Gabe Rocks!

🖥️ Tech

🤔 Rambling

🐷 Health

A brief look at Star Citizen

Taking a brief look at Star Citizen Progress

What is Star Citizen?

Star Citizen is supposed to be two very ambitious games in one. There’s a single-player mode in development called Squadron42 in development, and the MMO has been in alpha for about a decade. Since I backed the game since around 2015, I check in occasionally to see how the game has progressed. While I usually come back disappointed, at least this time I can say I’ve been less disappointed than usual.

Many basic things still don’t work the way one would expect, but there’s always more things added to take screenshots of. I can admit that as somebody who’s seen the game grow over the years that there has been some good progress, but it’s still quite far from what a normal person could consider a “playable” game. One of the biggest mistakes Star Citizens make is playing the game as they would like it to be rather than how it actually is.

Big Dreams

In my opinion, no other game has such a huge disconnect between what the players think it will be, and where it’s actually going. Star Citizen is to many of the backers their perfect space “forever game”, but many of these dreams are incompatible. At least a majority of them are going to be disappointed. Cloud Imperium Games, has a tendency to vastly over-promise and vastly under-deliver. Yet, it is the very dreams themselves that have allowed the game to raise the larger half of a billion dollars to support development.

MMO

The MMO portion of Star Citizen is known in alpha as the “Persistent Universe”. This is where players will be able to progress their character in a dynamic environment like EVE Online. This portion definitely fuels the lion’s share of excitement. The idea of a first-person EVE-like game with advanced combat mechanics is something that even I would find incredibly enticing.

The trouble is, Star Citizen as it exists is currently very far from being charitably called an MMO. Not many players can be on the same server for long, and all kinds of bugs and problems grind the servers to a halt after a certain amount of time. The few “gameplay loops” that actually are implemented in game, have many problems that make immensely challenging to even attempt them.

Squadron 42

Despite allegedly being almost ready 6 years ago, it is still two years away. Despite the “playable” persistent universe being something that earns CIG a lot of good will, SQ42 is effectively a stain on their record of delivering actual progress. I know many look forward to eventually playing the campaign, but for now it’s just a demo and far from being released. A lot of features claimed to be “almost ready” yet undelivered for years has lead me to suspect that much of what’s shown off by the developers are highly “scripted” demos rather than actual in-development features. This was effectively confirmed to me when it leaked out that CIG made their employees work a crazy crunch to deliver for this year’s “Citizencon”.

Initially, I had hoped that Squadron42 would be where CIG would work on getting the basics of the game working, and the MMO would be based on those systems. It seems in hindsight that SQ42 and the MMO share very little beyond art assets and UI. It is a shame, a lot was paid for high-quality motion capture and even celebrity casting. And we have no idea if the story itself is actually thrilling or entertaining yet, but hopefully that’s the easiest part for CIG.

Playing again

Every couple of years, I actually install the existing version of the game and see what it’s actually like. I decided to learn how mining worked and figure out how to do some of the hauling. I didn’t bother with combat because it appears unchanged from last time I tried things, and it seems still horribly unbalanced. The ground combat missions looked neat, but those also seemed riddled with bugs and problems. For a space MMO, hauling and mining should be very straightforward.

Annoyances

You have to play the game as it is, not how it should work. This has a lot of knock-on consequences that very often aren’t explained by the “influencers” who talk about Star Citizen. They basically gloss over many of the current state of the game to get people excited about the future, which doesn’t help somebody who doesn’t understand why doors don’t open.

Hauling

Hauling is usually done through missions and the “freight elevator” which is a new addition to me. Seems like a great idea for a system and “cargo grids” are pretty useful as well. In practice both are quite buggy. Apparently the freight elevator currently eats mining pods, and the tractor beam can leave cargo crates in a state that makes them sometimes unrecoverable, thus failing whatever hauling mission you’re on and losing reputation. Allegedly they’re going to be temporarily removing the reputation hit soon.

While space trucking is pretty fun, it still has a long way to go to be a reliable way to experience the ‘verse. In many ways, space trucking relies on other gameplay loops being interesting and valuable. For now, it seems to be a good pair with mining. It’s very profitable to mine the best ores you can, refine them, then spend the time hauling them to a main city yourself for a big chunk of change.

Mining

Despite everything, I’ll say I find mining pretty fun in this game. The ARGO MOLE is a multi-crew mining ship, but the single-seater prospector is probably more worth using for the time being. I quite enjoy how in-depth the mining mechanics are. The overcharge mechanic is pretty neat, and I really like being able to choose what sub-fragments are worth grabbing. If every gameplay loop ends up as good as mining with less glitches, I actually think Star Citizen might be a pretty fun game.

Star Citizen youtubers generally say you don’t have to be picky while mining but I definitely disagree. If one is bothering to mine despite glitches, and then still choosing to sell the ore, every SCU (Standard cargo unit) should be maximized for profit, not time mining. Refining takes quite a bit of time, so you want to make sure you’re only refining what’s truly valuable. To reduce hauling trips, being a picky miner helps some resources are a lot more valuable than others, so its worth always mining the best you can. This is particularly important when you don’t have a bigger ship to haul with.

Final thoughts

Ship rentals

This system is very important. The in-game rental system works surprisingly well and is priced quite fairly. You can rent a Prospector and make the money back very quickly. What I would recommend for mining and hauling is grinding out missions until you can rent a Prospector. Once you have your Prospector you can start mining like crazy. First you just want to sell the ore directly until you have enough to cover refining costs & a Constellation rental. Then you do more mining trips to refine the best of the best. Once all your refining jobs are done you can rent the Constellation to sell all your ore for a very nice profit.

That would give your character quite a lot of UEC in a relatively short amount of time even in the game today. I am skeptical that renting combat ships would give one the same ROI. But it’s very nice that with a bit of grinding you can try out so many of the flyable ships. I think the rental system is a bit harsh in some ways, because your rental is for calendar days and multiple days adds up quite a bit. If I were CIG I would set it to 24hours of playtime not 24 hours on the calendar.

Locations

Many of the newer locations are quite beatiful. New Babbage may be my new favorite place in game. I’ve been quite impressed with how CIG continually increases the quality and look of what they deliver. This does have a downside where it feels they rarely update old assets up to par. The Constellation interior is very dated and some locations look out of place for similar reasons.

The frustrating part about many locations these days is just the travel time to accomplish things. Once you land at a station, you have to go through multiple elevators just to begin making your way around the station. Often times it’s faster to “Exit to menu” so your character is placed in the temporary living quarters instead of fighting with laggy elevators. This won’t work forever because eventually they want your character to always remain where you logged out iirc.

Closing

I definitely wouldn’t recommend putting a lot of time into Star Citizen unless one is steeled for many frustrations. I’m curious to see if the 4.0 patch (which allegedly has to drop before the end of the year) will actually make enough of a difference. I’m very skeptical that Squadron42 will even be available in 2026, and it’s worth wondering what will be cut to even attempt to reach the deadline.

When I was trying things out this time around I watched a fair bit of YouTube commentary by new and long-standing channels on the latest developments. I am suspicious that many of them continue (as has been done in previous years) to deceptively misrepresent the likely state of the near future under the guise of being merely optimistic. They seem to be willing to take CIG at every letter of their word, despite having the first-hand experience to know otherwise.

I think this is incredibly misleading. I have not spent a lot of time watching the “in house” commentary from CIG, but I’m not convinced I would learn much more in doing so. Merely letting the years go by and occasionally taking glances is enough to know they consistently fail to deliver on their own promises. If anything, I think far too many people fill up their mental model of the game with promises from the staff, rather than building up their own from observation of results over time.

I think this has to do with many problems, even totally unrelated to gaming. Many people are incapable of questioning even the most basic contradictions between stated reality and actual reality when emotions come into the mix. Much of the sentiment on the internal forums “Spectrum” is overwhelmingly negative, but you wouldn’t know it from the people who represent the game on YouTube.

Reply to this post

Gaming Star Citizen
Prev B @ Next