Space ... I've loved space, and Science Fiction as a result most, if not all, of my life. I mean what about it isn't inspiring? Looking up at the night sky, the stars, the vastness of it all, all of that ... possibility. As such, Science Fiction has been part of my gaming catalog from the beginning, Starfleet, Descent, Doom, and, of course, the Wing Commander series and Strike Commander. I bring up those last two specifically because most of the rest of this is going to be talking about Chris Roberts latest foray into the world of Sci-Fi ... the much hyped, much derided, still unreleased, Star Citizen.
To put some of that last sentence into perspective, I was looking over the Star Citizen wiki yesterday and it noted as "on this day" in 2015 Alpha patch 1.0.4 went live ... so 10 years in Alpha, possibly longer, I didn't dig to find when alpha officially started publicly, much less internally.
I told myself ages ago that I was going to steer clear of this vapor-ware game, telling myself that it would never see the light of day. The game, between it's crowd funding star and it's ongoing 'pledge' store sales, has raised more money than some small countries and is, as yet, still in a persistent alpha state. I'm bringing all of this up to say that I have been playing it lately, I was given a starter ship package by a friend back in Dec 2024, an in game ship, a couple of paint options, access to the game, and some in game currency. At the time, the game was often unplayable between lag and bugs, and I shelved it to 'let it cook' for a while before I tried again. Well I recently upgraded my PC, increasing my RAM and adding a gaming SSD storage as too many games these days are optimized for SSD and take forever to load from a regular hard drive.
What I found was a game that still has it's bugs and issues, and is certainly not ready for release, but does have a good basis and is moving in the right direction ... mostly. I'll get into why I say 'mostly' in a moment, but, while some of the improvement I'm seeing is, undoubtedly, from significantly increasing the RAM on my system, the stability improvements and handling have made great strides. They are iterating on the earlier system designs and improving things making for a better experience. Flight and movement on foot (once you learn you can increase the walk speed which defaults to a speed that toddlers crawling could easily outpace) feel good and combat (both in space and on foot) feels good over all. There are a several viable paths to pursue in game, Merc, Hauler, Miner, Salvager, Courier, and Investigator are likely the most notable, but you can also trade (buying commodities and selling for a profit at another station), bounty hunting (both NPC and Players) and some more paths are planned but not yet implemented. Better yet, you can do all of the above allowing you to log in and do whatever you feel like doing at the time ... want to take it easy and go break some rocks, take out a mining ship and go mine ... well you have the ability to do this, but your going to need to have earned the cash to either buy or rent the ships to do it.
So what are the problems, it IS still in alpha stages so bugs are not uncommon. Frequently when you go to access a terminal the terminal will come up, but you won't be able to interact with it. (usually fixed by closing and re-opening the terminal), sometimes contract steps are completed but not recognized causing a mission to not auto complete once finished (I most often encounter this on hauling missions when the game realizes I delivered the cargo but doesn't believe that I have 'retrieved the cargo' from the origin station.) ... This usually is resolved by clicking the 'submit' button on the contract page, but can result in a lower than expected pay if it didn't detect some steps). Sometimes you can't equip/unequip items (most often for me is my helmet) but this is usually fixed by going to another area or accessing some other storage (Examples are getting on an elevator or accessing the freight storage in a hanger rather than your personal storage). Lag ... but this IS an online MMORPG ... you're never fully going to get away from this, there's just too many external factors, and for the most part I rarely run into it, if it gets to the point of being noticeable or being an issue (interactions not happening, or taking a long time to resolve) many times dropping to the menu and returning will resolve it, if doing this results in a login queue of double digits ... quit and go do something else for a few minutes as it's likely a larger issue like a DDOS or exceptionally high user volume (I've only seen this once in over a week of playing almost every night so far). Also, and I'm considering this a bug as I think that the issue was a UI display bug rather than a true design issue, the Tutorial is ... well ... buggy. Twice going through it the waypoint failed to show up for the next step so while it told me to 'go to my ship' it didn't tell me how to do that, or where the ship was ... reloging fixed that issue, but a few steps later I was told to quantum jump to a nearby station ... but not told how to swap to the other flight mode (I don't remember the names, but one is shields, weapons, slower speeds, the other is faster speed, no shields or weapons, quantum drive to cover large distances quickly)
Additionally they have decided that they need to, as part of the immersion, require you to eat and drink regularly. Which means buying food and water as well as consuming it. (Which in turn means making sure you are in an area where you can SAFELY take off your helmet to do so.) The thing is, this isn't immersion it's just tedium, it's just more stuff I have to carry in my inventory (or be sure to get to a station regularly to buy something to eat/drink). If I'm running missions the cost isn't going to significantly change my profit margins (20-25 credits in food and drink when I'm running on the low end 20-30k credit contracts, trust me quantum fuel is a bigger percentage of my expenses), and also you get hungry/thirsty too fast ... even if you go with the idea that time is compressed in the game I shouldn't need to eat/drink as much as that and even then running food and water to 0% would, realistically, still take several DAYS before killing me (This is, imo, a problem with most survival games as well ... the hunger/thirst mechanic is flawed because it's usually only a threat for a brief time at the beginning of the game and after that it's just a nuisance, and even then the main reason it's a threat early on is that it's too accelerated even accounting for the 'sped up' day/night cycle.)
Finally, it is, currently, open PvP. Now I don't have an issue with PvP I've even been known to enjoy it on on occasion, but I prefer my PvP to be in purely PvP games. I find PvEvP to bring out the worst type of PvPers. Though I must admit that I haven't directly encountered any of them in Star Citizen other than seeing them in general chat, usually making complete jerks of themselves, and generally lowering my already low opinion of humanity. That said, it has been said that the intent for release is to have 'private' or 'PvE' mode (possibly similar to Elite's 'Private' setting which put you in a universe of your own but allowed for you to invite others into your instance, in turn allowing you to create a community of people that had access to a shared experience.) We'll see if they go through with that or not ... the PvP community is certainly vocally against it, but I'm hopeful that the success of Elite and it's 'private' setting will convince RSI that it is a viable option and a way to broaden your appeal to more players.
Presently Star Citizen does not have an official release year, much less a release date. Though Squadron 42, a single player story driven game using the engine and set in the universe and lore of Star Citizen is scheduled to launch this year (2026). That's some of my thoughts ... if you want more info about Star Citizen or Squadron 42 you can head on over to https://robertsspaceindustries.com/en/
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