With over $200 million raised, Star Citizen is one of the biggest crowdfunded projects in history and may be on its way to becoming the biggest budget video game in history, surpassing games like GTAV ($265 million) and CoD: Modern Warfare 2 ($250 million).
To celebrate Star Citizen's anniversary this week, Cloud Imperium is releasing Alpha Update 3.3.5, which includes the game's first planet, Hurston, as well as its main city, Lorville. Hurston will be the first planet that players can explore using their actual space legs and space eyes. It is also by far the largest area in the game yet.
The size of the area players can explore stretches thousands of kilometers, and will include five different biomes, such as cityscapes, savannahs, tundras, mountains, and coastal seascapes. This seems to be more of a "see the sights, crash your ship into a tree" kind of deal, since the inclusion of missions in these new areas is not expressly mentioned. FPS AI enemies and missions were added to the game in update 3.3, but whether these will be on Hurston is not specified.
A "Free Fly" will also take effect from November 23-30, where the game will be free for anyone to try. All 80 flyable ships will also be free to try out for 24 hour periods, which rotate daily. The flyable ships will be grouped by manufacturer as follows:
November 23 - Anvil Aerospace
November 24 - Roberts Space Industries
November 25 - Origin Jumpworks
November 26 - Aegis Dynamics
November 27 - Drake Interplanetary
November 28 - Alien Manufacturers
November 29 - Musashi Industrial and Starflight Concern
November 30 - Kruger/Argo/Tumbril/Consolidated Outland
Star Citizen can be purchased here for a whole menu of different packs and prices. Although the exact day has not been specified, patch 3.3.5 will release sometime this week (Nov 19-23).