So I started playing Star Citizen

General Discussion
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Just wanted to rant and share in case anyone wants to try the game. So I started playing Star Citizen. A friend bought it for me. I had followed the game since a short while after its kickstarter days but never bought it because it never took off for my tastes. The first few hours looked amazing. The graphics look very realistic and the details are insane. After flying the starter ship and doing a mission and exploring the city areas and watching a few youtube videos on the game, I came to a conclusion.

Star Citizen feels like there’s something wrong here. It doesn’t “suck”, but it feels empty despite being highly detailed. Yes there are very detailed ships, weapons, vehicles, etc. But it feels like there is very liitle to do with it and it feels very tedious after a few hours. Again, its not a bad game. It just doesnt feel like a game to me, it feels like its very unfinished and thats because it is. Its visually stunning and satisfying to look at, but after that it feels like I rather just look at it than play it. I mean, after over $300,000,000+ in development costs and 8-ish years and thats all you’ve got to show for it? They push out ship after ship for hundreds of real life money instead of pushing out content such as missions(although they did eventually add missions but they get old fast) and they reset any in-game progress after some updates often forcing you to start from scratch again with the exception of the things you purchased with real-life money. This feels like an elaborate scam to get your money thats legal. Like they realised that they make more money if they just keep “developing” and they decided to push out content intentionally slow and small to keep revenue flowing at a consistent rate while they keep promising the game will get better(they actually faced legal issues regarding mismanegement of money too actually)

Warframe had been around for a similar amount of time and you can sink hundreds, even thousands of hours into its story and trying to unlock all of the other warframes, items, pets, ships, etc. and they did it on half the costs. They even have procgen levels and large open world playing areas on planets and offer the game for free since day-one with purchases optional. I always said that NMS and Warframe are great examples of how games should be made.

So my final thought on SC is that its visually stunning and gameplay is entertaining, but not a whole lot of “fun” unless your playing with friends, preferably with ones who payed hundreds of dollars on ships so that you can use them and not have to pay for them yourself. Lol. I hope that those developers get their priorities strait one day but for now, it looks like HG is putting out more meaningful content in NMS than they are in less than half the time and with a much smaller team. And for free.

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Thanks for the “review”, my thoughts about SC were quite similar.

Luckily I never “pledged” anything and I don’t have any playing experience myself, I just watched current fans advertise it on Twitch. Even big SC fans are beginning to diversify their program (in general a good idea long-term to not tie your carrier to one game).

Exactly… It might not be originally intended as a scam, but they are on the track of getting money from whales like a mobile gambling game. HG was horrible at communicating — but at least delivered a game after a while. CIG are fantastic at communicating — but their delivery does not scale to what they say.

I stopped following when CIG announced they were planning a roadmap for their roadmap… :unamused:

I don’t blame the developers, they are probably frustrated and working their butts off. Their CEO C.R. on the other hand has not completed a game release since the 90s, and then claimed, before he even had a studio, that he could implement multiple times the features in less time, than other successful game dev studios around him? yeahright… I hope they can salvage it.

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That has been my conclusion since (I’m embarrassed to say) I bought in to the kickstarter, and waited… and waited… and waited… and waited… for a game to be produced.
(I have since stopped throwing my money away on kickstarters.)

I have been playing Warframe myself lately. A lot of it satisfies in ways many other games do not. Some of it is too challenging (for me) to play solo. And the lore is intriguing. I do buy plat for real money now and then because I’m not a patient person. But the game and all of its content (tons of it!) can be played entirely for free.

I applaud HG for their horrific struggle to create and continue to improve NMS.
I would not play Star Citizen now if they “gave it away for free”, since it has been bought and paid for many times over by suckers like me. lol.

I’m not surprised that SC is beautiful and soulless. As are most things created not out of love and relationship, but out of cold greed.

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Sadly, there are many people who sink in hundreds, even thousands of dollars on a game that plays and feels unfinished.

Last long rant/review about it:
When I started playing it, the first 1-5 hours were spent in the city areas. I walked around and explored them as people on Youtube would hype them up like, “If your not here, your missing out on the greatest experience ever”. While I knew it was just streamers doing what they do for revenue, I decided to check out those areas first. It was visually impressive, sure, and I admit I enjoyed that the most in my gameplay but the appeal wore off after looking at everything once over. there was alot in one area but at the same time it wasn’t much to add of gameplay value, just a place to buy a limited amount of closes, weapons, etc. The train is a cool feature too. But once I got into space or tried to explore planets, it started to go down-hill slowly for me. Visuals remained impressive but bugs were popping up everywhere. Suit changes werent working, I would glitch out of the elevator floor-thing and die on one of the ships on a mission, kicked out of the game due to server issues forcing me to restart a long delivery mission 3 times in a row, entire rooms of NPCs stuck in T-poses, some things wouldn’t let me interact with them, textures were glitching in random places. Its not as bad as i may be making it sound but your almost guaranteed to experience a handful per game session. The other day a friend of mine were stuck in his ship and we couldnt interact with the controls for flight and that required a reset. This game(or beta? Alpha? Test session?) is not for those with small wallets or who want to play something that is polished. There is no story content and there is no in-game lore. Your just a player, in space, and you can interact with things that make you look different or to shoot other things. It feels a bit like the direction of the game is heading towards a cross of an Ace Combat game and call-of-duty, but in space. While many would love that, im not a fan of shooters. I like games that you can feel like your living in it, such as Ark: Survival Evolved, but this game doesn’t feel like your living in it yet. You wake up/respawn in a small pre-built room. Things are interactable but doesn’t really do anything. Just, “oh cool, you can open and close an empty drawer and the toilet.” Meanwhile in Ark, the things you build have a purpose. You can use the toilet, which then can be used to collect poop to then make fertiliser for your plants that actually produce fruits that you can pick and store and even use to craft recepies that actually give you buffs. A storage container actually stores things effectively.

Okay im done. Sorry to those who read my review/rant.

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I am not entirely sure whether SC can at this point be considered Alpha, or whether it’s still pre-alpha. I’d have to play it to decide, and I can’t be bothered to spend the time and money (also, not a great idea on my PC).

For orientation, Pre-alpha is the stage where production has started and individual parts of the game are actively developed, but they don’t come together to form the core gameplay yet.

Alpha starts once the core gameplay is in place. Which I find difficult to judge from let’s plays… It looks more like an assembly of disconnected and unfinished gameplay loops that don’t quite come together yet, bt the problem is that if SC was a less ambitious game that just wanted to do space combat, you definitely could call the space combat part an alpha. The trouble is that I feel SC hasn’t really a clue yet what its core gameplay is going to look like and how it connects, which is why one could argue that the project as a whole hasn’t reached alpha state yet.

A Beta it cleary isn’t, however. Contrary to what marketing has been babbling during the last decade, Beta is a feature complete state. Buggy, yes, unbalanced, of course, swaths of content still missing, no problem, but all the intended features are in and are playable. although maybe not quite on a scale and variety intended for the finished game, but they’re there.

In any case, what you shouldn’t have any misconceptions about, is the fact that a game where it’s debatable if it’s already Alpha after this much time and money… is dead. Oh, development is going on, true, and they’ll keep it up as long as there is still money to be earned. It’s not a “scam” as some people are refering to it.
But for a software project this deep in development hell it takes a major miracle to ever become a real thing. Usually such a miracle includes a complete change of managment, rigorous scale-down and limitation of scope, and quite often major systems completely rewritten.

As such I do not believe that this game is ever going to get anywhere significant.

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Agreed. I don’t think the game is a scam, just that they aren’t making good use of the funds.

I would say that they really should have focused on one single aspect of the game and made that one thing very good and then move on to the next thing while working out the new bugs it may have introduced along the way before moving on. Circle back later if you need to. The potential is still there but I hope that, some years in the future, they make it more than a combat-focused game.

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The catch is that the idea sounds really fun, nobody (no scifi mmo fan) disagrees with that, it’s just too complex to design and write by hand in a timeframe before your game engine becomes outdated. And software gets outdated faster every year, I have the impression.

I said above that C.R. has not finished a game since the 90s. I wish I had been even kidding. His last release was in 2000. His next game, Freelancer, was literally taken out of his hand, given a huge budget, and it took the new owners 3 years to turn it into something coherent (with CR as advisor only)…

Compare the “Development” section about Freelancer to the current state of Star Citizen/sq42, it’s identical:

So he has done exactly the same thing before, in the year 2000. The only difference in that story was that Kickstarter / Whales were replaced by Microsoft. And, that the scope of the unfinishable Freelancer was smaller… :cold_sweat:

Who would take on the task today to push CR into an advisor role (again, his ideas are cool and all) and steer development back into reality?

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The problem is more, nobody actually can, unless the company goes bankrupt or is sold of…

Actually, there were times when it was way worse. Platforms are pretty stable and long-lastig when yo compare it to the 80ies and 90ies.

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