Outer Wilds is one of the best space exploration games I've played! I'd spend a bunch of time describing and pushing the game on you all, but I've already done that so I'll just post the link.
What is the best space game out there. Just saw Star Citizen Video
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I get the impression Star Citizen's current state is perhaps the result of crowd funding without any significant amount of financial oversight. This might've been the case where a budget/time-conscious publisher could like, set deadlines to avoid an indefinite release scenario where the creatives' feet have left the ground. But AFAIK, "crowds" aren't capable of doing that.
Guessing that no promises were made other than, "Hey remember Wing Commander? Well we're making a really cool new space game that will blow that out of the galaxy, and it'll have *insert epically impossible feature set*, and all we need is your money to make it happen! Donate now to get early access *insert some future date*!"
...And on and on it goes.
Guessing that no promises were made other than, "Hey remember Wing Commander? Well we're making a really cool new space game that will blow that out of the galaxy, and it'll have *insert epically impossible feature set*, and all we need is your money to make it happen! Donate now to get early access *insert some future date*!"
...And on and on it goes.
There's a reason the ads talk about "lithobraking", i.e. slowing/stopping by hitting the ground.
Star Citizen's primary problem is that its design document is an ever-expanding list of "wouldn't it be cool if".
Not the best quality, but I feel this kinda feels relevant here. https://www.escapistmagazine.com/v2/kickstarted-to-death/
Oh, yesh. Classic Lithobraking. I mean, the spacecraft does stop moving after it impacts the ground so GREAT SUCCESS!
I'm also partial to "Rapid Unplanned Disassembly" which is engineer slang for Explosion.
I didn't play it when it was considered 'bad', but I found it to be a rather lukewarm experience when I played it recently.
Exploration is basically just heading form one procedurally generated world to the next, so it's not particularly exciting once you start to recognize all the base lego pieces everything is built from.
Space flight is rather rudimentary, and so is the combat.
Resource collection is just clicking on things with the same omni-collection beam. There's not much hostile stuff to deal with, besides the same annoying robo-police that basically won't lay off and just endlessly hound you unless you dig a hole and hide until they piss off. Or leave the system. I feel like you should be able to beat them to a point where they stop bothering you for a bit. The local fauna/flora don't provide much excitement either.
'Trading' just consists of instant warping from one world to the next, buying and offloading shit en masse.
You can form a flotilla of big ships, but you can't really control them or anything? You just send them off trading through menus and it kinda happens in the background. You can fly into your flagship, walk around and furnish the innards a bit but it doesn't feel like there's much point to it.
There's a whole story thing going on, but I got bored of the game before I got too into it.
Quests are just do the same variety of generic things X times or whatever. There's some co-op hub and co-op quests but the interface is incredibly weird and awkward, it's unnecessarily hard to party with your friends and the missions themselves.... are the same sorta generic jumble of stuff so it's not very interesting.
A lot of fans seem happy with the game though. Good for them, but it's definitely not my kinda game. I feel like it spreads itself too thinly onto too many areas and just ends up being shallow in all aspects.
Roberts has done this before too all the way back in the 2000s with Freelancer. He mismanaged the development of that game so badly that Microsoft had to buy him out from his own studio just to get the game finished. Now he's pulled the same stunt again with SC and added hints of a pyramid scheme because after almost a decade nothing he's released looks like it's progressed beyond an Alpha build. His mindset is still stuck in the Wing Commander days of releasing when everything is finished even though the accessibility of content patch releases and DLC makes that approach unnecessary. It doesn't help that the excess of funding he got made the scope of development balloon to such unfeasible levels that SC is the new Duke Nukem Forever. If Roberts was smarter and less stuck in the old ways of floppy disk media he'd get a stable core gameplay loop going and add to it over time instead of his kitchen sink approach, but it's obvious he's not that smart and has learned nothing from the Freelancer fiasco.
The ending was quite something too. Worth the odd frustrating few moments for sure.
I would have liked observation a lot more if it had been a pure space game. Fixing the station and interacting with the various module was fun and being an AI rather than the human character was unique. But the whole aliens/teleportation/time travel aspect didn't do much for me since it was just weird for the sake of being weird with nothing of value being said so I left pretty disappointed.
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What Star Citizen is trying to do is impressive, but it's really not something that I need, want, or would even enjoy. It's too big for its own good. A great big world of emptiness.
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Not really.
I know that the alpha has a city in it that you can fly around in, but does that city actually have anything to do, or is it just a collection of facades?
I can't imagine that they're making thousands of planets with millions of cities, structures, geographical locations, etc that have anything more than token interactivity, so the scale of it feels completely pointless.
This video is 2 years old but was an interesting look at the question you're asking.
To me, the first big red flag with Star Citizen is that I'm not even sure what it's trying to be. Does it want to be EVE online? Does it want to be an Elite clone? Does it want to be Wing Commander? Because it seems like it's trying to be all of these things, and at this rate it's not going to succeed in being any of them.
Something that's become increasingly obvious to me since [the event that we are not allowed to discuss] is that there is a section of the gaming community who care more about video games than they do about real life. These are people who are so disappointed in what real life has to offer them that's they've completely emotionally withdrawn from it to the point that their life revolves around video games. What these people ultimately want is that one game, that one game that can finally replace their real lives, that one game they can completely escape reality into, and what makes this really awful is that I think video game companies know this (at least the smart ones who aren't run by soft drink salesmen) and I think they knowingly exploit it. I think it was a big part of the bullshit around No Man's Sky, I think it was a big part of whatever the fuck happened with Cyberpunk 2077. I think it's an even bigger part of Star Citizen.
I don't even think Star Citizen is pretending to be a real game. I think the more it becomes a real game, the more they have to narrow down what the game actually is, the less it fulfils the fantasy, and the fantasy is what sells. A game is just an entertainment product. You buy it, you play it, you uninstall it. The people who spend tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars on star citizen aren't looking for a game, they want an alternative to real life.
I mean, I'm not the first person to point this out, but imagine if Star Citizen actually released and imagine it really was everything it was promised to be. Who is going to play it? Who is going to play a competitive multiplayer space game where some people have spent so much money they own the whole universe already? That's not a replacement for real life, that's literally real life, and it sounds terrible. Who wants to pay money to be the background scenery to someone else's Elon Musk LARP?
Something that's become increasingly obvious to me since [the event that we are not allowed to discuss] is that there is a section of the gaming community who care more about video games than they do about real life. These are people who are so disappointed in what real life has to offer them that's they've completely emotionally withdrawn from it to the point that their life revolves around video games. What these people ultimately want is that one game, that one game that can finally replace their real lives, that one game they can completely escape reality into, and what makes this really awful is that I think video game companies know this (at least the smart ones who aren't run by soft drink salesmen) and I think they knowingly exploit it. I think it was a big part of the bullshit around No Man's Sky, I think it was a big part of whatever the fuck happened with Cyberpunk 2077. I think it's an even bigger part of Star Citizen.
I don't even think Star Citizen is pretending to be a real game. I think the more it becomes a real game, the more they have to narrow down what the game actually is, the less it fulfils the fantasy, and the fantasy is what sells. A game is just an entertainment product. You buy it, you play it, you uninstall it. The people who spend tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars on star citizen aren't looking for a game, they want an alternative to real life.
I mean, I'm not the first person to point this out, but imagine if Star Citizen actually released and imagine it really was everything it was promised to be. Who is going to play it? Who is going to play a competitive multiplayer space game where some people have spent so much money they own the whole universe already? That's not a replacement for real life, that's literally real life, and it sounds terrible. Who wants to pay money to be the background scenery to someone else's Elon Musk LARP?
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- Feb 7, 2011
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Thanks for that video, it was pretty interesting, but it basically just reinforced my idea that the game doesn't really have anything meaningful to do once you're playing it. Maybe that'll change, but considering the scale of the game I imagine they're going to need to spread content paper thin in order to fill a universe with it.
I don't know anything about Star Citizen, but I just thought it was an apt description of our own universe. Too big for its own good, and apart from ours most(all?) planets are empty.