14 years of development, 1 billion dollars, and the tech demo is all they have to show for it. Bruh.
2-hour stream about space game without going to space.
This game has been in development for a decade with near-unlimited funding. Jesus christ guys, this has been plenty of time to get your shit together.
I think you pointed out why they don’t get their shit together.
As someone that has wasted 100s of hours into Star Citizen I don’t think I ever really liked that game as much as I convinced myself I did. Turns out I liked the game only because of what I thought the game could be instead of what it actually was. All my friends are trying to get me back into it but I just can’t do it anymore. I probably only ever enjoyed 10% of my total playtime on that game as the other 90% was spent fighting the gargantuan technical issues, performance issues, game breaking bugs, and general jank. The game is all vibe and promises without an actual fun experience underneath.
For anyone who wants to play an actually developed space game that has many (not all) of the features of SC, I recommend checking out Elite:Dangerous. It was a fully released game 10 years ago and is still receiving content updates regularly.
I’m gonna say elite is generally a hard sell because of the steep learning curve. I love it and have over 1,300 hours, but only after a friend brought me back because I was so lost my first time playing it. I similarly quit trying the on-foot stuff on 3 separate occasions because it’s so difficult to figure it out, and failing a mission often results in a fine or bounty you have to then find an interstellar factor to pay off.
Then there’s the engineer grind. I won’t speak on that here.
It’s frustrating because the game is incredibly deep with faction mechanics, system states, market demands, etc. but all of that is basically inaccessible in any reasonable manner without 3rd party tools. Outside that your options are exploration, shipping, combat, mining, and that’s about it.
That said, if you want a somewhat realistic space sim, it’s probably the best you can find. Just make sure you have a guide and inara.cz bookmarked.
See I don’t really think Elite scratches my space pilot itch very well, and so I don’t really recommend it to people and I don’t think it’s because it’s too complex or challenging - in fact the exact opposite. I found elite dangerous extremely shallow, missing nearly any engaging game loop that I could sink my teeth into. Granted this was 3 years ago but I’ve watched the content updates and they haven’t seemed very large.
I like the flying but the combat seems rather dull with very little progression or optimization capable. Like comparing ED to something like an ARPG or a Dark Souls, there just isn’t good itemization or “character” building last I played.
I liked the trading but there wasn’t a ton going on around the logistics sim to make it really exciting, like flying place to place wasn’t hard and interdictions were rarely challenging and the ship ladder felt kinda small. Mining also felt like the only other thing to do and again, not even a heavily compelling minigame.
They introduced planet side first person shooting stuff and that looked appealing as a new mechanic but it never grew into something that got me to return.
I guess I’m saying to anyone considering it but worried about complexity, give it a go it’s still a fun sim for most people for at least a couple dozen hours. Some people will find hundreds of hours of fun. I personally, and I think a lot of people, will find it lacking though from a space game perspective and there is still a massive hole in the market for a real AAA space sim game to come fill.
To your second point, meaningful progression is locked behind engineering, and a little behind powerplay. Yeah you can get a ship and A rank every module but it won’t hold a candle to a fully engineered build.
But yeah, there are some cool things you can do in the game but the core loop is shallow and grindy as hell. I spent most of my time unlocking engineers, making money, and farming materials to the point where I can get just about anything I want. I feel like cartman in the WoW episode saying “now we can finally play the game” after 1000 hours. Though I did finally join a squadron and that gave me a bunch of stuff to help with. One guy has a carrier and we farmed an assload of minerals and then picked up and turned in a whole bunch of 25m-50m credit mining missions all at once so that was kinda cool.
Oh they also added operations, which are basically multiplayer missions you can join a lobby for, and you don’t actually have to physically be anywhere specific. It’s a huge quality of life upgrade because previously you’d have to actually be in the same system or use telepresence which doesn’t let the telepresence crewmember to use their own ship.
This has been massively improved over the years with the introduction of Exobiology. Just about any new player can get into a ship worth a few mil and be collecting hundreds of millions of credits within a few hours without the need to consult a spreadsheet.
You certainly can min-max far beyond that point as you mentioned with external tools, but the feeling of ships or mission types being inaccessible is pretty much gone.
As an aside, I’m currently working on a guide to solve many of the issues you’re describing. Right now, it’s for my personal squadron, but I plan to expand this to a public sister site eventually.
I’m also working on a video series to introduce the game. This is part 1 of 3: https://youtu.be/c9xS9tcn4sk
Scope Creep Simulator
Was Star Citizen scope creeped?
I seem to remember it kind of always being sold as one of those “do everything for everyone” games that can’t possibly exist. Fly spaceships to different planets, be a bounty hunter, be a cargo freighter, go way out in the wilderness and explore, be a back alley prostitute, get into fist fights, join the navy, run a government. Meanwhile what they’ve made is a marginally Elite: Dangerous without an actual game in it.
Yes
If someone lacks skill, creativity, and the fundamental ability to learn new things, it doesn’t matter how much money or time they are given. Slop Citizen lmao.
Woooowwwww tell me you don’t know sc without telling me you don’t know sc and barely payed attention…
I’m in the middle of watching it to see what everyone is flipping out about and already 2 things they said right off the bat shows they don’t follow the development. The guy Elliot who says “you being up you being down doesn’t matter” is joking that’s literally his personality and he gets shit on all the time by other devs and streamers, it’s like a joke to pick on Elliot and he dishes back, it’s not some mean spirited thing being brought on by a failing stream. Hell the very beginning starts off with (paraphrasing) “let’s introduce our great devs, oh and Elliot.”
The “just close your eyes” wasn’t about any glitch either… He literally said he took care of the enemies and one of the guys calls him out saying there was one right there that he had to take care of so he says no there wasn’t just close your eyes, again jokingI might be misremembering this part, he did say something about not needing a fuse, I don’t feel like going back to disprove this so I’ll just leave it and own it up to my own failure to remember.I know it’s everyone’s favorite pass time to shit on star citizen, but being over an hour into the stream before I stopped for lunch I don’t see anything they’re all bitching about…
Dude it is still barely a game after all this time and that’s only barely more true than in 2016.
I had more fun fucking around Olisar and Jump
