Star Citizen developer Cloud Imperium Games released a new video showing off how the game will soon mitigate one of its biggest issues.
If you look beyond the objectively super-long development cycle, one of the largest problems new Star Citizen players face is the lack of a proper tutorial. The game is still in alpha and once it used to have a tutorial, but it was quickly outgrown by development and scrapped.
With the next update, Alpha 3.19, a brand new "New Player Experience" is coming, which is basically an extended tutorial that will teach you the ropes. This is especially important since it'll launch at the beginning of Invictus Launch Week with its Free Fly Event, which means that a lot of new players will flood the game's universe and will want to learn how to get up from the bed when they first spawn in their room.
You think that's a joke, but I've lost count of the times I've read people asking about that in the game's chat. Incidentally, just press "Y" on your keyboard.
The video features co-directors Todd Papy and James Kay as they walk us through the New Player Experience, and you can watch it below.
In the meanwhile, Star Citizen's growing crowdfunding campaign continues to make progress and the overall tally has recently passed $569 million ($569,811,719 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 4,573,148 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.
At the moment, update Alpha 3.19 is being tested, and it'll release ahead of Invictus Launch Week.
Full disclosure: the author of this post has backed Star Citizen all the way back when its crowdfunding was first launched in September 2012.