[Megathread] Star Citizen

[Val the Moofia Boss]

For people who are playing the alpha currently, how would you summarise the current state of SC? Is there a fairly complete game at the core of it yet, i.e. can you start as a noob, do a whole bunch of different shit to earn money and progress your character/ship until you're dripping in SC's version of epics?

The game seems pretty impressive during your first 10-20 hours. You pick one of three planets to wake up on. You wake up in a city (that lags at like 20 FPS) and spend an hour or two walking around marveling at everything, maybe spend half an hour buying different clothes or armor pieces and admiring your self. Then you go to the spaceport and marvel at your spaceship, tour the inside, look inside the bathrooms and cabinets. And then you take off and spend an hour flying around the planet (the forests and mountains of Microtech, the city planet of ArcCorp... or if you picked the dull desert of Hurston, well, there ain't much to see). Then you probably fly into space and go touring the other planets and moons and space stations. Spend hours touring through other people's ships. Then you maybe do some missions where you blow up NPC pirates or clear out bunkers with dank FPS combat. You will quickly learn that FPS combat is borked and that you should avoid it because of the netcode, where you will be killed by some NPC bandit you didn't know about and then as your body falls to floor, the camera zooms out to show that some bandit shot you through a wall or something.

After a few hours of blowing satelites or small bandits for a little bit of cash, you will want to look to upgrade your ship... and then see the huge price tags on buying new ships ingame. You will find out that the fastest way to make money in Star Citizen is to farm a mission called "Two in the Head", where you and another player have to kill two different targets in two different locations within 90 seconds of each other. You make like 200k-300k credits per hour doing this. So if you want like a 3 million credit ship, you'll be spending several hours farming to save up the money to do it, doing the same thing over and over and over. And at that point people start getting demoralized by the grind and start looking for other, more fun things they can do immediately with the ship they have.

They soon start getting into PvP. You might try becoming a bounty hunter who hunts criminals, but you will quickly realize that this game is terrible at pitting PvPers against other PvPers together ingame. You have to find some obscure discord community and attend one of their scheduled events to find consensual PvP. As a bounty hunter, you will spend 90% of your time doing nothing while your ship is quantum travelling towards your bounty target... only for your bounty target to either be sitting in an armistice zone (which means you can't get them), or quantum travelling to some other location, or they log out, so you almost never get to actually fight criminal players.

Left with no other option to find entertainment, you turn to becoming the criminal player who preys upon the weak. You might go around popular mining spots looking for miners, and then wait for them to start packing up to leave before running in to kill them and hijack their payload full of stuff, or using EMP guns to shut down their ship (and hope it doesn't explode when it crashes into the surface). Maybe you rack up a bounty, hoping that player bounty hunters come to you. Unfortunately, they never do and only boring NPC police show up.

Eventually you somehow wind up getting killed while you are a criminal (usually in FPS combat). This time, rather than respawning at the last city or station you visit, you instead wake up in prison. This is the most interesting thing to have happened to you over the past few dozen hours of play. You see that you have a real world timer ticking down your sentence (like 2 to 24 real life hours in prison). You are told that you can speed up your sentence by working in the prison's mines, so you do that for an hour. If this is your first time mining, this is when you find out that mining is... theoretically interesting, but in practice is tediously dull. After filling up your backpack, you turn in your ore... and see that your sentence has only been reduced by like 2 hours. Demoralized, you are tempted to just log off and stop playing for the day, and relog the next day when your sentence has expired.

... Or, if you explore the prison area (or have prior knowledge), you might find a secret passageway that leads to an escape tunnel. You then spend the next hour or two progressing through the escape route, which is sort of a jumping puzzle (in a game with terrible netcode and physics so the controls and responsiveness feels incredibly janky). This is actually pretty interesting. After dying a few times, you eventually memorize the jumps down and are able to complete the route in like 5-10 minutes. You eventually make it to the surface and hijack a rover and drive away from the settlement... only to realize that you have no way off the planet. So you have to call in public chat hoping that someone comes to pick you up (and doesn't just kill you to send you back to jail). If you don't get killed and someone does come to pick you up, then the two of your fly to Security Point Kareah to try to get your crime status wiped. You still have a bounty so theoretically this is a dangerous and exciting journey where people will be after you left and right. Sometimes that does happen and it's awesome. Most of the time, though, no one comes and you just reset your crime stat and you're now a free man.

At this point, you've pretty much seen everything SC has to offer.

- - - Updated - - -

I've spent several hundred hours playing Star Citizen. I think SC is worth checking out over one of those free weekends, or dropping $45 on to check out. Lot of fun for a few hours. However, once you've done everything, it becomes pretty stale. The game has been pretty much been the same for the past 3-4 years, with each patch only bringing on maybe some new ship or city I check out for like half an hour before logging off. You'll only really have fun in the long term if you find some other players to play with.

[MrAnderson]

For people who are playing the alpha currently, how would you summarise the current state of SC? Is there a fairly complete game at the core of it yet, i.e. can you start as a noob, do a whole bunch of different shit to earn money and progress your character/ship until you're dripping in SC's version of epics?

If you're up to it I'd suggest you watch the CMDR Kate (a veteran Elite Dangerous ex?player) series about starting up in Star Citizen:

It gives a detailed look into several mechanics of the game in interesting narrative way.

[DarkAmbient]

Damn, thanks guys, I appreciate you taking the time to write all that. It sounds like it really does have the bones of something fun there. The bounty system seems like it could be cool once it's properly fleshed out and implemented. Being locked up in prison and having to work to reduce your sentence sounds like one of those ideas that get floated in meetings but probably shouldn't make it into the game, at least not in a form that feels demoralising, but being able to escape sounds cool as hell.

It's so frustrating that there isn't a 'WoW' for the space MMO genre, i.e. a slick, fun, well implemented popular game with realistic graphics where you can explore space and build your own little empire with your friends. No Mans Sky is probably the closest to it but it's garish and not really an MMO. EVE is cool but lacks the immersive feel of first person avatar gameplay and manually piloting your ship. Elite is beautiful but so shallow and repetitive.

All I can say is I hope Roberts hasn't bitten off more than he can chew. It's nice having a grand vision but in the end you need to deliver, and you need to deliver something fun and sustainable in the long term. I genuinely hope he succeeds.

Edit: ty for the video, will watch in a sec

[Proskill]

i get rekt by LRTs after this patch
and barely completed VLRT

:O

[MrAnderson]

If you're lookibg into trying mining ex-cmdr Hawks just released a simple and straighforward mining guide:

[Proskill]

any guides on how to git gud in 3.14? i seem to not deal any damage, beside going out of ammo, also not hitting with missiles. everything is on its head now

[XDurionX]

Snip.

This is exactly how i imagined it would be. Thanks for the summary.

[Proskill]

is there any long range andromeda loadout yet for 3.14? the combat is sooo close now it makes me wanna vomit. its worse than WW2

i mean, keep it close for small ships that are supposed to dogfight, but give larger vessels more range, like it is in EVE Online.
maybe not 40km+ snipers, but at least that 4-5km range

and what the fuck is up with ballistic guns now. 5 seconds of firing and need to restock them which takes couple of minutes???
i know theyre supposed to make a quick work of the hull once the shields are down, but fuck me, i prefer energy guns which can take out shields AND hull, and replenish themselves

[MrAnderson]

Something like this:

Constelation is way more tankier in 3.14

[Littlechamp]

is there any long range andromeda loadout yet for 3.14? the combat is sooo close now it makes me wanna vomit. its worse than WW2

i mean, keep it close for small ships that are supposed to dogfight, but give larger vessels more range, like it is in EVE Online.
maybe not 40km+ snipers, but at least that 4-5km range

and what the fuck is up with ballistic guns now. 5 seconds of firing and need to restock them which takes couple of minutes???
i know theyre supposed to make a quick work of the hull once the shields are down, but fuck me, i prefer energy guns which can take out shields AND hull, and replenish themselves

Dude its just year 2951, wait another 600 years for ballistic weapon improvements.

Or truth is SC devs are really really bad. CR can't afford better devs since he is busy getting paid twice from backer money.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Hopefully the new combat changes will be reversed. Yikes.

[Mamut]

It will release when its ready, its been around 9 years in development

And still will be as long as people are donating monies. Keep dreaming about release tho, its all whats left from it.

[Proskill]

cant open page 686 of this thread. wtf

edit: had to post to see it. weird

[kenn9530]

And still will be as long as people are donating monies. Keep dreaming about release tho, its all whats left from it.

games are taking longer to develop, games like cyberpunk and RDR2 took 8-9 years so when you actually pay attention to what SC is doing then 9 years is not that long, CiG did have to build a company from nothing to that is a good few years of slow development, plus many of the things they are doing have never been done together in a game, star citizen is probably the hardest game to make for any company.

[Studentsx]

Sharing what I feel like it's an insightful video about Star Citizen that just so happens to corroborate most of what most Star Citizen fans crave about the game...

[MrAnderson]

cant open page 686 of this thread. wtf

edit: had to post to see it. weird

Have you tried multicrewing your Constelation? Grab to other players to man your turrets and a third to fly the parasite ship and even a forth for the missiles!

[Kyanion]

star citizen is probably the hardest game to make for any company.

Good thing you added that probably part. SC with pie in the sky ideas maybe, but what they are working on now and what they have put out? Ehhh..

[Val the Moofia Boss]

what they are working on now

Supposedly the next star system, Pyro, is almost finished. The Pyro system is supposed to be unpopulated and bathed in radiation. You're supposed to be exploring it, dangerous territory (solar flares that can roast your ship? Pirates? Vanduul fleets?). The surface of one of the planets is supposed to have this tentacle creature that disguises itself as a rock and then ambushes you. Supposedly you'll be able to kill it and cut it's tentacles off as a trophy you can wear, and use its carapace to make an armor. Too bad they can't implement it until their servers are fixed (ETA unknown).

[Kyanion]

snip

We'll see it when it's actually out.

Still does not really support the claim that was made of "star citizen is probably the hardest game to make for any company." line that was tossed out.

[Edge-]

Still does not really support the claim that was made of "star citizen is probably the hardest game to make for any company." line that was tossed out.

I mean...it kinda is. The expansive feature set, the complex interwoven systems, the absolutely bonkers scope, the quality they're trying to meet for all of it etc.

It's arguably the most ambitious/difficult game that's been in development, and how long it's been in production (from early pre-production to full-scale production) and how much longer it still has to go speaks to that. It blows the timelines for major MMO's or a GTA V or RDR2 etc. out of the water, including when it comes to the development budget which exceeds the combined development/marketing budgets for just about any game I can think of. Whether that's all a good thing is another matter.