• how much real world currency affects the gameplay? From early backing new release your ship can break needs maintenance and insurance, how’s the currently implemented in game?

In my experience not that much, the minimum you’d pay to get permanent access to Star Citizen is $50 or so, depending on the starter ship you choose. After that, basically everything can be earned in-game and you get access to the verse.

Having a medium sized ship does help with in-game money earning depending on what you’re doing to earn money. People can get quite wealthy just running bounties with a small fighter, or mining with the smaller mining ships. But even then, if you are in an org, make a few friends, or even if you just ask to borrow a ship in global chat people will happily lend you one. Ships and the utility they provide are very easy to come by. (Edit: you can also rent ships with in-game currency)

Once you build up some knowledge, earning money in-game doesn’t become a giant barrier. The ships you earn in-game typically persist for a few patch cycles (depending on the features being released, some of which require database wipes) I would not say SC is Pay to Win, at most there’s some convenience of having at least once medium-ish ship that’s attributed to your account.

• what’s the game structured like? is it more quest driven with some story? Or really open ended MMO community driven(more EVE like)? If it’s something else please give a description.

So there are still two games in development; Star Citizen and Squadron 42. S42 is a single player campaign that they’re developing more or less behind closed doors, SC is an open-ended MMO sandbox that is playable at the moment.

SC currently is divided into ~100-player shards/servers. You log on, connect to the verse and it drops you into one of those shards. As it is now, every session it tries to assign you to your previous shard, but if its full it just bumps you into a different one. In the near-term they want to allow you to wait to reconnect to that server if its full, so you can keep revisiting the same one.

The long-term goal is still to create one (or more likely a handful) of very large regional shards. A major milestone for that was reached this year, in that they began implementing some of the long-promised persistence features. I could talk at length about that but this is getting long, so if you want more detail just ask.

• what’s the fun part when playing the game?

This will depend on who you ask. There are missions to run (FPS bunkers, derelicts, delivery/item recovery, missing persons, bounties etc.) you can also go do things like mine, salvage, haul cargo, bounty hunt criminal players, or become a pirate and take other people’s cargo. There are in-world race tracks you can go to, players have created some cool racing orgs with player-run events and stuff. There are also some recurring official events, some pve, some pvp (some buggy, some less so)

One of the most fun experiences I personally had was one of the in-game events, Xenothreat. Basically you have to go with other players and fight off waves of enemy npc ships, protect transport cargo ships, and recover cargo from the destroyed transports. You do it all at the same time and you kind of have a choice to go to the destroyed ships, unload the cargo to your own and deliver it, or you can fly to protect those people against incoming fighters.

There are also purely PVP events that recur, like Jumptown, where you basically go and fight over a drug lab on a moon that just spawns free drugs while the event is active. Orgs will come and lock it down on some servers, while others a solo can just slip in unnoticed and skim some loot.

It’s very cool when it works, and kind of gives you a sense of what the game is aiming to become.

There are also two “modules” Star Marine (FPS round-based PVP) and Arena Commander (Racing, dogfighting, wave defense etc.). These are outside the MMO universe, and are sort of mini-games. They’ve been neglected for a while, but they just announced recently they are releasing a lot of improvements for them (better UI, matchmaking, new maps etc.)

To put it in a nutshell, the most fun for me comes out of player paths converging while doing stuff in the world, you hear people talk about “emergent gameplay” and that is what Star Citizen is aiming to create, a big sandbox with stuff to push people together and make stories out of it.

• how resource intensive the game is, computer spec and storage?

Spec/performance seems to vary. I have a fairly beefy system (RTX 2080 S, Ryzen 9 3900, lots of cheap Chinese RAM) and the client-side stuff generally runs pretty good for me, but it can vary from patch to patch but has progressively gotten better over the last few years. If you do install it, installing it on an SSD will give you the biggest benefit. Game size currently sits at around 90Gb.

The game is still in very active development though, so I think they optimize it to the point that its playable without spending too much time trying to optimize stuff that is being iterated upon.

This would be the part where I need to stress that Star Citizen can be really rough sometimes. Imagine a bucket of water that is being filled, the water is always churning a little and occasionally if some big feature comes along it gets dropped in and causes a lot of waves and chaos for a bit before things smooth back down. That’s what playing SC is currently like. The bucket is not full of water yet, it’s never fully calm and polished, and you need to be ok with some choppy turbulence sometimes, but the bucket continues to always fill.

I love the game and I can talk about it forever, but this above section is really important for anyone to understand, my explanations here are not to hype the game as perfect, it’s a struggle. Let it be known that I am a masochist who is interested by and enjoys the struggle. If you are interested in the game, I always tell people to wait for a free-fly event, they do them a few times a year.

• is it always online or you can play offline? Does it have subscription based stuff?

No subscription is needed. There is a voluntary subscription that gives you perks, like a monthly skin or item, access to a “ship of the month” in-game, access to early concept art and work in progress of features or locations, access to early test versions coming down the pipe to Live etc. None of it is anything necessary for the game itself.

Real World Money: Not much. It will dictate what ship & game package you start with. You can buy ships, some gear, and paints for your ship. Other ships and gear you can get in game with in-game currency or looting. You can ebay in-game credits, but that doesn’t affect the game too much because they wipe periodically.

Game Structure: There is no real progression beyond acquiring additional ships and gear. It has missions, but they are mostly pretty rudimentary game loops. Box delivery missions, bounty missions, assassination missions, salvage missions, missions to clear underground bunkers, illegal drug delivery missions, etc. With some mission types, you build up rep which gives you access to higher paying missions. The missions are built around earning credits to afford ships in-game. You can also do game loops that don’t have missions like cargo hauling or mining. It is sandbox, and EVE-like, but no where near the depth of play EVE has.

The Fun: Flying the ships. The ability to switch up gears and go in another direction, like any other sandbox. Grouping up with friends to tackle things at scale.

Computer specs: Anything remotely current is going to run the game decent as can be. It is highly unoptimized. They haven’t done the performance polishes other games do because of so much stuff on their backlog. But I’m running a 5800xed cpu and a 6750xt gpu, and can run the game ~80fps on average. Your performance experience is going to be dictated by the game’s back end servers. Sometimes they forget to feed the hamsters.

This game is always online. You can play the Persistent Universe (PU), which is the Sandbox MMO portion of the game. The single player game is still in development, and they keep that one close to the vest.