Star Citizen releases Alpha 2.0 as $100 million threshold passed

What does $100 million buy you in game development? So far it's purchased the fans of Star Citizen a second Alpha, as with the continued expansion of the number of backers – now over one millon – and ever increasing pledges, that astronomical total has now been reached. The celebratory Alpha brings a lot of prevous releases together, to give a much better representation of what the final game will really be like.

In this second Alpha, players find themselves aboard a space station orbiting the planet Crusader. From there they can explore on foot, go on EVA where they use their spacesuit's small thrusters to control their position and orientation, or head to the hanger and jump in a ship. If players choose that last options, they can climb aboard alone or with friends and head off to do much, much more.

There's random encounters to discover, involving exploration and combat; quantum, high-speed travel; the planet Crusader to investigate, as well as it's three moons; three distinct space stations to look into; a repair station to utilise and a number of comms arrays that may be hiding something worthwhile (thanks PCG). There's also first person shooter combat that can take place just about anywhere.

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There's also a few newly flyable ships, including the Constellation, the Retaliator and the Vanguard, the former of which is perfect for those looking to explore the system with their friends. This will also likely be good news for those that paid for those ships previously and haven't been able to do much but look at them in their hangar until now.

The Alpha is however, an Alpha, so it should come as no surprise that there are some known issues with it. For those wishing to furnish themselves with that knowledge, there's a full list of known bugs along with the feature list.

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KitGuru Says: Did you guys put much money down for Star Citizen? As much as I think the game looks great, I can't bring myself to splash out on some of those ships. They're very pricey.

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