Star Citizen developer Cloud Imperium Games just opened the floodgates of its annual Invictus Launch Week event, edition 2953.
The celebration comes with a Free Fly event that lets everyone try the game without any purchase required. All you need to do is to register an account on the official site and then download the client and you're good to go.
This means that you can take a good look at the latest build alpha 3.19 and all the features the game has to offer, including the overhauled new player experience with a tutorial that should make the first few hours in the game more accessible for newcomers.
If you're wondering about the name "Invictus Launch Week," it's unrelated to the actual "launch" of the game. It's actually an in-game celebration of the military fleet of the United Empire of Earth. 2953 is the in-universe date, which progresses with the real-world calendar, just 930 years in the future.
Among the special events available for a limited time is a tour of the interior of a massive Javelin-class destroyer while a demonstration fleet led by a gargantuan Bengal carrier will tour the Stanton system. On top of that, an expo showcasing all the ships available in the game will be open to visitors at Area18 on the Coruscant-like urban planet ArcCorp.
Below you can check out two trailers, one is aptly militaristic, celebrating the event itself (it is an event dedicated to the fleet, after all), while the other showcases the brand-new ship made available today, the Mirai Fury, alongside its missile variant Mirai Fury MX.
Incidentally, two dedicated game packages are available at a discounted price for those who try Star Citizen and enjoy it enough to fully jump in. The C8X Pisces Invictus Starter Pack is 25% off at $55.45, while the Avenger Titan Invictus Starter Pack is 10% off at $77.62, offering a more powerful starter ship. Both come with a special bonus paint for the ship included.
The event will span 12 days until May 30, and every day will be dedicated to different brands, with a rotation of most of the game's ships available to rent and try for free. Below you can check out the full schedule.
In the meanwhile, Star Citizen's growing crowdfunding campaign continues to make progress and the overall tally has just passed $571 million ($571,455,846 at the moment of this writing) pledged from backers.
The number of registered users has also recently passed 4.5 million and it's now at 4,584,191, albeit not all of them are paying since many register accounts to access the free fly events. According to the latest information that creative director Chris Roberts himself shared in October 2022, 1.7 million players are actually paying customers. Of course, that number is a few months old, so it's probably higher now.
Full disclosure: the author of this post has backed Star Citizen all the way back when its crowdfunding was first launched in September 2012.
