Erlkönig: Star Citizen: Early Impressions 2024

Star Citizen: ready for release in 2034‡

‡ Or later. If ever.

So, having now played the game for about a week, I can say with some confidence that it appears to be about 50% finished, despite 10 years and $700+ million being allegedly sunk into it.

[ASIDE: a fortnight later, still finding bugs at about the same pace, and each patch usually seems to add as many new bugs as it supposedly solves]

Star Citizen looks good because CryEngine looks good, and probably part of why CryEngine is so good is that Star Citizen's maker, Cloud Imperium, wasn't involved in most of CryEngine's core development.

Virtually all of Star Citizen beyond CryEngine's look (and some great sets and backdrops, and the prison excape quest) basically anything that involves that software implementation of the game, appears to have been haphazardly developed in a toxic environment, under horrible management, corruptly chasing funding based on lies and misdirection, headed and micromanaged by Chris Roberts, whose skills and interest lie in shockingly inefficient and disorganized film production, applied here to create a nightmare of progressively worse game design, seemingly crafted to make its players as miserable as possible, while extracting as much money from them as possible, with the combination of all the money and time beggering the imagination of any normal professional software developer in that the current state of Star Citizen is such a travesty.

This joke of a game is not necessarily the fault of the individual developers, but clearly the failure of CR both as the head of the project and as the one who selected his management team, who have prioritized gross profit - so far $0.7+ billion - over development, and pushed for anything that could be used to market this abomination more effectively, which is mostly new pretty ships and descriptions of upcoming features, while continuing to fail piteously at correcting the deep flaws and rampant bugs. In fact, the real objective, now that CR has finally found a deep enough fountain of cash to sustain his ability to blow through it, is likely to drag out development as long as possible, either only producing a release when legally forced to, or ideally, never.

I do applaud various parts of what I've seen - nice takes on the tool UIs, the wonderful setting in the prison escape route (though currently bugs will kill most escapees within a few minutes of reaching the 229°C surface), pretty starships... umm... but so far, that's it. Hopefully there's are some great things I haven't seen yet. But the future doesn't look good. As more CR's "vision" continues, progressively more of players' time will be blown on time-sink logistics and dreary normal-life activities, like spending a cumulative 15 minutes on trams (that may kill you) during a gaming session, and more time than that running through repetitive, liminal-ish corridors, until eventually you'll want to play another game just to avoid all the chores and irritation (and innumerable bugs) of SC itself.

But here let's talk about just a few of the huge array of bugs that stand ready to fight off most would-be players, here taken from Aug/Sept 2024:

inventory

• it's possible to get invisible objects jammed into a hidden inventory that cause encumbrance only dying outside of armistice can correct
• attempting to move things into a full inventory aften just drops the items with no warning to the player
• moved items in inventory often don't update in the view, especially for equipped weapons
• the inventory system is poorly designed, highly modal and overcomplicated, yet still both fails at manipulation freedom and fails at being immersive
  • case in point, in real life one can easily move objects between two containers within arms reach, even if one is (omg) not wearing a backpack
  • for immersion, one should be able to open up multiple containers at once if within arms reach (then drag items between them) - SC doesn't support this
• cargo boxes can't be pulled up in a shared UI with either the local freight depo or the storage terminals, meaning that instead vast quantities of items might have to be funneled through the players pack, the floor, and so on, a process than easily take 30 minutes+ for anything interesting
• container nesting is pathetically rigid, e.g. an empty backpack doesn't fit into a 2nd empty one
• looting the bodies of the fallen requires huge amounts of time and effort, since you can no longer dump them into area storage, but have to carry stuff manually or drag a big crate with you
• freight elevators will collect your purchases at outposts, but often won't let you collect them
• buying things like sandwiches and drink from vendors won't give them to you, but force you to find a storage terminal to collect them

object manipulation

• the action button can be very difficult to access, tiny, or oriented edge-on to the player, blocking play
• often weapons will refuse to present an action button, making them impossible to pick up outside of a specific inventory mode

badly implemented objects

• containers for certain resources will fill up, or fail to work, due to glitches
• many objects that should logically be impermeable are often one-way permeable

walking around

• the city tram lines don't stay on the rails, overlap with other objects, and even kill players riding on them
• it is common for characters on the surface to just fall through the ground (fatal)
• various actions, like starting to descend a ladder, can just drop whatever was in the player's hands
• many actions can stall waiting for server response that shouldn't need server responses
• walls that should exist can spontaneous not exist.
  • frustrating when you've cleared a mercenary hit, but are dropped into the planet core before you can take all the loot out

vendors

• the terminals will occasionally sell you things without confirmation, and possibly without having clicked on any specific item at all

hangars

• don't open when you tell them to, especially bad when you're inside them
• some don't open period, trapping you from leaving on your own at all
• elevators sometimes won't let you access your own dedicated hangar
• hangar elevators sometimes list bogus hangars (format strings instead of names)
• hangar elevators can drop you through the floor to bleed out and die (rare)

starships

• ship owners are often labelled as trespassers in parts of many ships
• many ship owners get around certain ship bugs by exploiting other bugs
• ship elevators can eject you from the ship or outright kill you
• some ships don't even start reliably
• items dropped in ships not infrequently are found on the ground outside
• ship quantum jump commands will often be ignored, abort early, or be mapped incorrectly
• ships can spontaneously move while on the ground, and even self destruct
• quantum jump initiation can instakill the pilot
• your ship's forward/backwards thrust is controlled by the left hand, but injuring your left arm compromises attitude controls managed by the right hand
• flying ships and maneuvering can throw passengers out through solid walls
• examples for just one ship, the Syulen
  • buttons in the Syulen ships are amazingly hard to hit reliably
  • the reverse view in the syulen ship should make it easier to land, except that the back camera apparently goes underground long before landing happens, and thta "long before" has been increasingly long over time
• invisible asteroids can destroy your ship
• clicking on the MFD menu button (or even missing it slightly) sometimes cuts power

death

Generally game bugs kill players more often than anything else, especially true for cautious players. Death is especially harsh in this game, where all items are left with the corpse, and others can abscond with them before the player can return, typically 5 to 20 minutes later

• your corpse is supposed to hang around so you can loot it, but the location markers can lie, or not appear
• your corpse can seemingly displace itself 4km underground, utterly unreachable
• your death effects, like the beeping, can get locked on when you are reincarnated back in the hospital (as well as making storage terminals hang)

chat

• the global chat channel doesn't always work
• scrollback is starkly limited, only available when writing a message, and clumsy
• global chat refuse to work at all (2024-09-06)

npcs

• other than enemy combat AIs, NPCs are entirely noninteractive
• NPCs can completely, unjustifiablely respawn in otherwise empty rooms, within seconds

journals

• archived mission data doesn't record where the missions were done, making it difficult to find the same POI to recover one's corpse, etc

Seriously, almost no systems work correctly. Mining is probably the only stable one.

The design guidance is that player death+regen will later be limited to some fixed (-ish) number, forcing you to create a player Will and Testament for an inheritor, which can then be killed multiple times in the same game session by trams, falling through the world, spontaneous ship ejection, kamikaze pilot attack, server lag, and so on.

The game is like a massive finger being shot at the players, promising more tedium in each release (That's right, hundreds of crates you have to load by hand!in response for the funds drained from them by false promising and lies.

I'm still playing, but it's from a dual motive on wanting to find the few things that are good (the prison escape, etc), and being amazed at the level of brokenness everywhere. For a software engineer, it's like being an archaeologist at Pompeii, or a dive at the Titanic, a visit to a disaster area. Which might make a good theme for the Eulogy for Star Citizen when CR's final vision (probably only "final" because he passed away first) is released in some future decade, at which point it will be briefly retro-cool before all but the most hardcore players go back to modern XVR games or whatever is fun in 2034, the servers are shut down, and the code, probably never being open sourced, vanishes into the void.