.

Oh and for those of you who think you’ve “done it all” the nightmare versions of scenarios will be balanced around the highest (QL10.5) gear requirements. However if you like less of a hardcore challenge, the Scenarios will also be available in Normal and Elite mode as well.

Of course, that then leads into the discussion of rewards for completing Scenarios, which in turn leads to a discussion of the Augment system.

Augments fall into four categories. Each category of the wheel contains 10 Augments, and each Augment can be upgraded up to 5 times.

Base Augment items are recovered during Scenarios (in the beginning, but itemization of Augments will continue into future content) and must be crafted into useable items before they can be consumed to upgrade Augments in the wheel. The required crafting materials for each upgrade are clearly explained in the tooltips for the base items.
Once an Augment item is created, it can be consumed at a significant AP cost to learn/upgrade the appropriate Augment in the Augment wheel. In order to upgrade Augments past a certain tier a player must also increase his Augment Skill to the required level.

As you increase your Augment Skills, you increase your capacity to store AP. Players who have fully upgraded Augment Skills can store hundreds of AP.

Augments can be equipped on any of the 7 abilities in the hotbar – though abilities may not be able to slot all types of Augments. Augments can be upgrades which affect your entire character, or they can be narrowly focused and only able to upgrade the active ability that they are equipped on. Augments can only be attached to active abilities.

Overall, there are 200 different upgrades available to characters through the Augment system and in keeping with the general theme of The Secret World, it is absolutely possible to get all of them with enough dedication. We're really looking forward to see what players can do with the augments, and you'd better be prepared, because Tokyo is going to challenge you in ways you haven't even considered!
 

Sunday, September 01, 2013

17 Million!

I would like to extend my most heartfelt thanks to each and every one of you! We just hit $17 million at slightly past 12am PST August 31 2013 – less than seven days after we hit $16M!!! The power of this community is simply amazing!

We still have a ways to go before we have achieved the goal of being completely community funded but based on our current trajectory we’re going to make it – maybe even by the end of this year! Which will be another amazing milestone that will have been set by this community. The enthusiasm and support the development team and I have felt is amazing and makes us even more determined to make the best damn space sim ever! (BDSSE!)

The $17 million mark unlocks a special ship upgrade pack for every pledger who has donated prior to this point. An engine modifier will be added to your account shortly and in the near future you should be able to see it in your hangar! You also unlocked an additional flyable ship class in the finished game: the massive battlecruiser!

This accomplishment means that it’s time to reveal the $19 million stretch goals. Without further ado:

$19 million

  • Know your foe with a Jane’s Fighting Ships style manual free in PDF form to all pledgers.
  • Manage Space Stations – Players will compete to own and operate a limited number of space stations across the galaxy.
  • RSI Museum will air monthly, with a new game featured each time!