Hey there! If you're like me, you've probably been aware of Star Citizen in general for a while now. It's kind of hard to avoid all the news of how successful it has been. But for a lot of us who were recently (or still are) on the outside, this entire project seems more than a little bit confusing. If you've immersed yourself into the world of Star Citizen, then a lot of what I'm about to type will seem super obvious from the inside, but is surprisingly opaque for those looking in!

I'm super new here, I made my first pledge right around Christmastime, and binge-watched the entire Wingman's Hangar series, the entire 10 For the Chairman series, and am currently catching up on Around the Verse, Reverse the Verse, and all the lore and such on the main site. There's a looooooot of content out there, in other words. I'm here to try to consolidate a lot of that into one post.

INDEX
What is Star Citizen?
Why is Star Citizen a big deal?
What are modules like Arena Commander or Hangar?
Star Citizen? Persistent Universe? Too many names!
Payment model? Buying ships? Insurance?
Explore planets?
Permadeath?
Can I lose all my ships?
Customization?
Non-combat gameplay?
Is gameplay complicated?
Ship components?
Multi-crew ships?
Guilds?
Is it a game yet?
Links to videos?
Other questions?
Should I back it?

There will be occasional mistakes in this thread! I don't expect anything too big, but if you catch something that's off, lemme know so I can fix it! Like I said, I'm still new. Without further ado, let's get started:

What IS Star Citizen?

Star Citizen is a game being developed by a man named Chris Roberts. A long time ago, he made some genre-defining games. You may have played some, or merely be aware of them. His most popular work is on the Wing Commander series. He also helped create Starlancer and Freelancer. He went into movies for a while, and recently returned to video games to make the space sim of his (and hopefully our) dreams.

We'll get into all the different modules and modes of play later, but the basic concept is that the game is a "first-person universe," where you take the role of a man or woman in space, you take your ship and do what you want. You can fly in races for money, you can explore as a career, you can do some bounty hunting, or steal ships from NPCs or players. You can haul cargo, or escort others that do the hauling. You can fight for control over valuable space stations, or you can roll with a large organization to defend and help those in need. The idea is that you don't have to play a specific way, you just do what interests you. You can hunt pirates or become one, you can focus on upgrading to bigger, more luxurious ships, or leaning into the idea of flying your beat up space-bucket and the joy of pulling through impossible scenarios with it. We'll leave it at that for now and get into more detail on specifics later.

The game was funded in 2012 on both this website and Kickstarter, and continues to be funded to this day. At the time of writing we're at nearly $70 million and 720,000 backers. The initial funding price was just $2 million. Chris Roberts and his team at Cloud Imperium Games have received over 35 times their expected funding, shattering all crowdfunding records. For reference, as of this post the second-highest crowdfunding project (not just video game) is $18 million. To put things further into perspective, in the month of November 2014 the game received over $6 million in funding, three times the original goal to create the game itself.

All of that is a roundabout way of saying that Star Citizen is a pretty big deal, regardless of how it actually turns out. The expected release date for a total 1.0 launch is sometime in 2016.

Okay, WHY is Star Citizen such a big deal to people?

A lot of reasons, and different people will have their own reasons for supporting it. For many, Chris Roberts is a trusted industry veteran who knows how to get things done. He makes great games and runs ambitious-but-possible projects. For me personally, watching him on Ten for the Chairman is especially telling. Despite clearly grand ambitions, he obviously knows what can and cannot be done within a reasonable timeframe, and what just isn't feasible. He doesn't just say "Yes of course" to every cool sounding idea or concept, because that's untenable. I did not grow up playing Chris Roberts games, I was only vaguely aware of Wing Commander and had no idea who this man was until very recently. He has suitably impressed me since then, and has instilled a sense of trust in this project he and his team are building.

For other people, it's because the game itself sounds so ambitious and amazing. There are a lot of games where you fly a space ship, and there a lot of games where you run around on foot. There are precious few that have you do both, have you really feel like part of the world. And those that do allow this typically don't have very meaningful content. Star Citizen looks to want to address these issues and make a space sim where you feel like you're in a world that is always evolving, always adapting, and doing so in real ways. Economies need supplies, they don't just materialize out of thin air. They must be delivered. Whether by NPC or player, supplies have to be delivered for factories to create items, tools and weapons. Players or NPCs can also disrupt this by attacking haulers, and all of a sudden you have a shortage of supplies on a given planet or system. This is just a small example of how interaction within entities in the game world can change the state of the world and how all of this can eventually lead to you landing on a once thriving planet and finding it in a state of disrepair, with no fuel or ammunition for you, and now you've got an entirely new set of priorities and goals on this planet that was just going to be a quick stop-and-fill.

Others might simply want to partake because it's such a big deal, such a monster of a project. The idea of being part of gaming history, for better or worse. This game and its development are major events, huge milestones and are extremely interesting to a lot of people. We continue to see skeptical article after skeptical article about the game. That's fine, skepticism is good, especially when big promises are made, but my favorite part about this project has been the fact that I watched these video series from the beginning as I played the game. You see Chris and team talking about very specific details years ago that came to fruition exactly as they said in the Hangar and Arena Commander modules. A lot of times with Kickstarter or other crowdfunded projects you'll see big promises slowly be broken or altered because of over-promising on something that the creator(s) just quite couldn't do, but it looks like Chris and co knew exactly what their limitations were and although we're still super early and AC (Arena Commander) 1.0 still has issues, it has made great strides over the last several months.