Hm, do you mean that players would have the ability to choose from different paths?
For example, choice A: recruit Kusari shipwrights to build Kusari ships at your base, choice B: recruit Bretonian ones to build Bretonian ships, choice make and sell pizzas with leftover Nomad meat as toppings, and so on.

If players don’t have the ability to make choices, and can progress through a linear path only (like the vanilla SP story), then I’d say it’s quite doable, and would still make for an interesting campaign.

If the authors want people to pay more, then it’s common practice to set incentives for them to do so. Nothing unusual about that, every crowdfunded project is doing it, so why wouldn’t RSI?

Timmy, I wouldn’t say that instancing is an evil thing that caused Black Prophecy to tank. In my opinion, it was due to a series of bad decisions, such as the staggering lack of new content after the short storyline (just reused stuff), and the very high grind factor.

Besides, think about this. Suppose Freelancer servers could run each and every system as a separate instance. Would that be visible to players? Most probably not. However, being able to run separate processes for them would be great, in my opinion.

Oh, and both Squadron 42 and Star Citizen are already funded, so nobody need worry about that. Even if the four million mark is not achieved, I’d still be willing to bet that they’ll release modding tools for the community some time down the road: it’s in their own interests to do so too, after all.

It took them a while, but they uploaded a pitch video now.
“[…] who’ve already plezed, pledged”, hehe.

Glad to see that they’re keeping the 3D radar. In my opinion, that’s still the best I’ve seen in a space sim so far. (I-War 2’s radar came close, but it was much too small.)

Yeah, the lack of a video so far is somewhat disappointing. However, there is one up on Frontier Developments’ site for the game (here), so odds are that we’ll see something on Kickstarter too.

w0dk4 wrote:

Also, I dont understand why a company that mainly develops “simple” mobile games has the necessary knowledge and expertise to develop such a game…

Correct me if I’m wrong, but the only mobile games Frontier Developments has made are the two Lost Winds games, no? As far as I know, most of their other games were the Rollercoaster Tycoon games, Wallace & Gromit and Kinectimals.

Not to mention that having a company that’s been profitable for years is better for attracting publishers and sponsors than having (had) to put a new team from scratch together is.

Anyway, in my opinion, this project deserves a chance just as much as Squadron 42 / Star Citizen does. We’re talking about one of the two people who made Elite and started the freeform space sim genre, after all. (Sadly, Ian Bell hasn’t developed any games since.)

Oh, and thanks a bunch for posting the news!

Say, am I reading the stretch goals wrong, or will the online persistent part only happen if the 5.000.000$ goal is met?
“Star Citizens will receive access to the Wing Commander/Star Citizen universe for on-line persistent play (30 months)” only appearing at stretch goal 3 can be interpreted several ways, so it would be good to know if anyone has more info on this. After all, I didn’t watch all the videos and stuff.

Funny that the “Creation of Professional Mod Tools provided free to players” will only happen at four million though. Ah well, it’s not like Freelancer had any bundled with the game.

Oh, and WhiskasTM: please note that MMO does not equal being a browser-based game. They did say the game will use the CryTek engine, so you can rule that out.

Just my two cents, but he made so many promises now that I wonder how many of them he’ll actually fulfill. It’s pretty much a given that they’ll have to find some other investors as well, because crowdsourcing almost certainly won’t turn up five million dollars. As far as I know, no video game on Kickstarter ever hit more than four million - and RSI is doing this on their own.

We’ll see how much money the initial fundraiser does produce. It should be interesting, because would-be investors will probably base their decision on that too. After all, Chris Roberts doesn’t exactly have a spotless track record: correct me if I’m wrong, but his last game went way overtime and over budget, no? Didn’t deliver the majority of promised features either. Granted, it was a long time ago, but this is a niche genre that we’re talking about.

Unfortunately, if funding won’t meet the intended goal, the persistent multiplayer / MMO part will probably be the first to go. Developing and maintaining it is more expensive than making a SP game, after all.

But hey, we’ll wait and see. One more project that might happen is still good news, after all.