You need to purchase a base ship, weapons, armor, and supplies to begin in Star Citizen.
You need to purchase a base ship, weapons, armor, and supplies to begin in Star Citizen.
The core concept is pushing boundaries. But wait... your mind is the boundary? I'm not sure. Right now, the game will start with a fixed number of star systems (maybe 50? I don't remember). One of the earlier targets was to create a procedural system for planets and possibly entire systems. That aim was also achieved. Eventually, there will be many systems to travel through, linked via JumpPoints. The game will use instancing—joining a 'patch' in the 'Verse.' Leaving that area sends you to another instance, without loading screens, supposedly. Instances limit the player count to around 100. That's essentially what I understand about instancing and the Presistent Universe, though this area is still under heavy development. CIG has been working on instancing for a while now, and they're still figuring out the details.
The universe will have less system to explore than ED however unlike ED where you can warp to a system that is baron, SC will have something to explore in every system as well as a majority of systems being hand made. On top of that they have a system of spawning and despawning old relic ships and jump points so that once the verse is mapped, there are still things to explore. On top of that there is vandaal space to enter for risk/reward explorers
Yeah, I got an Alpha slot but ended up losing it after trading in my old 325A for a cutlass blue. They mentioned I was paying for the extra capacity, which made me frustrated since upgrading meant more money and support for them. I was an early backer and had access, so it felt unfair not to get the Alpha.
I should have predicted that. It’s hard to recall if it existed back then, and I don’t remember seeing it during the upgrade. Even then, I wouldn’t have received the asteroid hanger or all the other features that made it so attractive. Linking game access straight to the ship package seems odd; they likely should have handled it differently. (For example, when you back up, you get the game plus module access (at least you did then), plus the ship package you selected. That way you can melt the package and modify your ship without losing your game access, etc.)