Developers answer community questions on ship sales and store policy: concept sales (a new ship at Gamescom, Polaris later in 2016), buyback tokens, and melted packages. They also cover a monthly rotating subscriber ship (Sabre in July), patch 2.4.1 fixes, Free Fly, Orion, and merchandise shipping.
We can say it's flight ready. I don't want to say when we're thinking because it'll go with a patch. Well, that's called a tease. Stand by. I can say, I think we can safely say that one of the things we'll be doing at Gamescom, one of our evenings, will be revealing a new ship that's in concept. So stay tuned for that.
Well, we have our initial base set of ships that we came up with at the very, very start of the process, the Hornet, the Freelancer, Cutlass, sort of base concepts of the game, starting points. We keep them in packages. They're ready to fly now. You can come to Star Citizen and get started with them. The more exotic stuff that's more role-specific, that maybe doesn't have a mechanic in the game just yet, we put out only for occasional sales and concept sales. As ships come online, we would like to have them be more permanent in the store as options. But even more than that, what we'd like is for them to be available in the actual game. So hopefully it won't be a worry whether or not something's on the website. You could still go to your Astro Armada and get it there.
It's different. It's something different. Definitely something different. And you'll see more of that in the near future. In fact, I've seen that the folks over in the UK have been doing a bunch of space station building lately, components to put together into space stations. That's cool stuff.
I think nobody knows anything at all. It's certainly touching that there's so much concern from Star Citizen backers. I don't think anybody knows what's going to happen right now.
And I think it's a long process, so it's not something to worry about right now. Just to quote Desiderata, which Alli posted on her Twitter yesterday, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.
I can ask about shipping some of them today. I mean, we can talk about shipping some of them very soon. It's just some of the overseas warehousing ones.
Yeah, we're kind of waiting to work that out before we started shipping those. I know originally we said that they were going to start shipping in May or June.
I mean, they are ready to ship. It's just a question of if we try and overseas warehouse them, because we would like them to be in good shape when they arrive.
I mean, that was one of the questions in Time for the Chairman, and none of us are going to disagree with Chris Roberts about what to do with Drake ships.
I do not know. That's purely on the art side. I think, as with most colors in the game, it's because it looks cool. And of course the idea is our ships will be painted different colors by you.
Yes, but it's on track. It's looking good. It's a really cool ship. You guys are going to be very happy. And we will have a concept sale for it a little bit later this year.
I don't think they work on physical items either. Packages with physical items. But I think a standard package does work. But we will check with Turbulent and we'll clarify. I'm almost certain you can buy back a package.
We will have one as soon as we want. They're working on 2.4.1, which is going to address some of the stability issues and just general bug fixes. I would expect that once we get that out, we'll look at having a Free Fly, but no specific date right now.
This seems like a good time to mention the rotating ship that we're going to start doing for subscribers. So next Friday, July 1st, we're going to start doing a rotating ship for subscribers. So every month, we'll have a new ship that you get for the month to fly and try out. We're going to start off with a Sabre in July. So any subscribers will have access to fly that for the month, and then we'll have something new in August.
It's very cool stuff coming up. I am totally confident that a lot of people will love it. I am confident that there are other people who will not be satisfied with anything. That's just the way the world works. I will say that what we have in the pipeline I am very proud of, and I can't speak for anybody else.
The balance stuff is all being balanced, and especially since most of the ships, it's not even most anymore, I think actually it's less than most. There are a lot of ships still to be put in, especially the role-specific stuff, so balancing will continue forever.
If you ordered Jump Point Volume 2, which we sold back around Christmas time, we had pre-orders up, they're currently in production. It took us a bit longer to get things rolling than we anticipated, but they're in production now, and I would think they'll probably be shipping sometime end of July, August.
We basically needed to keep the numbers the same. We needed them at a standstill to get that into production. It's possible that we might have something later.
Once we've fulfilled all those early physical packages, we can go back and look and say, hey, we can do this again, or hey, we have these leftover, we'll have them separately. We need a locked number for the stuff we're actually going to be shipping. In the past, we've shipped some physical stuff already, like the Citizen cards and the Constellation models for the larger packages. No way to bring those back.