Normally I open with a good joke so you know my brand of bullshit is on full display in the rest of the article. Not this time. Star Citizen is one of the few games to beat me rather than the other way around. Just thinking about playing it makes me tired. Just thinking about engaging with the idea of Star Citizen makes me tired. This game is fucking exhausting.
If you haven’t heard of The Best Damn Space Sim Ever, Star Citizen initially launched as a relatively modest Kickstarter. Chris Roberts, the Wing Commander guy, asked for enough money to make what was initially pitched as a modern Wing Commander/Freelancer. They made unholy gobs of money and continue to make unholy gobs of money. They’ve pulled in something like $300 million as of this moment, which is approximately enough to make an EA-class game.
Oh, and the Kickstarter launched in 2012.
With that money, they are still making Star Citizen, which is supposed to be an MMO-style persistent universe. But there’s also Squadron 42, which is supposed to be the narrative, Wing Commander/Freelancer reboot that started everything and features the likes of Mark Hamill and Gary Oldman and Gillian Anderson, though I don’t think they’ve shown too much of that recently and it’s an open question of whether it exists. There are also game modes inside the game of Star Citizen itself, like an FPS…thing called Star Marine and a spaceship arena combat game called Arena Commander.
To keep funding going after eight years, they sell literal spaceships in the game of Star Citizen. Well, many times what they sell is drawings of spaceships that will be in the game eventually. Likewise, they do boast of their open development, but features slide around all the time, come and go, and vanish into oblivion with nary a word. But people keep on buying spaceships so they keep right on trucking.
Those passing 8 years have generated tremendous amounts of drama, from a small but viciously loyal community and from a wider network of gamers at large that enjoy laughing at people dropping substantial amounts of real-world currency to buy spaceships that may or may not exist in a game that may or may not ever come out. If you’d like to know more, Something Awful and Reddit are major repositories of Star Citizen drama, but far from the only ones.
If this all sounds confusing, you understand why keeping up with and understanding this thing is exhausting. I’m almost at my so-called word count and haven’t even talked about the game yet. I recently got the chance to check it out and while I’m familiar with drama, I’m also here for weird games with ambition.
Star Citizen is incredibly weird and loaded with ambition. It is also incredibly exhausting. You might think that in a game theoretically about spaceships, it would be pretty easy to get into your spaceship and fly away to do spaceship things.
You fool.
You clown.
You utter nitwit.
Star Citizen isn’t one of those games where you click Launch and then appear in space. It’s not one of those games where there’s a cool cutscene. You are doing it all yourself. Literally everything.
To undertake the simple act of getting your spaceship off the landing pad, you must:
- Strafe up off the landing pad by holding Space Bar (Left Control to strafe down).
- Strafe laterally using the W, A, S, and D keys as you would were you on foot.
- Q and E to roll the ship.
- Pitch and Yaw by moving the mouse slightly away from the center crosshair.
- Once you’re far enough away from your landing pad or hangar, press N to raise your landing gear.
- You can toggle Cruise Control with C.
- Scroll Wheel adjusts your speed, but be careful, ramping up too fast can cause your engines to overheat. The ship will become less maneuverable above SCM speeds. This is indicated by the red portion of the speed bar.
- Left Shift will engage Afterburner to make your thrusters more responsive, however, this also generates a lot of heat.
- Some ships start in a VTOL thruster configuration that provides better efficiency in atmosphere at the cost of decreased forward thrust. Press J to swap to regular forward flight in those vessels.
Does that begin to convey the scope?
What if I told you that wasn’t all of it?
Instead of launching into more summary or editorializing, I’ll simply walk through the process of getting into space in a spaceship in a game theoretically about spaceships.
Start to finish:
- You download the game
- You go through character creation, where you can make an enjoyably bug-eyed goon.
- You pick your starting system.
- Your character wakes up in their living quarters in the space station you chose.
Now, some games just have living quarters, but this is detailed enough that, yes, there’s a shitter, and because it’s in spaaaaaaace…., you actually have to click a button on the wall to make the toilet deploy.
You wander around the living quarters and into the broader station itself, which feels huge because it’s deck upon deck of living quarters packed with NPCs for some reason, and there’s not a lot of guidance as to where to go, but there are also lots of vending machines scattered around that do various things.
There are vending machines that vend food, because you have to watch your hunger levels. There are vending machines that have missions. There are vending machines to pay fines. In the glorious space libertarian future, you’re always fumbling for change.
There’s nothing resembling fast travel, so you’re exploring a multi-story station with bars and residences and admin offices, full of NPCs standing blankly on chairs at the moment. It’s quite a level of detail. And it’s also kind of appalling. Why do you have to do this every time?
I wandered into a clothing shop with actual clothes and boots and whatnot on the racks, and you could go rummage on the racks like an actual clothing store to change your outfit. That’s kind of interesting. But why? Especially since you can actually walk up to a console in the same shop and shop for armor. Then why have the shop at all?
If you’re in a hurry to get into your spaceship, you CAN run and jump, BUT that’s tied to your heart rate (which is another thing you have to monitor besides food, drink, hunger, body temperature…again, this is ostensibly a game about flying spaceships around but it’s also a quasi-survival sim), so if you run and jump too much, you can have a heart attack. Which I suppose answers why we don’t see people moving at a sprint in our world all the time: because even in the future we have the heart health of a 78 year old man and we’d fucking die.
Now you’re saying Thomas…Tommy…Tombo…just tell us about the fucking flying spaceships.
But that’s the thing, I haven’t gotten to the bit where I fly the fucking spaceships.
The station I’d chosen did not actually have a spaceport, so eventually I wandered around and found some kind of subway/train map that showed I had blundered into the Central Business District of the city and I needed to take the train to the Spaceport if I actually wanted to get into my spaceship and fly around.
Yes, you literally have to figure out what trains you need to take and what connections you need to make to get to the spaceport where you can, theoretically, get into your spaceship. It’s all the thrill of wondering whether you accidentally wandered onto the Express when you need the Crosstown.
Once your train actually arrives, you have to get on it and, again, this plays out in real-time. For several minutes I was riding a train through a space-age city. Interesting. Once. On the one hand, there is a genuinely impressive level of detail. Like, wow, there’s a big enough game area to take trains in real-time to different parts of it and actually try on clothes and eat at restaurants and whatnot. On the other hand, are you fucking insane?
But eventually I arrived at the spaceport where I would take to the stars!
First, I had to find my way to…
- Go to the vehicle retrieval console and select your ship
Which makes sense because, presumably, everyone couldn’t have a personal garage with all their space rides, but this means you have to “order” your ship, then remember which hanger they put it in, then go to the elevator and ride the elevator to the right hanger…
Side bar: If you, like me, are wondering whether you can just go to different hangers and steal people’s ships or hide aboard them and murder them, the answer is apparently yes, so that’s actually kind of fun!
- Arrive at the right hanger
- Get in the spaceship
Oh, my dear friend, you thought you could just click the spaceship or something and zoom off? No, no, no. You have to figure out how to get on the ship, manually open the door and extend the ladder or whatever, actually climb into the ship, shut the door behind you, actually walk to the pilot’s chair and…
Yes, it’s actually like this, and apparently there are going to be multi-crewed vessels, to the point that relaxing in your space hot tub while your servants and space hoes fawn over you for being a space captain of industry. Some fans are apparently buying accounts for all their kids, like Family Battleship Potemkin.
“I SWEAR TO GOD KID IF YOU LET ONE MORE FIGHTER THROUGH OUR SCREENS…”
“Dad…please…I just want to learn to read…”
Anyway, you…
- Actually get in the captain’s chair
Now, we’re off to space…
Wait, wait, hang on, first we have to…
- Power on the spaceship
Okay, and then we…
- Contact flight control and ask for permission to depart
Come on, but surely we can…
- Do all that stuff in the tutorial to get moving and out of the hanger
Okay fine but th…
- Accelerate up into the sky far enough to actually leave the atmosphere and get into, you guessed it…
SPAAAAAAAAAAACEEEEEEE
Star Citizen is for people who don’t want to play a game. This is for people who want to live a life, but with a spaceship or spaceships. It’s for people who write insanely detailed Dungeons and Dragons campaigns about their homebrew world, then make you sit through it because goddammit they put all that effort in and you are going to sit and take it. I get the urge. I just think it’s a goddamn moonshot to attempt it. Can it be done? The answer 8 years later is…maybe?! They’re damn sure going to try and find out though.
I did attempt Star Marine but couldn’t find a game on a weekend morning after waiting 15 minutes or so. I did attempt Arena Commander. I did find a game on that same weekend morning and rather quickly at that, only to be dumped into an arena by myself waiting for someone else to show up that never did.
However, there is a single player, offline mode of Arena Commander, which finally let me give the space combat a whirl. (Yes, after all that, I finally got to shoot spaceships).
My first impression of the space combat: it’s weird. Ships feel big and ponderously slow, but combat also can be very lethal when you get close. So you sort of blunder around for a bit, and then you’re dead. Just like real life. I think there’s also meant to be some kind of exciting game thing where you shuttle power around between shields and defenses and engines and whatnot while you’re trying to shoot the other guy, but I was busy trying to shoot the other guy, not fiddle with my power to various stations. It seems designed to fulfill the fantasy of shrieking ALL POWER TO WEAPONS more than making it a fun gameplay element.
It’s puzzling that there’s two entire game modes that are incomplete tucked into a larger MMO project that’s also incomplete. One’s left with a sense of a team lurching from shiny thing to shiny thing, working on it furiously then discarding it as soon as someone saw a new shiny thing to chase.
And that’s really the game as a whole because there are all these disparate systems running together. You’ve got games inside the game that were fleshed out and seemingly abandoned. There’s this whole survival thing where you have to monitor your suit oxygen and water levels. There’s a mining system. There’s mission running. There’s combat. There’s all these different systems and just…things, like massive sprawling spaceports and space stations. Like someone lurched from game trend to game trend and idea to idea–survival sim! Space combat! Space mining! Giant living cities!–and then discarded it as soon as they were bored.
How can you finish something overall if you never finish any of the smaller parts of it?
Star Citizen feels like a genuine attempt to build a living universe. Remember when Second Life was all the rage and we were all going to be taking classes as furry avatars with horse dicks and bantering in virtual clubs as furry avatars with horse dicks? That didn’t work out, probably because of all the dicks. But this feels like a shot at making a life simulation where you’re not just an avatar, you are an entity with needs.
And I get the idea, but I don’t feel like there’s a huge audience for a spaceship combat game where you die of a heart attack running to catch your train.
Which by the way I have to do again because I logged off in space and respawned in my bed.
Shit.
