I know I left a few comments like this on this thread already, but I'm a big fan of the game. As a game dev, I have a lot of respect for their ambition, tech, and recent transparency. I'm not sure why people always fixate on the money - people invest and donate to worse things. RSI isn't predatory about it, they're very honest about the progress and expectations (especially recently)
PVE - Cargo delivery missions (from small to large size) - Bounty hunting (in space and on planet) - Mining - Salvaging - Cave exploration/rescue - Escaping from prison
PVP - Bounty/pirate hunting
Just search for Star Citizen content on YouTube. You fill find a lot. My favorites are https://www.youtube.com/@CaptainBerks and https://www.youtube.com/@Morphologis
Squadron 42, the cinematic, single player, space campaign, was supposed to come out in 2014!
The game has major ups and downs, but nothing really comes close to the same feeling of being on a capital ship with your friends pulling out from a beautiful space port. I wish there was a better alternative but there isn't, nothihng really comes close.
Performance has vastly improved from 50 players per server to 110 now i beleive? And i think theres talks of increasing it further.
Also free fly weekends are when the game is at its worst, the servers are bought to its knees.
Again, no fault to the player and its completely on CIG but its a shame that a lot of players never get to see the game in its best light because free fly is a nightmare.
There had/have been recurring problems with elevators and inventory. I would get ejected into space; no leg breaking.
I think just the way they mesh the world together makes that something that has been hard for them to fix.
The inventory issues are what got me to stop playing. Long inventory load times, and then 75% of the time, inventory would be lost or permanently broken (items lost/can't add new things to inventory).
Still fun for a few days. Pretty graphics. Space flight was fun. FPS missions needed a lot of work, but functional.
Another thing that made me quit, was the tedium of setup. You respawn quickly, from death into the hospital (unless you end up in prison, for shooting an at FPS guard that looks 90% exactly like an FPS enemy (then you get the prison play loop, which is fun once or twice)). But, then you need to take the elevator (chance of instant death) down to the ground floor. find the train. wait for the train. take the elevator (chance of death; or stairs if you are lucky [ i feel like there's a 'I'm gonna git you sucka' joke in here ]) to the shopping district. Wander around the shopping district (which is different on each planet) to hopefully find new Armor, Rifle, Mining tool, Gravity-gun tool (not all planets have the things you need, even)... then get back to the train and repeat for the space dock. then elevator to your ship bay. ... that's like 10-30 minutes. it just gets tedious. - probably more fun playing with groups of people, but it got too tedious playing solo.
Was an early Kickstarter backer, so I'll try it again at some point when it is more polished.
Agree that what I paid for was mainly a modern Wing Commander/Freelancer type game, and they are overreaching by a lot. I think the First-person-shooter stretch goal was added later in the funding campaign.
I also feel like a lot of the kick-starter ships have been power-creeped (and they also seem to be lagging behind in quality updates; because CIG has to design and sell new ships to make more money to fund development, and then most of that money goes to make new ships).
They should not be making new ships at all at this point, unless those ships are required for the single player campaign. Focus should be on game systems and game play.
It's not an MMO as such, with something like 50 players per server. The Server Meshing God-tech that they've been banging on about for years now is practically impossible as described. To paraphrase, "you'll be able to shoot a gun from one ship and the bullet will pass through several cloud servers as it hits a player in another ship". Latency and n^2 are not your friends here. Honestly, based on this alone I'm surprised by the amount of Gell-mann Amnesia in the thread.
In my experience it's a "make your own fun" sort of game. Try it on a free play weekend, but IMO don't get sucked in and donate tens of thousands of dollars to a broken CryEngine demo running on promises.
