Is Star Citizen an MMO?
No! Star Citizen will take the best of all possible worlds, ranging from a permanent, persistent world similar to those found in MMOs to an offline, single player campaign like those found in the Wing Commander series. The game will include the option for private servers, like Freelancer, and will offer plenty of opportunities for players who are interested in modding the content. Unlike many games, none of these aspects is an afterthought: they all combine to form the core of the Star Citizen experience.

How will modding work?
Players will be given full control of their game! When operating private servers, players will be able and encouraged to mod the game. It doesn’t stop there, though: we hope to institute a ‘mod approval’ process that will allow the best of the best player created ships and other additions to be integrated into the central persistent world as well.

Can you explain the stretch goals?
The purpose of the higher stretch goals is to ensure that the game-as-described is finished in the two year time period. We intend to build the game that Chris Roberts described at GDC Online regardless, but without additional funding we are going to have to do it one piece at a time, starting with Squadron 42, rather than as a single larger production. With more funding we can include more ships, systems, unique locations, animations and cinematic sequences.

Is Star Citizen “free to play”? A subscription game?
To play Star Citizen you need only to buy the initial game. There will never be a monthly charge for usage. Some in-game items may be available as microtransactions, but we will NEVER sell anything that can’t be acquired through honest (and fun!) gameplay.

Hi, Chris Roberts here.

I’ve seen a few concerned posts on the Facebook stream about whether there’s going to be a single player game, and whether if the budget gets tight will that be the first feature that gets cut. I just want to be clear with everyone, Squadron 42 is an integral part of the Star Citizen experience and it will be the classic Wing Commander experience that everyone loved (without the FMV though!)
In fact the order of the development means that there’s no way that Squadron 42 will be cut, as the features for this, and multi-player dogfights are the first steps in building Star Citizen. The prototype that I showed already includes most of the functionality that I need for Squadron 42.

There’s still a lot of polish to do on the dogfighting and assets to be created but Squadron 42 is not the difficult part of Star Citizen. The difficult part is building the open world that Squadron 42 fits inside. I’m confident of that too as I’ve built this open world twice, and have done a lot upfront technical design work to avoid some of the problems that I dealt with on Freelancer

So ambitious yes. Achievable? Most definitely!

The Wing Commander games didn’t allow much content creation, but Freelancer continues to flourish because of mods. What is your position on user-created content?

Absolutely for it! I love what the Freelancer community has done, and I’m impressed what other communities like the Skyrim or Team Fortress achieve with good tools. There’s a lot of talent and creativity out there and I fully intend to enable it and support it in my new game.

How will modding work?

Players will be given full control of their game! When operating private servers, players will be able and encouraged to mod the game. It doesn’t stop there, though: we hope to institute a ‘mod approval’ process that will allow the best of the best player created ships and other additions to be integrated into the central persistent world as well.