Star Citizen - 2019
By Timothy Tibbetts |
You may have heard of Star Citizen, the 8-year, $250-$300 million massively multiplayer online space game that's still in Alpha? We keep hearing about the game and finally decided to take a brief look during a free play week. While space sims aren't my first choice, my gaming history goes back 25 years to the arcades and early game consoles (Atari, Nintendo) as well as beta testing games for many companies including Microsoft.
Let's take a look at the monster that is Star Citizen by exploring the games history, controversy and kicking the tires.
A Brief History of Star Citizen
Star Citizen is the brainchild of Chris Roberts, the man behind the popular Wing Commander Series and Roberts Space Industries or RSI. The game has a rabid, almost cult-like following with a claimed 2.3 million+ fans who, in many cases, have donated thousands of dollars to buy ships to support the ongoing development. And, there's a lot of ships to buy over the last nine years. The money was initially raised on Kickstarter, and an additional $46 million was raised in December of 2018.
If you've heard of Star Citizen, there's a good chance it's due to a lot of public controversies. Check out any thread on Reddit, and you'll find anyone who posts anything negative will quickly find themselves in a dead-end conversation with a Star Citizen. Derek Smart was removed from Star Citizen in 2015 as an initial backer in 2012 when he wrote a negative article about Star Citizen. Coincidence? Probably not.
Interestingly, the controversy probably didn't hurt the game any. If it weren't for Derek Smart on Twitter, I probably would have never heard of the game, and frankly, he keeps daring me to try it, so here we are.
The game costs $45 to purchase your first ship, and as mentioned, you can buy more ships later. I don't mind this concept, and there are even third-party trading websites and ships for sale and trade on sites including eBay and Reddit.
Kicking the Tires
To play Star Citizen, you need to create an account and then download a 50MB installer which will, in turn, install the 48GB game. Game download and installation took over an hour for us, but we needed a nap, so that worked out.
The game interface is well polished and laid out not unlike Steam, UPlay, or other similar launchers. You can launch the game and click to go to the official website, FAQ, and get help. You can also read Star Citizen news, patch notes, and access settings.
Before the game launches, you must accept the Terms of Service including agreeing that you are aware that the game is a pre-release, which feels weird considering it's been like that since 2012.
You can choose from three different game modes; Universe, Star Marine or Arena Commander.
Universe lets you explore the world, Star Marine is multiplayer First Person Shooter, and Arena Commander is multiplayer dogfights and races. I'm going to explore the universe because that is the core of the game.
Getting the hang of your controls could take a while. A lot is going on in this game, and that is to be expected. I noticed early on that the players were friendly and very helpful and you're going to need it. I watched as message after message scrolled by wondering where all their ships went, why the store was empty, glitches, and other "jokes" about the bugs in Star Citizen.
Once you leave your room, you can call your ship and head to the pad where the ship was delivered. I'll admit these simple steps took longer than they should have, but that's typical with any new game. I'll give the artists credit; the ships are beautiful. I mean, not $3,000 beautiful. I jumped in my ship ready to learn a new set of controls but stopped to have a smoke and as disconnected for inactivity and returned to my bunk. What? I know I should quit smoking, but that sucked.
Flying for your first time is much easier than it looks thanks to the built-in help giving you tips. Frankly, I found flying easier the first time than I did finding my way to the ship. I didn't play much beyond flying and wandering around because space sims aren't my favorite genre. As mentioned, I just wanted to kick the tires. Most people will tell you that you should expect 80 hours of gameplay when you drop your $60 plus on a new game. For $45, you'll get every bit of that out of the game. The average player donates closer to $200.
But, remember you're playing an ongoing alpha so you can expect bugs and expect to plunk down more money as well. It's your money, so I don't care how you spend it personally, but it will be hard not to spend more than $45. Remember that the $250-300 million was all crowdfunded and some players want to know when they're going to get what they paid for. The initial completion date was 2014.
As you can see, we keep coming back to the money. There are many well-documented examples of mismanagement of development and money. The biggest question looming remains if Star Citizen will ever be completed. Some players have demanded and received refunds including one case where $3,000 was refunded while others have lost. RSI implemented a 14-day return policy essentially putting an end to refunds. Then again, many journalists and observers are predicting the game will never be released, and years later, the development continues.
As someone who has beta tested many games, the alpha tag fits because the game has too many well documented, unaddressed bugs to enter the beta stage yet. I'm surprised they didn't just pick a date and call it beta.
Star Citizen is on track to set two records - The most money raised for a video game (consider the movie Titanic cost $200 million) and the most years for a game in alpha. I understand both sides of the argument but consider this; SpaceX is 16 years old and has changed (real) space flight and rockets forever. They're landing rockets and reusing them, and we can't get Star Citizen out of alpha and into beta after 9 years?
If you want more information on the entire saga, check out this article at Forbes.
In closing, I hope my writing wasn't too bad. I'm not a journalist and rely on Grammarly to help my writing skills. Thanks for reading.
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Let's take a look at the monster that is Star Citizen by exploring the games history, controversy and kicking the tires.
A Brief History of Star Citizen
Star Citizen is the brainchild of Chris Roberts, the man behind the popular Wing Commander Series and Roberts Space Industries or RSI. The game has a rabid, almost cult-like following with a claimed 2.3 million+ fans who, in many cases, have donated thousands of dollars to buy ships to support the ongoing development. And, there's a lot of ships to buy over the last nine years. The money was initially raised on Kickstarter, and an additional $46 million was raised in December of 2018.
If you've heard of Star Citizen, there's a good chance it's due to a lot of public controversies. Check out any thread on Reddit, and you'll find anyone who posts anything negative will quickly find themselves in a dead-end conversation with a Star Citizen. Derek Smart was removed from Star Citizen in 2015 as an initial backer in 2012 when he wrote a negative article about Star Citizen. Coincidence? Probably not.
Interestingly, the controversy probably didn't hurt the game any. If it weren't for Derek Smart on Twitter, I probably would have never heard of the game, and frankly, he keeps daring me to try it, so here we are.
The game costs $45 to purchase your first ship, and as mentioned, you can buy more ships later. I don't mind this concept, and there are even third-party trading websites and ships for sale and trade on sites including eBay and Reddit.
Kicking the Tires
To play Star Citizen, you need to create an account and then download a 50MB installer which will, in turn, install the 48GB game. Game download and installation took over an hour for us, but we needed a nap, so that worked out.
The game interface is well polished and laid out not unlike Steam, UPlay, or other similar launchers. You can launch the game and click to go to the official website, FAQ, and get help. You can also read Star Citizen news, patch notes, and access settings.
Before the game launches, you must accept the Terms of Service including agreeing that you are aware that the game is a pre-release, which feels weird considering it's been like that since 2012.
You can choose from three different game modes; Universe, Star Marine or Arena Commander.
Universe lets you explore the world, Star Marine is multiplayer First Person Shooter, and Arena Commander is multiplayer dogfights and races. I'm going to explore the universe because that is the core of the game.
Getting the hang of your controls could take a while. A lot is going on in this game, and that is to be expected. I noticed early on that the players were friendly and very helpful and you're going to need it. I watched as message after message scrolled by wondering where all their ships went, why the store was empty, glitches, and other "jokes" about the bugs in Star Citizen.
Once you leave your room, you can call your ship and head to the pad where the ship was delivered. I'll admit these simple steps took longer than they should have, but that's typical with any new game. I'll give the artists credit; the ships are beautiful. I mean, not $3,000 beautiful. I jumped in my ship ready to learn a new set of controls but stopped to have a smoke and as disconnected for inactivity and returned to my bunk. What? I know I should quit smoking, but that sucked.
Flying for your first time is much easier than it looks thanks to the built-in help giving you tips. Frankly, I found flying easier the first time than I did finding my way to the ship. I didn't play much beyond flying and wandering around because space sims aren't my favorite genre. As mentioned, I just wanted to kick the tires. Most people will tell you that you should expect 80 hours of gameplay when you drop your $60 plus on a new game. For $45, you'll get every bit of that out of the game. The average player donates closer to $200.
But, remember you're playing an ongoing alpha so you can expect bugs and expect to plunk down more money as well. It's your money, so I don't care how you spend it personally, but it will be hard not to spend more than $45. Remember that the $250-300 million was all crowdfunded and some players want to know when they're going to get what they paid for. The initial completion date was 2014.
As you can see, we keep coming back to the money. There are many well-documented examples of mismanagement of development and money. The biggest question looming remains if Star Citizen will ever be completed. Some players have demanded and received refunds including one case where $3,000 was refunded while others have lost. RSI implemented a 14-day return policy essentially putting an end to refunds. Then again, many journalists and observers are predicting the game will never be released, and years later, the development continues.
As someone who has beta tested many games, the alpha tag fits because the game has too many well documented, unaddressed bugs to enter the beta stage yet. I'm surprised they didn't just pick a date and call it beta.
Star Citizen is on track to set two records - The most money raised for a video game (consider the movie Titanic cost $200 million) and the most years for a game in alpha. I understand both sides of the argument but consider this; SpaceX is 16 years old and has changed (real) space flight and rockets forever. They're landing rockets and reusing them, and we can't get Star Citizen out of alpha and into beta after 9 years?
If you want more information on the entire saga, check out this article at Forbes.
In closing, I hope my writing wasn't too bad. I'm not a journalist and rely on Grammarly to help my writing skills. Thanks for reading.
comments powered by Disqus
