Star Citizen from a New Player's Perspective
Just a review from an old gamer but noob to SC.
I'd heard this game was a total scam and avoided it for all these years. Maybe it was a bad-deal back then, but now: I'm happy to report that this IS a real game with a lot to offer and a lot to do. It has incredible potential! $45 gets you into SC and that is a great deal!
Where I come from: Halo CE-Reach. Wow/Wc3/Starcraft/HotS/OW. Mass Effect. Deus Ex. Subnautica. . Elite Dangerous. No Man's Sky. Dota2. Helldivers2. Escape from Tarkov (7 years). I love spaceships, FPS combat, hot-rodding stuff, buying/selling/stealing stuff, murdering, rescuing, etc. Love PVE and PVP.
WHAT’S GOOD ABOUT IT:
Visuals. Most beautiful game I've ever seen. Most talented art-team ever. Spaceships, environments, gear. Best ever. Constant state of amazement and it runs great on a PC I built for tarkov (5800X3D / 4070ti)
Sound: Very good! Each ship has audible-personality! Guns sound good, character sounds good. A+ sound design.
Movement: Character crawls, runs, walks, climbs, jumps as you'd expect. Climbing works! Great job here. Would love a slide, but that's being greedy.
Controls: Default controls are intuitive to new players and very configurable. Basically perfect.
Ships: The ships are the star of the show. They are unique, beautiful, ugly, serious, silly, etc. The ships are CHARMING and wonderful. I love my razor, cutlass black & blue, msr, herc, avenger, redeemer, retaliator, and the eclipse (3.22)!
Flight: More involved than No Man's Sky, but simpler than Elite Dangerous. Perfect! (3.22).
Vehicles: Incredible vehicles!
FPS Gear: Great looking suits! Fun weapons. Varied fighting styles. Gear can be dropped almost anywhere.
PvE:
1 - Bounties are fun and can result in cargo to sell!
2 - Mercenary stuff is fun, I hope for more variety in the future.
3 - Running cargo makes sense and works and most importantly: involves risk! Delivery makes sense but pays terrible.
4 - Salvage: Did a session on a reclaimer as a box-stuffer. Boring but lucrative, not a fan.
5 - Investigation: cool idea but forced me to EVA in a wreck and EVA just about made this 25 year gaming + vr veteran hurl.
6 - Pay for all jobs is a bit low given what you can make doing cargo or salvage.
PvP:
1 - Is rarely fair - as it should be in an mmo. Rock Paper Scissors, outnumbering, surprise, and gear all play a part as they should. I can't believe they made space-dayz!
2 - Ruthless - perfect! Winner takes all! Day-Z/Tarkov/Rust players, this is the space game for you!
3 - Piracy. Real actual piracy. You lie in wait, ambush someone, take their cargo, sell it to a fence. BRAVO. No game has ever got this right until SC.
Crime:
1 - Can buy your way out of minor stuff - awesome!
2 - People get bounty missions for you and will wait for you outside the hangar doors: cool!
3 - You can HACK THE POLICE DB AND CLEAR YOURSELF?!? Amazing. 10/10.
4 - Jail - which can be reduced with labor, or more crime, or via escape. Awesome!
The Community. SC wouldn't be here without devoted (and spendy) players who are willing to put up with bugs and problems. Most are helpful in general chat. Some are scary-good at ship to ship combat (3.22). We didn't expect to like SC players as much as we do.
WHAT'S BAD ABOUT IT:
Servers. Servers. Servers. Everything listed above in the good section fails on the regular. You fall through those beautiful environments and die. Your quest bugs and fails or can't be completed. NPCs stand still or hover in space doing nothing or shoot you through objects and you die. Massive desync between players. We have to regularly confirm "ARE YOU ON THE ELEVATOR?!" before we push the button it's so bad. Crashes. So many crashes. Everything good or bad about Star Citizen takes a backseat to the very very poor server performance. People regularly run with r_displayinfo 1 on to monitor the server health - that is NOT good for any phase of a game from Alpha to Beta to finished. THIS PROBLEM CLOUDS EVERYTHING.
Flight (3.23): Completely changed the flight model. Less of a pain for me & my crew since we just got here. We have less to un-learn and re-learn. At first glance though: it seems worse in every way. More complicated without reason in canon or out. More difficult without being more fun. All ships feel less capable than they did 2 weeks ago when we started playing SC. Good ships are now bad etc. I can see why many veteran players who love ship to ship combat are very upset and worried. For now, I avoid ship to ship combat because it seems very broken. Will try again in a few patches.
The Focus: This game has 20 unfinished gameplay loops. There's tons to do but any/all of it may break at any point. It's like every time they have a great idea (and they have TONS of great ideas!) they run off and get it barely-up-and-running, then dash off to the next thing. I've been amazed at all the REALLY BRILLIANT ideas that are 60% implemented in a 10+ year old game...
WHAT'S UGLY ABOUT IT:
The Developers: SC has had a lot of $ come in and many years and it's still very much an alpha. IMO that's a mistake on the devs parts. They could be beta by now, even in this era of 'beta forever' development we should expect more. Focus on fleshing out fewer features and basic functionality, spend more $$ on servers. Get the game to a stable beta - still with some bugs & crashes - but out of Alpha. You have to get out of Alpha. It's been years.
The Devs continue to get away with the weirdest project-management model on earth because of:
The Community: Whether it comes from SC Veterans to noobs like me, criticism is NOT well heard in the SC community. Whatever is in the patch notes is like marching orders from a cult-leader. Any discussion on spectrum or reddit that suggests maybe the game should be more functional by now is met with fervor. It's sad because you guys deserve better than this, and these devs can definitely do better!
Recent examples: Helldivers2 publisher almost forced a bad 'feature' in, the players stood up for themselves and said "NO!" and the devs/publisher reconsidered (and that fight continues). Tarkov was exposed for its absurd level of cheating last year, and subsequently tried to change the rules of purchase & up the price. Tarkov players logged off in droves and the company reversed course (and that fight continues). We did this BECAUSE WE LOVE THE GAME.
You are the customer! SC-Devs are creating this beautiful work of art, but it's a work of art they hope to sell you, therefore: you have a SAY. You can complain, you can criticize, you can dislike a new direction. It won't kill the Devs. It will make the game better!
As of right now, it's unplayable, but I want to defend that a little. 3.23 is a big patch for SC. A lot of back-end stuff seems to have changed, and some major front-end stuff is totally different. I've barely been able to complete a quest, run cargo, fight anything, go anywhere, look in my backpack, or drink a space-gatorade. I've seen this happen with many games from WoW on up to Tarkov.
With Tarkov throwing away thousands of players and untold SCU's of good will, I had this thought: if star-citizen was beta and not alpha, it might have just picked up tens of thousands of players this month. It didn't because it doesn't have enough servers. Cue the sc-beliebers devsplaining why future quantum server meshing technology will save the day and just spending some more of their smaug-horde on servers won't help.
