Star Citizen Is Barely Playable, But After Trying It For A Week I Am Sold

Posted by By our-little-miss-is-home December 18, 2024 2 Views 9 Min Read
Star Citizen Is Barely Playable, But After Trying It For A Week I Am Sold

Star Citizen is a curious game. Led by Wing Commander creator Chris Roberts, it’s both one of the most ambitious games ever conceived and the most expensive, thanks to its crowdfunded development. As I write this, nearly five and a half million people have ploughed over $750 million into bringing it to life, and yet twelve years on from its first pledge, it remains in an alpha state.

Let’s just put that figure into perspective for a second. Three quarters of a billion dollars is the equivalent of $140 per person, more than most deluxe editions of ‘regular’ games cost. And yet, there are countless Reddit threads asking if it’s worth it, and most are met with answers that begin with something along the lines of “if you can accept the bugs…”

So why have this many people bought into Star Citizen? I’ve always been intrigued, but had never taken the plunge. I absolutely adore one of the games it seems to get compared to a lot, No Man’s Sky, so the genre is right up my intergalactic street. And this year has seen my tastes shift considerably – nowadays I’m looking primarily for games I can drop in and out of rather casually, and I figured a persistent universe I can explore and deliver packages in like a fancy FedEx pilot would be ideal.

Thanks to a ‘free fly’ event as part of the in-game Intergalactic Aerospace Expo, I could finally see what the fuss was at no risk to my wallet. I downloaded the game, created my character, and entered the universe. A tutorial helpfully offered to show me some of the many ropes, before a bug meant that I couldn’t even complete the first task – using an elevator. Reset, go again. More bugs, stuttering gameplay, and the onset of a magnificent headache. When the game froze, I mashed keys, and somehow that led to me skipping the tutorial, never able to return to it.

Normally, I’d have given up, but my curiosity was just too strong. I then spent an entire evening researching how to run Star Citizen more efficiently on my laptop, to squeeze out as many frames as possible so that I could walk from my starting dorm to the expo, how to configure it for a controller, and even how to set up voice commands and eye tracking. As I said, it’s an ambitious game. Oh, and I very nearly bought a HOTAS set on Amazon on a whim.

Before you all say I’m stupid for trying to run it on a laptop, know that the laptop is a top-spec ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14, running a Ryzen 9, RTX 3060, and 32GB RAM.

Tempering my burgeoning impulses, I went to check out the expo. It’s a fully-realised trade show, where the various manufacturers park their spacecraft in a giant hall for you to see and even rent for free. The ships on show change every day of the event, and getting to board them has just served to increase my interest. It’s a clever ploy, and I’ve gone on to spend countless hours watching review videos for pretty much every ship in the game. I made lists, as I always do when trying to decide things, and I think I’ve fallen in love with the Origin 315p as my dream ship. The only problem is that it costs $60.

Remembering that I haven’t actually played the game at this point, I set off for the hangar. Star Citizen’s systems are complicated across the board, and even getting to your ship is an event. You head to a spaceport, access your ship from a terminal, wait for it to be retrieved if it’s elsewhere in the universe (something that can take a good chunk of real time depending on where it is), and then take another elevator (my nemeses at this point) to your hangar.

Preparing flight systems for takeoff, leaving the hangar, and actually flying have all been rendered nigh-impossible by myriad bugs, and I often couldn’t access the mobiGlas system to accept a delivery mission. I could stutter forward, enjoying the view of my frozen starter planet, before crashing when the game lagged. Once I did manage to leave the planet and make it to the delivery pickup, but because I landed in a suboptimal position I couldn’t even get back onto the ship to take off again. I guess that’s why there’s an in-game suicide button.

For me, and I suspect for many others not running the best rig possible, the game is quite literally unplayable. You can’t go an hour without something going wrong, and it makes for a miserable time. If this was any other developer, and any other game, there’d be such an outcry that the game would have been pulled by now. We’ve seen too many live-service games meet that very fate over the last few years. But Star Citizen keeps raking in the dollars, with more than $20 million coming in November alone.

And yet, despite having a far-from-ideal gaming experience, I’m not done with Star Citizen. Bugs have made me quit playing every single day of the event, but then I’ve gone right back in the next day to try again. I see the ambition of it through reading the many threads, watching the many videos, but most of all, just by being in the universe. It’s a game that lets you play how you want, from delivery driver or space ambulance to pirate or fleet captain, and it’s a universe I want to be in.

Most of all, I see why people have spent so much money on new ships. They’re the real stars of Star Citizen, carefully crafted works of art that somehow make you feel like you’re making a big purchase, as we would feel buying a house or car. Your ship is your home, not just a tool for going pew pew in space or dropping off some boxes at a remote outpost. And that aspiration of trading up using in-game currency as opposed to real money, eventually landing something like the luxurious Origin 890 Jump? It’s a drug.

The most expensive ships, like the 890, are pushing $1,000 in real cash. Some limited-time packages cost even more. You can purchase ships with in-game currency too, but they won’t be protected if Cloud Imperium decides to wipe inventories on launch. Any ship bought with real money is account bound, and can also be traded up for real money, like you were part-exchanging a car.

I haven’t yet dropped any real money on a game package, a ship-plus-game deal needed to play, but I know I will at some point. Whether that’s when I have a better rig to play it on or when I’ve finally got over those big-purchase nerves is anyone’s guess, but it will happen. Job done, Star Citizen. You don’t need my £50, but you can have it anyway.

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