I almost feel sorry for Elite Dangerous.  Announced by David Braben, back in November 2012, people got rather excited about the return of gaming's greatest space game.  However, Elite's return came at a time when everyone was already rather excited about the spiritual sequel to a number of other classic space combat games... Star Citizen.

Announced shortly before Elite Dangerous, Star Citizen marks the return of Chris Roberts.  With the likes of Wing Commander, Privateer and Freelancer in his back catelogue, he is easily on equal (if not better) footing with Braben.

Both have had a significant amount of interest, but it's clear that Star Citizen is in a different league.  While Elite Dangerous is currently celebrating just over £2,016,484, Star Citizen is steadily marking towards it's next stretch goal of $34,000,000 (just under £21m)!  No matter how you look at it, that's an incredible achievement.

Like any game that is crowd-funded, however, I do have some concerns.  It's one thing to 'invest' a few pounds/dollars in a game that has not yet been completed, but people are buying hundreds of dollars of virtual ships.  The entry level package is $30 and includes a basic ship, a basic hanger and a few sundries but no alpha or beta access (the cheapest package with alpha/beta access is $40).  Not a huge amount, but you are only getting the most basic equipment.  If you want a better ship or hanger, you're going to need some fairly deep pockets.  Currently the most expensive single-ship package contains the RSI Constellation for $275.00 which comes with the deluxe hanger and a number of decent extras (including a number of physical rewards).  Should you really wish to start off in style, however, they even have a number of multi-ship packages... starting at $1,150 and going up to $10,000.  That's right, you could spend $10,000 and get yourself five ships and a stack of extras.  And people have... originally there was a limited number of $15,000 dollar packages but they're all gone now!

Don't get me wrong, from what I've seen so far, the game looks like it has the potential to be amazing... but what happens when, in order to justify the money people have spent on the high-end ships, they've reduced the the basic Aurora MR to a point where it just isn't fun to play?  Let's just hope that they don't get blinded by the money and remember why they came back!

Personally, I hope that both games succeed.... we're long overdue for the next benchmark space trading/combat sim!

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~ Naiboss