I love the game’s potential, I will regularly log in just to walk around stations or planets or hang out in my ship and enjoy the aesthetic. I like to fiddle with things and see what’s new. I love the sense of scale and freedom, just knowing at any time you can get up out of your pilot’s seat and open your cargo hatch and yeet yourself out the back just makes me giddy.

All that said, I grow weary of the endless fuckery and delays and just uninstalled for the dozenth time to let the thing cook longer. The graphics, for all their beauty, require more power than my PC can put out so the frame-rates are almost unplayable in many areas. Quests and missions are still a complete dice-roll if they’re going to work or break at any moment. NPC’s in the ground missions are either dumber than rocks or clip through walls and you can never find them. The map/navigation system on your wrist computer is so janky that I dread having to use it, and that’s after several major overhauls.

Server meshing is an amazing technology, but you have to have all your servers working, so there is always at least one area of the solar system that just plain doesn’t work. Stations that don’t answer your landing hail, quest locations that don’t work, lagged out doors and ship systems.

The universe truly feels more vast than any other game, ever, because you feel like a tiny human in a huge expanse. Too bad that’s about it most of the time, there’s no sense of permanence, no bases you can build, no personalization you can do to your own apartment, no storage locker in your own room like every other game ever made, everything including accessing your personal gear has to be done through kiosks in lobbies. The lack of personal items and survival components other than eating and drinking once in a while leave a good 80% of every station or base useless.

Sure you can buy a few cheap ass toys to put in your cockpit, but since most likely your game will crash and you will have to file a claim on your ship, you will hardly want to do this more than once.

Ship interiors feel real, it’s highly convincing. It’s just too bad that they’re mostly useless. Other than moving cargo around a cargo hold, there’s very little else you can do on a ship.

And you know what… I would be okay with all of these shortcomings IF THE GAME HAD GOOD CONTROLS. Seriously, look at a game like SCUM, it’s a survival PvP MMO where the gameplay is so detailed you need to manage your protein levels to build muscle and you have to poop regularly, you can even die of a heart-attack. You can load your magazines with several types of bullets and it will fire them in order. You can adjust how deep of a crouch you’re in and you can craft a vast array of useful items to survive and fight.

And it does it all smoothly. Sure it takes getting used to, but it’s never tedious. You never fall through the floor. You never have to fiddle with a door panel, you don’t have to make sure you point your cursor to just the exact position to open a hatch, you can actually trust the line-of-sight from a hostile mech so you can avoid it.

And that’s a game that’s far, far from perfect but they make a better gameplay experience than Star Citizen which has made exponentially more money from its players.

I will still keep trying it out from time to time, but I really, really hope some new game comes along and takes all the best lessons from SC and makes a more polished game experience that keeps the scale and detail and freedom but gives you things to do.

(No, I know about No Man’s Sky, it’s like a muppet/minecraft version of a space sim and too silly and unrealistic, totally different experience.)

The scam is eternal.

Star Citizen may very well be the single greatest argument for Scrum Masters on Dev teams.

Talk about infinite scope, holy shit.

We are gonna get gta 8 before we get star citizen.

Meanwhile I’ve done five or six playthroughs of Freelancer while this game has been in development and had more fun than I’ll ever have with Star Citizen.

Bro running the greatest grift on earth not counting the crypto market

Store Citizen missing deadlines like that is to be expected.

After much careful reflection on this news, here is my response: HAHAHAHAHHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHA!

I think I could have written this headline 6 years ago.

Game development as a service.

It’s been in development for 15 years. Duke Nukem whatever was only in dev hell for 14. Y’all ever gonna admit you got scammed?

When this game is released the setting is going to be ancient history.

I’ve spent hardly any money on that game. I did the first 20 bucks. Then a 15 to get a tiny mining ship to help get in-game money. But I wouldn’t have even gotten it if it wasn’t for my partner REALLY liking the “game.”

I might like it too… if it actually worked and every bug I’ve ever encountered being perfect for setting all my progress to zero or even backwards. Because you have to buy supplies to do a mission.

So fuck that. I’m not playing it until I can make progress- which will be never.

I was this 🤏 close to buying squadron 42 years ago, as it was just about to get released. dodged that bullet.

You know, when they mentioned 8k textures 10 years ago, I laughed because it was so overshooting gaming standards that it was laughable. Now I’m think they will be just on track when it actually launches.

As a very early backer of S42 way back in apparently 2012: It never ceases to annoy me that The Wing Commander Guy has once again managed to do everything possible to NOT make a fucking Wing Commander. This is, what, the third big clusterfuck and the first one where there was nobody to take it away from him and just finish it themselves? But, whatever.

As a big fan of elite games: I am really glad star citizen “exists” to contrast Elite Dangerous and has led to some truly amazing games in the genre. Some of which actually ARE more Wing Commander than not (Everspace 2 is basically the Freelancer that was promised). Now we just need some studio to make a proper Freespace game.

All that said: I don’t like it but I weirdly keep coming back to the thought process that Star Citizen actually IS delivering on its “promise” to the backers… of the past decade or so. Not the OGs. Fuck us.

Because they were never sold on actually playing a game. They were sold on a dream. It is the same logic by which you watch Aisha Tyler do VO for a Tom Clancy game and think that you and your friends are also going to be super sweaty tier seven operators. Or how you watch your favorite group of online youtubers read off their pre-written jokes and pretend to be shocked while playing “friendslop” games. Or… you are a non-sicko who read too many AARs of Dwarf Fortress and thought you would boatmurder too.

Its the idea of spending money to Dream. You know you’ll never actually do what you saw the pretty people do. But you THINK you will and, by owning a copy of Garry’s Mod that you will never boot up, you think you will too.

Obviously the star citizen heads are spending WAY more than 20 bucks a pop and some are buying multiple megaships they’ll never use meaningfully. But it is hard to not see parallels to the people who buy a DCS plane because they want to pretend that one day they will learn how to fly that jet.

And… truth be told, I think I’ve gotten my money’s worth out of the annual charity streams where Drew Scanlon (The Blinking White Guy) and Vinny Caravella attempt to play Star Citizen and spend an hour or two crashing to desktop, getting confused, and accomplishing absolutely nothing. Hell, I think there were a few years where they never even found each other in the space station?

Also, as much as Freelancer hurt, I’ll never stop laughing/being annoyed that he managed to take a sci-fi movie starring Freddie Prinze Jr AND Baby Busey AND Matthew Lillard and turn it into a charisma-free void with no redeeming qualities. Like, you gotta put some fricking effort into that. Those guys could make reading the dictionary be entertaining.