Trying Star Citizen today disappoints and excites me in equal measure: This is how the space MMO evolves
After almost ten years of development, Star Citizen is still in a very premature state. The incredibly ambitious MMO is set to turn things upside down, and it is likely to succeed… if it ever ends. But how are you doing for now? We get on board a ship to see how the alpha is doing right now.
350 million dollars . It’s said early, but this makes Star Citizen one of the most expensive games to produce ever. And we’re talking about a fan-funded game. By now, we are all well familiar with the rare case of patronage of a game that has been almost ten years in development with no solid clues pointing to a release date. It’s not just that Cloud Imperium Games doesn’t want to commit to deadlines that it can’t realistically meet, but sensibly, the game is very, very green . Or at least, it’s what I think after spending time trying to play, to understand its universe, its mechanics and what makes it so special.
And it is that Star Citizen is built like an inverted pyramid where the base is a niche audience , an elite seduced by the romanticism of space simulation, the ultimate fantasy of piloting. The bar is so high that the question is not whether to take the game or not. That is the least. Rather, the question is whether to buy 50 or 500 euros to buy, before even knowing if you really like the game. Because of course, here the experience we all seek is to have a second life , a second job, sharing tasks with 79 other players aboard a 480-meter long Javelin military capital ship. But that dream is long overdue and I don’t think it will ever be within the reach of many.
An experience within the reach of few
I think simulation is the genre of the passionate … and the wealthy. When the great Flight Simulator went on sale, the analyst firm Jon Peddie Research released an interesting study in which it states that simulator gamers on PC are also the ones who spend the most money on hardware , and that goes so much for the components with those who play at higher qualities and peripherals with which to achieve a more immersive experience. You know, levers (HOTAS) seats, that sort of thing. A dedicated $ 20,000 station sounds outrageous, but it’s just one example of the kind of demands that come from this quiet sector of gamers.
The interior of the ships is very detailed, but there is not much to do.
It is probably not unreasonable to see Star Citizen as a kind of Holy Grail for that audience, and of course I would like to philosophize on that subject, because everything I have seen of the game market reminds me of that ” cult of premium“That surrounds, for example, Apple products. I mean, you can pay hundreds of euros for a ship and an insurance service, subscribe to a superior client for the RSI website and everything you want; that in the end you will crash the ship or a bug will leave you suspended in the darkness of space and you will have to wait, wait and wait to continue playing. But all this is part of this very particular vision where having fun is subject to the whims of a “realism” that makes you feel more like a space mogul than anything else, and all of this is something I learned very quickly.
I started playing with a Mustang Alpha ship, which is part of the cheapest package possible, because here the idea was to face the alpha version and understand what makes this title so special; not playing Elon Musk with expensive space projects. In any case, when you wake up in a small station room, the first thing you do is hold down the F key to look around and interact with the world and objects. To get up and walk out the door, go. But it is that this action so damn simple, is best complemented with a Tobii Eye Tracker 5 device of about $ 200. Yes, you can play perfectly without it, but it’s there and you notice that this mechanic is designed to work looking to one side or the other.
Fun is contingent on the expensive and frustrating vagaries of realismOnce out, you do what in my opinion feels most immersive in the entire game: go get your ship. That translates into following the station’s directional arrows and signs —which is not the same as a waypoint, be careful; this is more like the first visit to Black Mesa in Half-Life— to get to the hangar. I had to restart the game several times to achieve this, because it was appearing far from my friends or there were visual bugs that took my frame count to 3 FPS. I play on an RTX 3080, by the way, but reaching 60 in this space is like seeing a shooting star in real life. It’s a very early version, after all, so let’s not ask the elm for pears either, right?
Legend simulation, worrisome in the rest
Well, being in situ, the first thing we did was dispose of that ship that I had, because according to my friend, it was much slower in the jumps. So I got on with him in his Drake AS-1 Cutlass Black to meet another colleague who was relatively close to us. There are fantastic interactions in the takeoff process : starting the engines, sending a message to the station asking for permission to take off, or getting on carefully not to touch anything. It is a spectacular dance of light and shadow that mixes with the tension of not hitting anything with the ship. The ship feels incredibly responsive, so you have to maneuver very carefully, and once outside, you find that there is a whole world behind the power management, navigation plans and interface control.
One of the most spectacular spots, but completely empty inside.
It is magnificent, I must admit, and I almost feel sorry to have closed the game without trying a bigger ship. But it is that to do that without going to the credit card you have to work your own, and it is not that it is very fun. “I’ve been farming all day, ” my cabin mate would tell me. “Really, I have been still for hours and hoursreading you know And every time they said, ‘oh, you have to help us… an enemy has come out’ he would go, kill the enemy and come back. And that’s it. “I laughed with him, of course, because he loves to put weeds into the game no matter how much he likes it; but the truth is that he took advantage of the matter.” Careful, I have made gold, I have 1,400,000 [from credits] when I had a million this morning. “He told me he wanted to buy a mining ship, because you can basically do three things in Star Citizen today: fight bandits, trade, and mine . The other option is to rent ships. cooler, but of course, renting is not buying. And all the content present in the game today carries a series of technical problemsor design that make me doubt if in the future it will become an enjoyable game for anyone or not. For example, during space travel a route is drawn that the ship follows automatically, but it is usually quite long and there is not much to do until you reach the destination. Not on the ships I’ve been able to play with, at least. The interior of the cabin is very detailed, but in the end one ends up lying on the bed to avoid being ejected from the ship due to a physics error, reading the menu and little else.
Once you hit the target, it’s not like everything is silky smooth either. If you walk on sandy ground, you can fall for no apparent reason. If you are in zero gravity, any collision causes you to completely lose control of your character, and the same goes off when you enter the ship again. Any action can literally kill you. You are not even completely safe in the menus, because you just click where it does not touch and the game understands that you want to exit to the main menu. It happened to me. When all goes well, you might as well fight bandits to complete a mission , which sounds a bit more exciting. It is, actually, but coming from Ace Combat , the more recent Everspace 2 or Star Wars: SquadronsWell, it’s not that much fun either.
At that session last February, an event also took place , “Xenothreat” , which was part of RSI’s plans to shape a living, flexible and constantly evolving universe. The idea was to infiltrate a ship, take certain merchandise and deliver it to a station; although most likely there would also be crossfire between players and AI-controlled enemies. We never got to finish the mission, which was simple enough by itself, because we started seeing stagnant floating characters unable to interact with merchandise or the rest of the world until the server pulled us all out of the game a few minutes later. In other words, it was like completing any Sea of Thieves contract.but with almost half an hour of travel, countless bugs and a sense of action even more improvable than that one.
Another thing we did was travel to Daymar (OM-3 to OM-5), Crusader’s moon, to see the wreck of the Javelin I mentioned above, which should be one of the most exciting places you can visit in the game today. for today. It should. The truth is that being a ship in development, the only thing we found was the fuselage. Completely empty, like a snake that has shed its skin. He had 15 minutes to see it before he died of heat, because the meter counted 120ºC on the surface, but with a couple of minutes he had already been able to appreciate everything he was looking for after about 20 minutes of travel. As you can imagine, my experience with Star Citizen hasn’t been very good yet. Not that I’m throwing in the towel or anything, because it’s still an alpha phase. You have to give him space and time, of course, because creativity and pressure don’t get along very well and the team deserves to work calmly. But we’ve been waiting for almost a decade, I’m getting old and (kidding aside) all I know is that this is far, far from being considered finished.
Present and future of Star Citizen
I’d say Star Citizen is more of an appreciation game , than a fun one. And nothing happens, because many piloting simulators are like that too, they have their audience, and they love them. But it is shocking to know that there are things as promising as the idea of becoming a true citizen with work and tasks to do always or the possibility of also fighting on solid ground, which are either not implemented yet or are already there, but with a very improvable design . All in all, it is well worth keeping track of it, because nothing else, but there are plenty of reasons to excite.
Personally, I am fascinated by the detailed universe that RSI is creatingPersonally, I am fascinated by the highly detailed universe RSI is creating, with alien species speaking their own languages, huge worlds to explore, and that Squadron 42 that probably condenses all of that into a few impressive hours. There are some proposals that seem revolutionary, too, like that idea of intermixing the servers that could give the MMOs we now know a new goal to overcome. But of course all of that is on the horizon. Those who want to follow the development of the game closely, can do so from the official website , where there are new weekly and monthly updates
