'v3.0 is Moving into a Phase Akin to Early Access'

In an extensive interview at Eurogamer, Star Citizen's Chris Roberts likens the v3.0 version of the game to being roughly equivalent to Early Access as it is defined by other games. He further speaks about some of the features players will find in 3.0 including character, ship and item persistence, basic AI and more. 

Other topics discussed include:

• Defining the difference between alpha, beta & EA: "The way I look at it is, if you've supported Star Citizen you can download and play 2.63 which is a mini, early-stage version of this universe and play around. There's a game experience there - it's not got nearly as much as we'll have in the final game but you can go and see how ships feel, find out what you think, and get your voice heard in our community as we make it better."
• A Price Point Increase:  "All the money we've raised dictates our budget - to a certain point where we have pretty much everything on our wishlist. Right now it's a very not-for-profit enterprise where we plough the money back in."
• Spending Limits for Backers?: "I definitely think there are some people out there who just like the idea of supporting this. For them it's their hobby. I have friends who aren't necessarily into computer games but maybe they're into golf, which can be a pretty expensive hobby. I like to play games, I don't buy antique cars and restore them, or play golf, or any other middle-aged person's hobby. So I figure I'll spend a couple thousand dollars on games, I'll budget where I'm going to spend that, on World of Warcraft or EVE Online or whatever, because I like what's happening and I want to support them."
• Star Citizen as a 'role model' for crowdfunding: "I feel like we do a better job than a lot of people do with interfacing with and updating our community. We had a site for the community before we announced the game, the DNA of the company has always been about informing the community and keeping them involved. And of course with having a community comes people who will always say 'you're not open enough'."

And this quote about responding to detractors:

People still say 'Chris, you lied to me', even if I did give all those caveats for our predictions. People forget all those qualifiers. I am fed up of giving someone an estimate - I'd rather say, here's the data I have, here's the schedule I see. This is what we are hoping for. Software developers at all levels tend to be optimistic - you have to be to build big things. But I hope that with what we're doing, show what we're doing every week, we can educate a fair amount of people about the process. There will always be cynics. And we're big - I grew up in Manchester when United weren't great, Liverpool were the team of the time. Now people hate United because they're the big team of the 90s and 2000s. There are people who love to show up in the match report in the Guardian and rile up their rival supporters. There's definitely an element of that which happens in Star Citizen - there's an element of investment and passion in the community, and when you're invested in something it's easy to get rises out of those people. There's a subset of people who say 'this thing is never going to come out, it's a scam'. Which is plainly not true. It would be the worst scam in the world. We're hiring all these people, we're working really hard. We're showing what we're doing every week.

It's an informative interview so be sure to head to the link above to check it out.

Thanks, anonymous tipster!