Star Citizen, I need a break…

Star Citizen (SC) is without a doubt one of the most devisive early access video games to be developed in recent years. There are players who believe that it is one of the most technologically impressive video games ever envisioned and perhaps rightfully so. Not many games allow you to seamlessly transition from a planet's surface to it's atmosphere to outerspace and beyond and even fewer allow you to do so on 100 player servers where you can board an actual ship and even jump out in mid-flight to float around in the blackness of space or plummet back to the planet's surface in a hopeless spiral and a spectacular crash. Then there are the jaded players who have become numbed by the abysmal state that the playable content is perpetually in. The bugs, the crashes and the attitude of Cloud Imperium Games (CIG), the developers of Star Citizen, to maintaining the status quo. Finally there are those who look at the game and the time and money that has been spent on developing it and laugh it off as a scam. A money scheme designed to lure in unsuspecting backers with promises that cannot be fulfilled. I've been following Star Citizen for as long as it has been announced, and have been a backer since around 2015. I've been in all these camps at one point in time or another.

Over the last couple of years I've spent many hours in Star Citizen and have countless hours of video footage dating as far back as 2019 and perhaps even older than that. I've several fond memories of the game which even the constant disconnections, server issues, client crashes and bugs can never spoil for me. Star Citizen is so seamless and beautiful that we'd often just sit and admire the scenery rather than actually do any of the missions or interact with the game in any meaningful way. It has a way to draw out a session for way longer than the existing programmed missions and other scripted content would have you believe possible, for better or worse. This all allows time for conversations and fun banter that you wouldn't normally expect to have. This, in a way, is what makes SC fun. Isn't that what games are for? Well yes, but you see... there's a sort of a catch...

I really love many aspects of SC, but sadly there are also downsides that are worth discussing. Lately these have become more and more prevelant and often unbearable. The current state  of the game (3.18) is rather tiring and we no longer have the types of experiences we used to have while playing the game. In the average game session you will run into lots of issues. Unable to connect, friendlist not loading, random disconnects, ASOP terminals not working, transports not showing up, AI issues, world glitches, missions not working right, unresponsiveness of UI elements and unexplainable oddities. Star Citizen is an Alpha so these types of things are to be expected, but many of these issues are simply never addressed. For example, the NPC AI has never consistently worked before and has now seemingly regressed to a state worse than it has ever been before. You'll often see groups of unresponsive humanoids hanging around devoid of life. Sometimes they'll even stand or squat on a nearby table or chair. The same with mission bugs, many of the types of errors we still frequently get also happened in 3.17 and even before that. The common rhetoric among die hard SC fans is that SC is so ahead of its time in ambition and scope and that we just need to wait for Persistent Entity Streaming and Server Meshing to make it into the game for the flood gates to open so the rest of the game can finally flow free. But many of the broken features are not ground breaking implementations and yet they are not working at all right now and they haven't really ever worked consistently before. The state of the game right now is essentially the only proof we have of progress on the game. Anything else is merely lip service. That being said, at some point anyone with even a shred of interest would become turned off and eventually even aggrivated at the status quo that CIG has set for SC.

One of the original promises of SC was open development. This is to me what got me interested in the game in the first place. Getting to see the project take shape was exciting, especially in the early days when all we had was the hanger module. You could run around and admire your ship and that was it. Later Vanduul Swarm came out and suddenly you could fly around and shoot down AI ships with a buddy! Exciting stuff at the time. We now have one entire system called Stanton. That's literally just the one. You can glitch around and sometimes complete missions to your heart's content. If it works. It feels like over the last couple of years progress on SC has been really slow. The 'progress' on the game feels more like adding placeholders on top of more placeholders. This is made more apparant by the fact that it feels like we're in a perpetual state of waiting and what we're waiting for is that mythical golden feature which will slot into place (they hope) and make everything else just fall into place along with it. These golden features may as well be the silver bullet that SC needs, but it's nearly impossible to know exactly when these features will drop and also in what state they will drop. From the outside looking in things at CIG can seem rather chaotic. CIG has a gift for making decisions that I can only describe as irrational. The best example I can think of was that time where they gave players in-game money for time spent playing a particular version that had issues, but by accident gave players that played a lot more money than intended. Of course , they then went out of their way to undo it only to later do a full server reset anyway when the next update cane out causing nothing but undue resentment.  Recently they promised full resets between 3.18.1 and 3.18.2 but then only did a partial reset... These types of decisions can lead to a lot frustration as you can never be sure exactly what CIG is planning to do. It makes time spent on SC feel like wasted time and it is a real shame.

It's also perhaps worth briefly mentioning Squadron 42. SQ42 is a single player game that is developed alongside SC in the same universe and using the same underlying mechanics and systems. To avoid spoilers SQ42 is largely developed in secrecy with only rare updates on what has been done on it. Right now, SQ42 development takes priority over SC. The idea is that once SQ42 is complete many of these assets  and systems will make their way into SC in a big scary code base merge which will almost certainly cause issues. I know enough about developing games to know that building for singleplayer and building for multiplayer are two entirely different beasts. It would seem that SQ42 development is being used as an excuse to delay SC even more as undoubtedly when, or if, the systems become one a lot of rebalancing and redevelopment will need to be done. Well, that is to say unless the idea is to rebuild and rebalance SC from scratch based on SQ42. This definitely is worrying thought and further serves to discredit the current state of SC.

Recently I've also found that reporting issues in the Issue Council, SC's equivalent of a bugtracker, is a loveless effort. Issues are rarely resolved and even if they are they'll pop up again. I do believe that many of the reported issues are server side and relate to server performance, but even so the way these reports are simply brushed under the rug makes it feel like CIG simply do not care about fixing things right now and discourages me from reporting issues that I have while playing.

To me right now, it feels like SC is for all intents and purpose deadlocked. It is deadlocked by the fact that the underlying systems are not yet completed and it is deadlocked by SQ42 which we have no idea how far along in development it actually is. The amount of frustration that following the game causes is not worth it either as the project is far more closed than it seems at first. In a couple of years things may, hopefully, look significantly different, but until such time as SC can prove that substantial progress is actually being made I definitely don't think the game is worth playing. So, Star Citizen... I'll be following at a distance, but I need a break...