Star Citizen Hangar Module released: walk around your ships, sit in cockpits, but don't fly
Hey, Star Citizen has been released! Well, sort of. A very, very tiny part of the game has been made available to Kickstarter backers, who can now walk around their own personal hangar, marvelling and pawing at the spaceships they were gifted for funding Chris Roberts' space sim.
You can sit in the detailed cockpits and look at the beautifully rendered gauges, but you can't open the hangar bay doors and fly out in search of space adventures quite yet. It's a lot like being 14 again and sitting in the driver's seat of your mum's car in the garage, imagining what it a thrill it might be to drive along the M50. Except my legs never glitched when I was getting in and out of a Nissan Almera.
The Hangar Module is still in early alpha and so naturally comes with a fleet of weird bugs and animation glitches. The CryEngine powered showroom also comes with a hefty minimum requirement, a 64-bit system, 8GB of RAM and a thunderous graphics card.
Players who own at least the $30 Digital Scout pack and one of the five compatible Star Citizen ships can download and enter their hangar at their convenience, at which point they'll be able to explore the area in third or first person. Ships can be entered and cockpits can be sat in, interiors can be admired, exteriors can be scrutinised, locked doors can be frowned at and imaginations can run wild.
It's essentially a showroom and a tech demo rolled into one, but having hard-bought ships exist in some tangible sense has already begun compelling backers to start handing over more cash to expand their collections and improve their virtual hangars.
Star Citizen's Dog Fighting Module is to follow in the coming months, which sounds ever so slightly the more interesting of the two releases.
http://www.pcgamesn.com/indie/star-citizen-hangar-module-released-walk-around-your-ships-sit-cockpits-dont-fly
For Gabe Newell, Greenlight is just a stepping stone to a bigger endgame
"The immediate goal [of Greenlight] was to give us more data in the selection process as we ramp up the tools needed to get us to our longer term goal of improving the overall throughput of the system," Valve founder Gabe Newell tells us.
"Before Greenlight, folks would send mail to us mail or fill out the posted submission form, hope that someone saw it and liked it, and waited in the dark for a reply. While it is not perfect, Greenlight helped us pull that process out of the dark and help with the selection process."
"Much of the evolution of Steam and Greenlight is driven by what the community of gamers and developers tell us they want to see made possible," says Newell. "Right now, we’re focused on expanding the depth and breadth of our catalog. That expansion and addition of content is going to come with a need to innovate and iterate on how customers browse for games and evaluate potential purchases."
Full Article: http://gamasutra.com/view/news/199249/For_Gabe_Newell_Greenlight_is_just_a_stepping_stone_to_a_bigger_endgame.php
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