As someone who's tightly followed the project for over four years, it's sometimes hard for me to know what it's like for the outsider/newcomer to the project -- aside from knowing that it's really fucking hard to find any specific piece of info on the official website which is why I end up writing walls of text explaining things to people.
I think this guy has a pretty fair and reasonably positive take on it. If you don't want to deal with the early access life you should definitely hold onto your money for now or, if you have bought in hold back and save your bandwidth the 50GB install just yet, because it's still a ways from being ready to come out of the oven. It's a daft fool who tries to tell you otherwise.
But the rewards are that much sweeter because you achieved them while fighting poor UX (due to the raw alphaness) instability and bugs, and doing it at the deliberate un-streamlined pace meant to simulate being a real universe. You feel that much more triumphant as you actually step down the ladder out of your ship onto an alien moon one step at a timeuntil it instantly kills you after the first step because buginstead of schooping straight out your seat or, in the case of Elite Dangerous, never leaving your seat except to teleport into a lander buggy cockpit to get onto the ground. It's such a pain when it fights you, but when it lets you win, what CAN be achieved is glorious.
The guy questioned why anyone would want to open their doors or pop the canopy from the pilot's seat (but he's glad that it's a thing the game lets you do or something), and I can answer this. In ships large enough for others to ride in, especially ships large enough to store vehicles and even small ships in, it's super convenient to be able to land on a landing pad or ground or even just pulling up next to a disabled ship, yelling "Get in!" (either in chat or over voice), and opening the doors from the seat so as soon as they're in you can pop the doors shut and get moving again. This is especially important if you happen to be rescuing someone from a hostile situation, although at this point that would probably need to be staged unless you were very lucky.
There's also a second, less-intended reason and I'm going to let the screenshots of a little jaunt I had one night with @Korro Bravin tell the story. All you need to know is that the game currently doesn't do anything to you if the canopy is open (even orbital entry), and emotes that put you into a static pose like /sit stick you to your position until you get out of them. This probably shouldn't be possible in the final game, but it works right now.
https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/2304/ebf81019-5e9b-4052-8277-f0277c25277a/ScreenShot1722.jpg
https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/2304/356ccefa-c94d-4a90-8b9b-0e374a5fccd2/ScreenShot1725.jpg
https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/2304/4688782b-4628-40a9-91d9-84756e443b25/ScreenShot1727.jpg
"Local space gay man displeased by female hitchhiker's attempt at offering 'One Thousand Mile High club' lap dance as payment", 2019, colour
By the way, in that middle screenshot, you can see the Hurston Dynamics building towering high above the indistinct and smoggy Lorville skyline to the right of Korro's helmet. We're probably 25-40 kilometers away from the city and that tower's height is 4km above sea level. There's no such thing as max draw distance in this game, only a cutoff where the LOD is smaller than one pixel on your screen.
One day it'll launch out of beta and most of the bugs will be smoothed out, but until then it's a beautiful, glorious mess and I can't help but love it.
@elix is there anything you'd consider 'finished enough' to entertain yourself with? I've dumped hundreds of hours into elite, freelancer, x3, avorion etc but every single time I see real gameplay of star citizen it seems like it's nearly unplayable
I'm very impressed with the pedigree of the developers and the ideas and goals, and if I went into a 30 year coma and woke up to a fully-released mostly-bug-free SC it would be an instant buy, but what do you think of its current state?
I understand why people who initially backed SC would be upset that it went way beyond its initial scope
I don't get how people can be mad at them for not being faster with development
like, compared to what? I can't think of anything that looks anything like SC, even if it is buggy as fuck. What standard are they failing to live up to?
The game clearly isn't vaporware. It's there. It exists. It's buggy as fuck, but I would be astonished if something like this wasn't. Meaningful progress towards completion continues to be made. What else can you expect?
Heres the other thing about SC, it's a passion project. The people who really knew what they were getting into when they backed it knew it, and the devs knew it.
Being apart of that group, I knew I was in for a long haul run, and that it was going to take a damn long time. I understand RSI's vision, and know this game wont ever really be done. But just as long as it gets progressively better, and achieves a decent playable game, I'll be happy.
Hi, this became a crazy long answer, because nothing about this game and the rolling development state is easy and concise to explain unless you ask me a precise question...and you asked me a fairly broad question so rip I'm at the post limit lmao. Thanks in advance for having the patience to read it without dismissing it offhand as fanboy jerking because I've tried to make every line count.
For the moment and for reasons that will become clear momentarily, since 3.0 I have been treating the game more as a space tourism simulator than an actual game I engage with in any serious capacity, and I'm not afraid to admit it. I've flown around, explored places, done sightseeing, tried out different ships and ground vehicles, gotten some practice dune buggy'ing it up on lower-gravity moons and learning how to drive without ending up stuck flipped over less than a kilometer from the starting line, and I've done all this solo and with other players, but it's hard to say I really play the game. I've never bothered to run missions to earn enough faction rep (hidden stat) until I unlock one of the voiced mission-giving NPCs already in the game, and I avoid serious combat unless I'm looking for a quick respawn. I don't even know all of the missions in the game right now.
It's important to understand that the game is using a test currency instead of the live economy and with every major patch there is a global economy wipe, with occasionally out-of-cycle wipes forced on the live environment without advance warning. Grinding credits in-game is meaningless right now unless you're already playing the game tons and you've decided to spend that time doing something productive (you can 'buy' some ships in-game now, if you can earn up to them, but the wipe takes them away too). The fact that nothing currently matters is a strong reason not to take it too seriously, but it also liberates you to do things you'd never risk your permanent in-game bank balance on, like turning your engine off while in freefall into a planet's atmosphere to exceed the flight computer's speed limiter and becoming a ship-shaped meteor plunging at a (lore-)populated city at over 2km/s. Because it's worth it to try and pull off a recovery before you pancake into a skyscraper at Mach 6.
But, I feel like the game has finally hit a point of stability and maturity where when I log into SC going forward I'll at least sometimes be looking to do more than take screenshots of sunrises through the trees. With multiple important caveats to follow this list, here's the different available gameplay experiences I'm probably going to engage in more often this year and beyond:
fetch missions (go to place grab box bring back, or grab box go to place drop off box) and similar Radiant-tier first-gen missions
scramble races (unsanctioned weapons-free races in space and on the ground)
Hurston security missions (fps missions to kill AIs in underground bunkers located randomly around the whole planet)
transporting players who need rides home (such as by crashing their ship/having it blown up by someone else)
mercantile hauling (load up on commodities and haul them to the highest-bidding station -- which you checked first, right?)
drug smuggling (first I have to find an unmarked drug lab; then I have to land and purchase drugs from the lab without me or my ship being killed; then I have to survive my way to a profitable black market with my sinful contraband)
turning on/off comm arrays, depending on if I'm a good boy or a bad boy; shutting off a comm array has a meaningful effect -- crimes committed within its surveillance radius will not be reported when it's powered off and it stays off in that instance until a player EVAs into the mini-station to press F on the console to boot it
bounty hunting missions (go after criminal AI and wanted-level 2+ players)
anti-security missions (if you have a wanted level, attack AI system security ships that spawn and attack pirate AI - who are friendly to you because you're a criminal)
honourable mention goes to mining, which I can't do unless I cashbuy a MISC Prospector because it's the only ship with mining capabilities for the moment and earning one with alpha credits is like a 2-week grind (that gets wiped eventually) but hypothetically I would because the mining gameplay is fun (and can blow your ship up if you aren't smart about it)
That's a fairly sizable list of activities, even if half of them are just variations of "kill things" and "transport cargo because reasons". I said that there were multiple caveats, and they both explain why I have not engaged in these gameplay opportunities much so far and why I may not do them much for the near future:
no sugarcoating it, all forms of hitreg are garbage right now; half the time your direct hits don't cause damage. And then sometimes you'll just randomly die instantly from a shot directly into your cockpit through 100% shields because ?????? QA can finally repro the hitreg after a year plus of player reports, and a major combat overhaul is due (and was held back until at least after the flight model gets overhauled, which it just did but is still shaking itself out). Unlike the other caveats I'm going to list, this one is basically still a full-strength problem at the moment and makes combat gameplay unsatisfying so I still will want to skip it.
server stability used to be awful, and it's been only recently that the server stays up for 4+ hours at a time reliably without dying and kicking everyone; the instance crashing is bad for mission-running because any missions in progress fail and any cargo in your active ship is lost -- this is particularly painful if you are hauling your life savings in goods and suddenly all your money is eaten by the server crashing to a black screen and you being kicked to menu but it's your fault for putting all your drugs in one cargo hold. Stability is now at the point where mission-running isn't mostly a waste of time because it's no longer highly probable that you can't even finish the mission before the server explodes.
a subset of mission failure was, cargo boxes used to fall through surfaces at random and especially your ship's floor(s) and fall to the center of the moon/planet or get teleported to (0,0,0), which instafails the associated mission if it's a mission box; this still happens but less frequently, meaning like the improved stability missions are more likely to succeed instead of wasting your time.
while I'm talking about cargo boxes falling through floors, sometimes your ship itself won't have a solid floor and the results will range from instantly killing you because bug or just making your ship unusable because you can't make it to the pilot's chair if the floor is a mirage. Usually exiting the server and joining a new instance, then reclaiming your ship and spawning a brand new copy fixes this.
There is some equipment customization for your ship but right now when it blows up you lose any custom fittings when it's replaced, no refunds gone poof, so aftermarket parts aren't worth it yet unless you're a careful tourist. Gear insurance will be a thing one day.
this caveat is less a bug or unintended flaw and more a version-zero implementation of an interesting game mechanic that causes problems in practice: certain missions, especially bounty hunter missions, are oppositional, which is to say other players may be assigned to the same mission and might complete the primary objective before you even get there. This is a mission fail for you and while this is interesting it's also frustrating because there's no warning that others are attempting it, so you might accept a mission that someone else is thirty seconds away from completing.
if after all of that shit, all of those bugs and stability concerns, you got your cargo box safely to the NPC that was supposed to take it... until recently, it was a coin flip if the NPC wouldn't just totally break for the whole server. AI are still not 100% unfucked but there is an implemented workaround to prevent NPC breakages from destroying the ability to complete missions so it's not as bad now.
I'm breaking this one out for visibility:
Until ship purchase is practically more affordable (with or without patch wipes) and the selection covers almost every spawnable ship, the current state of the game is objectively P2W, with the understanding that "winning" isn't worth much except stroking your e-peen because you wallet warrior the near-military-grade heavy dogfighter and do nothing but PVP in an alpha sandbox. This is a limitation of the alpha state of the game and the economy is missing an entire list of features and mechanics that'll largely mitigate the current P2Wness as the game progresses towards live economy.
All of these issues made mission-running not worth my time, because three quarters of the time I couldn't get to the end of the process somehow. Most of these have been cleaned up by a noticeable amount; it's now possible to play for six hours without client or server crashes.
So, to answer your question, I think the game is almost "finished enough" for me to play it properly and actually try and take it seriously, even though wipes make earning credits meaningless on the long term. 3.5 introduced a major overhaul to the entire flight model that in my opinion makes flying more fun and makes the different ships have more meaningful differences and more distinct flight experiences. My Drake Herald, a data-running ship which basically is two giant fuckoff engines attached to some encrypted USB hard drives and a camper van, now has an acceleration curve that feels like it's ripping the hair follicles out of my spaceguy's scalp the way the concept suggests it should. The multicrew Constellation, with two manned turrets and a cargo hold large enough to store a panel truck, is a much more lumbering cow by comparison now, but even dead cows build up momentum if you burn a rocket behind them for long enough.
I'm optimistic that, as long as there isn't some catastrophically bad delay or derailment in development because, oh I don't know, CIG suddenly invents magic zero-fps-loss raytracing and drops everything to spend a year adding that to the engine, by the end of this year SC will be in a "playable" state with the understanding that regular wipes means it's only worth playing to enjoy what you're doing in the moment, because the only thing you actually get to keep permanently is memories (and screenshots/video) made and friendships formed. And gameplay experience, which the OP video highlighted the importance of. The public development roadmap is reasonably supportive of my hope, but the roadmap cards are not hard promises and could shift at any time.
For now, I'm still content appreciating the beauty of this game as a space tourist because there's a great big universe out there, even if the universe only currently consists of the underdeveloped beginnings of half of one star system out of what is slated to eventually be 100+. Even now there's lots of gorgeous eye candy, like this realtime sunset video on a rooftop near Area 18 on the planet ArcCorp (mentioned at the end of the OP video) using Lorville's theme that I use to end my (infrequent) streams.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcbNezzqX3c
I put it to you that it's the Dunning-Kruger effect in action, but in the skeptics'/critics' defense it is hard to blame them for having trouble keeping up with this project. When engaging critics of the project, I often find them holding onto misconceptions that were accurate criticisms of the project like three years ago but they've been out of the loop enough that their info is so entirely out of date... but they don't even know they don't know. I get the best results when I take them on a tour of what's changed since then and bring them up to speed so that, at least, their criticisms are about builds from the last 18 months and not something totally irrelevant by now.
Let's be honest: if Star Citizen actually hadn't made much in the way of progress at all in the last three years, we all should be pissed. The difference is that I know better, that meaningful progress is happening every week and the devs aren't just jerking to 7 of 9 porn on the backer fund's dime. Some people don't stop and check if their knowledge is out of date before blessing the Internet with their hot take even if they aren't trying to deliberately troll.
My experience with the game has been pretty much what has been described on the video, I managed to try the game when it had that weekend with the free ships museum and it has been nothing short of frustrating with all the technical issues, of which most of the people I know that plays it and were backers happens to completely gloss over it and treat it as a more polished product than most released games to the point of toxicity. It’s difficult to have a decent video where these issues are also in the spotlight since its a big part of the current game experience.
Does the game have delta-patching yet?
I own a copy, but I have real shit internet, worse than comcast, and downloading some 60 gigs or whatever every updates would take days
Delta patching has been in for more than a year. If your last download was before 3.0, you need the new (delta patching) launcher, currently v1.1.1, and you need to download the whole phat 50GB package. But the next time there's an update you'll only need to delta it and grab a few hundred megs or a few gigs, depending on just how much is changing/being added.
Every download check also means downloading ~150MB of repo data in order to determine how much you need to delta (if anything), but it's still better than the "we changed a few textures and sounds, 7.8GB patch" days.
Star Citizen is running a freefly event for the next week, starting today. I slammed the keyboard a million times in this thread but you can try the game out for yourself instead of taking my opinion for gospel. I want to remind people not to expect a nice stable clean experience or even a structured in-game tutorial because it's still aaaaalpha. An updated tutorial video series is on the official Star Citizen YT channel, among fan resources. Anyone with questions is welcome to come by the SC megathread or join the FP SC discord (link's in the megathread OP).
Use code GETINTOTHEVERSE on that page and it'll unlock game access (if you don't have it yet) as well as five vehicles/ships to use:
- Anvil Arrow, a newish nimble light fighter
- Drake Dragonfly, a gravlev bike
- Drake Cutlass, a smaller multicrew ship
- Aegis Avenger Titan, a cop-car spaceship with a cargo hold (it's a "fighter" but not purely for combat)
- MISC Prospector, currently the only ship in the game that can mine asteroids/moonrocks
Existing backers can use the code to unlock access to the ships for the same week-long period.
SC's more fun in a group so if anyone wants to arrange gaming together, especially having a veteran join you on your first time if you've never played, feel free to join our Discord and see if anyone's available to play. Figuring out how to play the game is hard right now, exactly as the OP video describes, but having experienced players around to talk you through things makes it much easier.
It's not a Star Citizen thread without Elix writing walls of texts trying to sell the game.
Or without low effort posts like this pointlessly deriding people for trying to clear up misinformation
Yet if you actually read his posts he more often than not suggests that outsiders wait for a more substantial product before dropping money on it.
That's right, gather around, everybody, for your favourite Elix Shill Lines, like
and
and who can forget the crowd-pleasing favourite
Remember, for every word I write when I post positive comments about Star Citizen on Facepunch Chris Roberts lets me speak to my wife on a phone for five seconds before he puts me back into my dungeon and forces me to be audited by Sandi Gardiner in a Jason mask. Please be understanding.
Hell yeah. I can finally stop playing vicariously through you.
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