Star Citizen 2.0, or the great server kickout

Lo and behold! Cloud Imperium Games managed to, unlike many people though, open up Star Citizen's long-fabled 2.0 mode to the masses before the end of 2015. Unlike in the previous 1.3 version, you now finally start seeing what kind of a game they are trying to build here.

1.3 wasn't a huge amount of content. It was a very limited construct of hanging in your hangar and admiring your ships, trying to do space combat in Arena Commander, or trying to race against other players. Or just hanging in the world's prettiest chat room, chatting away with other hopeful Star Citizens. In contrast to that 2.0 is something completely different.

Mind you, it's still just as buggy and unstable you'd expect an alpha product to be. Most of the time it's annoying because of the stability issues, but when it works, you can at least see where the monstrous 100 million dollars crowdfunded budget is going.

This screen is something you'll see very often.

2.0 still has the same things 1.3 has, so if you're into Arena Commander, you still can do that. The main attraction of it is the new test run of the real persistent universe. Not that it has any real persistence yet, but it's at least a little snippet of the sandbox they're trying to build.

Now instead of entering a simple chat room you actually can enter into Port Olisar, a new hub where people can order in their ships and start exploring the area around Crusader gas giant. There are even some real missions there, ranging from EVA to FPS combat. It's not yet groundbreaking, but it is a start. And if you want a stable run of the place, I do recommend using the well-known solo mode trick, as it is quite evident that most of the crashing and frame rate issues are coming from the server-side.

Port Olisar. It's pretty, but sadly the best way to see it is in the self-forced solo mode, at least for now.

And the severe instability really is a huge bummer, as this is supposed to be an MMO after all. When you aren't connected, you won't see other people. And thus you can't do many things that actually do require real players, like be a part of a multi-crew flight or have a good old shootout. Nor can you ambush people and steal their ships.

The whole sever thing really is something that worries me about Star Citizen the most at the moment, even more than the wonky flight model they still have, despite going through several iterations with it. A lot of time and effort has gone into creating a lot of great-looking assets, but they're still is a lot of issues under the hood when it comes to the tech they're using.

Crusader gas giant as seen from the landing docks of Olisar

So, I hear you ask, should I jump now? Well... I wouldn't have recommended it with 1.3, especially if you are looking for something fully playable. With 2.0 out, I can say, that it's something better approached with caution. It has improved quite a bit, but it still isn't a game you can play with ease, given all the underlying issues it still has.

There should be 2.1 update coming out maybe at some time in early 2016. There was some discussion about it coming out before the end of 2015, but I don't see that happening. 2.1 update should bring more meat to the table, but what this game desperately needs now is more stability.

In the airlock

Again, if you want it, don't go for the highest pledges. Get the cheapest you find to get Star Citizen and Squadron 42 on. But, it's not a fully functional game yet, so if you really, really want it, you need to fully understand that you're getting it in a raw alpha (or better yet pre-alpha) state, that works if you're lucky.

So head to the official store, if you want it. And if you do, you can use this referral code to get some extra bang for your buck (you get 5000 in-game credits): STAR-G4R9-XLR3

Walk in the space