Star Citizen has crossed the $23 Million dollar mark for funding. Â This means that as of October 17th, 2013, just over 1 year post announcement… the game is fully funded. Â Does this mean RSI is done with funding? Â Nope. Â They’re going to continue to let the fans support them, and use additional money raised to improve/enhance the game, and in some cases, speed up the addition of planned features.
$23 Million stretch goal that is unlocked is:
Xi’an Scout Unlocked! The Khartu is the light attack craft of the Xi’An military. Contrary to Human ship design, the Khartu doesn’t have a traditional main thruster, instead featuring an array of maneuvering thrusters on articulated rigs. This design allows for incredible agility, making them the bane of UEE pilots, who bestowed the nickname ‘Quark’ because when all of the thrusters are firing, the ship looks like a spark flying through space. The Xi’an Aopoa corporation also manufactures an export model, the Khartu-al, for sale to human civilians as a dedicated scout/explorer. The export model features the same Xi’an maneuvering rig, but control surfaces modified for human use and a more limited armament. (Designer: Aopoa)
And… that’s not all, as a bonus, everyone who was a backer pre-$23 Million, will (eventually) get a model of the Khartu to have in our hangars!
As is traditional, the stretch goal has been revealed for when an additional $2 Million is raised:
Enhanced Alpha – We will use additional funding to build a wider alpha test than we had originally intended for the first phase of Star Citizen’s launch. The initial plan was to first launch servers in North America and then expand to areas such as Europe and Australia to decrease latency in these areas, perfecting the game as we improve the experience around the world. This funding will allow us to invest in a wider infrastructure for our early testing, spinning up remote servers earlier. Hitting this goal will also allow us to increase the number of remaining alpha slots. Extra alpha slots not only means more Star Citizens will travel the ‘verse at launch, but that we will receive more feedback and more stress testing. This in turn will allow us to better balance and enhance the Star Citizen experience!
This is good news for the Non-North American regions, though, I do wonder how having regional servers will impact the playerbase (the SC universe is huge, not having the entire playerbase on one server may make it very rare to run across multiple players). Â The additional alpha slots will also be nice, as we’re down to about 8,000 left as of this writing, so it’ll be interesting to see how high they bump that slot number.
Last, but not least, we also got some additional Retaliator concept art.. this time, of the cockpit!
Just think… the Hornet variant sale still has yet to happen (it’s scheduled to start Friday the 18th, last we heard). Â So, that’s probably another $500,000 by mid week next week… Â Hope Chris Roberts is ready to write another ‘we broke another record’ post soon…