I have it installed and very infrequently play, more to check in on progress. It is most definitely a really cool engine and there is a fair bit to explore, but it takes a looong time to load up and get to the point when you are in space since on start up you have to commute from an apartment to the space port. Basically every time I start it up I spend an hour or 2 playing and just explore a different but similar spaceport or space station…
I play it almost daily. It’s been a blast for me. Is it broken half the time? Yeah, kinda. Is it worth it? For me it is. Nothing is quite like Star Citizen when it works.
Had a blast in the past, until my GPU couldn’t handle the graphics anymore when I pushed myself to the competitive limits, and shortly thereafter they nerfed the Ares Ion (my absolute favorite ship) and my 10 year old Thrustmast TM16ks started to fall apart as well.
I’m heavily looking forward to getting back into it again once I can up my hardware :3
I have a GamePass subscription, so I don’t see why I wouldn’t play it. That’s kind of the point of GP. Try random stuff, keep what you want installed, delete the rest.
So in this sense, no I did not actually played star citizen, but as initial backer I wonder if I should even try it? Since you played for years, could you mind sharing the following things? (so I can see to get some entertainment out of my backing dollars. )
how much real world currency affects the gameplay? From early backing new release your ship can break needs maintenance and insurance, how’s the currently implemented in game?
what’s the game structured like? is it more quest driven with some story? Or really open ended MMO community driven(more EVE like)? If it’s something else please give a description.
what’s the fun part when playing the game?
how resource intensive the game is, computer spec and storage?
is it always online or you can play offline? Does it have subscription based stuff?
Real World Money: Not much. It will dictate what ship & game package you start with. You can buy ships, some gear, and paints for your ship. Other ships and gear you can get in game with in-game currency or looting. You can ebay in-game credits, but that doesn’t affect the game too much because they wipe periodically.
Game Structure: There is no real progression beyond acquiring additional ships and gear. It has missions, but they are mostly pretty rudimentary game loops. Box delivery missions, bounty missions, assassination missions, salvage missions, missions to clear underground bunkers, illegal drug delivery missions, etc. With some mission types, you build up rep which gives you access to higher paying missions. The missions are built around earning credits to afford ships in-game. You can also do game loops that don’t have missions like cargo hauling or mining. It is sandbox, and EVE-like, but no where near the depth of play EVE has.
The Fun: Flying the ships. The ability to switch up gears and go in another direction, like any other sandbox. Grouping up with friends to tackle things at scale.
Computer specs: Anything remotely current is going to run the game decent as can be. It is highly unoptimized. They haven’t done the performance polishes other games do because of so much stuff on their backlog. But I’m running a 5800xed cpu and a 6750xt gpu, and can run the game ~80fps on average. Your performance experience is going to be dictated by the game’s back end servers. Sometimes they forget to feed the hamsters.
This game is always online. You can play the Persistent Universe (PU), which is the Sandbox MMO portion of the game. The single player game is still in development, and they keep that one close to the vest.
• how much real world currency affects the gameplay? From early backing new release your ship can break needs maintenance and insurance, how’s the currently implemented in game?
In my experience not that much, the minimum you’d pay to get permanent access to Star Citizen is $50 or so, depending on the starter ship you choose. After that, basically everything can be earned in-game and you get access to the verse.
Having a medium sized ship does help with in-game money earning depending on what you’re doing to earn money. People can get quite wealthy just running bounties with a small fighter, or mining with the smaller mining ships. But even then, if you are in an org, make a few friends, or even if you just ask to borrow a ship in global chat people will happily lend you one. Ships and the utility they provide are very easy to come by. (Edit: you can also rent ships with in-game currency)
Once you build up some knowledge, earning money in-game doesn’t become a giant barrier. The ships you earn in-game typically persist for a few patch cycles (depending on the features being released, some of which require database wipes) I would not say SC is Pay to Win, at most there’s some convenience of having at least once medium-ish ship that’s attributed to your account.
• what’s the game structured like? is it more quest driven with some story? Or really open ended MMO community driven(more EVE like)? If it’s something else please give a description.
So there are still two games in development; Star Citizen and Squadron 42. S42 is a single player campaign that they’re developing more or less behind closed doors, SC is an open-ended MMO sandbox that is playable at the moment.
SC currently is divided into ~100-player shards/servers. You log on, connect to the verse and it drops you into one of those shards. As it is now, every session it tries to assign you to your previous shard, but if its full it just bumps you into a different one. In the near-term they want to allow you to wait to reconnect to that server if its full, so you can keep revisiting the same one.
The long-term goal is still to create one (or more likely a handful) of very large regional shards. A major milestone for that was reached this year, in that they began implementing some of the long-promised persistence features. I could talk at length about that but this is getting long, so if you want more detail just ask.
• what’s the fun part when playing the game?
This will depend on who you ask. There are missions to run (FPS bunkers, derelicts, delivery/item recovery, missing persons, bounties etc.) you can also go do things like mine, salvage, haul cargo, bounty hunt criminal players, or become a pirate and take other people’s cargo. There are in-world race tracks you can go to, players have created some cool racing orgs with player-run events and stuff. There are also some recurring official events, some pve, some pvp (some buggy, some less so)
One of the most fun experiences I personally had was one of the in-game events, Xenothreat. Basically you have to go with other players and fight off waves of enemy npc ships, protect transport cargo ships, and recover cargo from the destroyed transports. You do it all at the same time and you kind of have a choice to go to the destroyed ships, unload the cargo to your own and deliver it, or you can fly to protect those people against incoming fighters.
There are also purely PVP events that recur, like Jumptown, where you basically go and fight over a drug lab on a moon that just spawns free drugs while the event is active. Orgs will come and lock it down on some servers, while others a solo can just slip in unnoticed and skim some loot.
It’s very cool when it works, and kind of gives you a sense of what the game is aiming to become.
There are also two “modules” Star Marine (FPS round-based PVP) and Arena Commander (Racing, dogfighting, wave defense etc.). These are outside the MMO universe, and are sort of mini-games. They’ve been neglected for a while, but they just announced recently they are releasing a lot of improvements for them (better UI, matchmaking, new maps etc.)
To put it in a nutshell, the most fun for me comes out of player paths converging while doing stuff in the world, you hear people talk about “emergent gameplay” and that is what Star Citizen is aiming to create, a big sandbox with stuff to push people together and make stories out of it.
• how resource intensive the game is, computer spec and storage?
Spec/performance seems to vary. I have a fairly beefy system (RTX 2080 S, Ryzen 9 3900, lots of cheap Chinese RAM) and the client-side stuff generally runs pretty good for me, but it can vary from patch to patch but has progressively gotten better over the last few years. If you do install it, installing it on an SSD will give you the biggest benefit. Game size currently sits at around 90Gb.
The game is still in very active development though, so I think they optimize it to the point that its playable without spending too much time trying to optimize stuff that is being iterated upon.
This would be the part where I need to stress that Star Citizen can be really rough sometimes. Imagine a bucket of water that is being filled, the water is always churning a little and occasionally if some big feature comes along it gets dropped in and causes a lot of waves and chaos for a bit before things smooth back down. That’s what playing SC is currently like. The bucket is not full of water yet, it’s never fully calm and polished, and you need to be ok with some choppy turbulence sometimes, but the bucket continues to always fill.
I love the game and I can talk about it forever, but this above section is really important for anyone to understand, my explanations here are not to hype the game as perfect, it’s a struggle. Let it be known that I am a masochist who is interested by and enjoys the struggle. If you are interested in the game, I always tell people to wait for a free-fly event, they do them a few times a year.
• is it always online or you can play offline? Does it have subscription based stuff?
No subscription is needed. There is a voluntary subscription that gives you perks, like a monthly skin or item, access to a “ship of the month” in-game, access to early concept art and work in progress of features or locations, access to early test versions coming down the pipe to Live etc. None of it is anything necessary for the game itself.
Having a great time with myself and a few friends that I’ve drafted. We launched a Mirai Fury from the cargo bay of a Constellation Taurus and it was a blast.
Also found this new community in these post reddit days:
I come back and mess around with it once a year or so. I’m an Original Backer so it’s become kind of an annual tradition at this point. Also I have one of those red AMD ships which I think are kind of rare or something?
Having a great time with myself and a few friends that I’ve drafted. We launched a Mirai Fury from the cargo bay of a Constellation Taurus and it was a blast.
Also found this new community in these post reddit days:
I would like to get into it, I do have a basic ship of some sort from many years ago. But I just can’t run the game well enough and only get 20-30fps in most places.
I bought a Reliant Kore game package a few years ago. I didn’t have enough PC horsepower to run it at the time so it just sat. Just before 3.18 came out, I got some upgrades and could actually run the game.
I had quite a bit of fun with it before 3.18 came out. Since then, it’s been too buggy to enjoy much gameplay unfortunately. So I’m back to waiting for more updates (and maybe more upgrades on the PC) before I jump back into it.
I did upgrade my Reliant Kore to a cutty black. So I’m looking forward to getting more use out of that ship in the near future.
Yeah, the Cutlass was the first ship I bought in-game with room to walk around in. My friend helped me escape Klescher in that thing, neither of us knew what we were doing and by the time we got out of range of the turrets the thing was just gouting fire and smoke from every pipe and we had to limp out to Kareah to clear our crime stat before we could get it repaired.
It will always have a special place for me, it’s like that old beater car that you got as a teenager. You get better cars later in life, but nothing quite captures the spirit like the first one.
I’ve gotten to fly it a little, hauling scrap for a Vulture pilot. It definitely seems like it’ll be a blast. Here’s hoping they can get things a little more stable in 3.20.
I dropped $90 wayyyyy back in the day and still have my login. I install it again every once in a while to see how things are progressing. Can’t believe how slow the gameplay progress is but I will say the work they’ve done on the engine is really cool. But like… That’s not why I backed the game. I’m not mad about the game, I’ve had my fun testing it out over the years and I like the idea of what it could be, I just don’t expect it to be finished anymore.
I imagine it’s more of a watched-pot kind of situation than it will never finish. Starfield reserved its trademark way back in 2013, but you don’t get the sense that people think it took overly long.
Open development definitely skews people’s perspective on how long development of these big titles takes.
The only reason I don’t play currently is due to my PCs CPU being about 9 years old. About to do a rebuild in the next few months.
I enjoyed it when I did play, for me it was more about discovery. I had a few PvP battles which were fun, not that iwas any good. Flying around in a group was great, especially when they implemented linked quantum jumps
3.19.1! It’s been much better so far (fingers crossed). With the freefly over, no major events going on and this stability patch out it might be good timing to get back in.
hey, so racing was probably my favorite thing to do back when I originally bought the game (late 2015)
what is available in the racing gameplay now? is it still checkpoint based with leaderboards or can you actually race against other people at the same time?
I play it occasionally. I generally have runs of good times and then runs of bad times, 30ks, random explosions/deaths. I would say I have gotten enough fun out of the starter pack that it is worth it. I probably wouldn’t pledge if I could go back in time, but I do enjoy the Vulture, so I hope they go back and make salvage profitable again, so you can make good money on something besides just bounty hunting, since most other stuff isn’t that profitable on a aUEC/time ratio. Things have been wonky for the past bit after Invictus, so I’m waiting for the next update to roll up to the live PU.
Regarding profitability, my understanding is that they shift that kind of thing around to incentivize people to test a given feature. Sometimes it will be bounty hunting, mining, salvage etc. But in the end the balance will come back around.
It can definitely be frustrating if you like a given thing though. I know people really liked salvage because it was sort of a chill way to do something without involving yourself in combat. Perhaps with the new salvage missions there will be better opportunity for cash.
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I have it installed and very infrequently play, more to check in on progress. It is most definitely a really cool engine and there is a fair bit to explore, but it takes a looong time to load up and get to the point when you are in space since on start up you have to commute from an apartment to the space port. Basically every time I start it up I spend an hour or 2 playing and just explore a different but similar spaceport or space station…
I play it almost daily. It’s been a blast for me. Is it broken half the time? Yeah, kinda. Is it worth it? For me it is. Nothing is quite like Star Citizen when it works.
Had a blast in the past, until my GPU couldn’t handle the graphics anymore when I pushed myself to the competitive limits, and shortly thereafter they nerfed the Ares Ion (my absolute favorite ship) and my 10 year old Thrustmast TM16ks started to fall apart as well.
I’m heavily looking forward to getting back into it again once I can up my hardware :3
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I have a GamePass subscription, so I don’t see why I wouldn’t play it. That’s kind of the point of GP. Try random stuff, keep what you want installed, delete the rest.
Star Citizen is not on GamePass
Pretty sure they are thinking of Starfield.
Quite similar games though from what I have read about starfield
In style maybe but in scope not at all.
The scope of both of them seems to be “too big”, honestly.
Starfield will be wide as an ocean, shallow as a puddle, most likely. More sweet little lies from Todd and co.
So in this sense, no I did not actually played star citizen, but as initial backer I wonder if I should even try it? Since you played for years, could you mind sharing the following things? (so I can see to get some entertainment out of my backing dollars. )
Real World Money: Not much. It will dictate what ship & game package you start with. You can buy ships, some gear, and paints for your ship. Other ships and gear you can get in game with in-game currency or looting. You can ebay in-game credits, but that doesn’t affect the game too much because they wipe periodically.
Game Structure: There is no real progression beyond acquiring additional ships and gear. It has missions, but they are mostly pretty rudimentary game loops. Box delivery missions, bounty missions, assassination missions, salvage missions, missions to clear underground bunkers, illegal drug delivery missions, etc. With some mission types, you build up rep which gives you access to higher paying missions. The missions are built around earning credits to afford ships in-game. You can also do game loops that don’t have missions like cargo hauling or mining. It is sandbox, and EVE-like, but no where near the depth of play EVE has.
The Fun: Flying the ships. The ability to switch up gears and go in another direction, like any other sandbox. Grouping up with friends to tackle things at scale.
Computer specs: Anything remotely current is going to run the game decent as can be. It is highly unoptimized. They haven’t done the performance polishes other games do because of so much stuff on their backlog. But I’m running a 5800xed cpu and a 6750xt gpu, and can run the game ~80fps on average. Your performance experience is going to be dictated by the game’s back end servers. Sometimes they forget to feed the hamsters.
This game is always online. You can play the Persistent Universe (PU), which is the Sandbox MMO portion of the game. The single player game is still in development, and they keep that one close to the vest.
In my experience not that much, the minimum you’d pay to get permanent access to Star Citizen is $50 or so, depending on the starter ship you choose. After that, basically everything can be earned in-game and you get access to the verse.
Having a medium sized ship does help with in-game money earning depending on what you’re doing to earn money. People can get quite wealthy just running bounties with a small fighter, or mining with the smaller mining ships. But even then, if you are in an org, make a few friends, or even if you just ask to borrow a ship in global chat people will happily lend you one. Ships and the utility they provide are very easy to come by. (Edit: you can also rent ships with in-game currency)
Once you build up some knowledge, earning money in-game doesn’t become a giant barrier. The ships you earn in-game typically persist for a few patch cycles (depending on the features being released, some of which require database wipes) I would not say SC is Pay to Win, at most there’s some convenience of having at least once medium-ish ship that’s attributed to your account.
So there are still two games in development; Star Citizen and Squadron 42. S42 is a single player campaign that they’re developing more or less behind closed doors, SC is an open-ended MMO sandbox that is playable at the moment.
SC currently is divided into ~100-player shards/servers. You log on, connect to the verse and it drops you into one of those shards. As it is now, every session it tries to assign you to your previous shard, but if its full it just bumps you into a different one. In the near-term they want to allow you to wait to reconnect to that server if its full, so you can keep revisiting the same one.
The long-term goal is still to create one (or more likely a handful) of very large regional shards. A major milestone for that was reached this year, in that they began implementing some of the long-promised persistence features. I could talk at length about that but this is getting long, so if you want more detail just ask.
This will depend on who you ask. There are missions to run (FPS bunkers, derelicts, delivery/item recovery, missing persons, bounties etc.) you can also go do things like mine, salvage, haul cargo, bounty hunt criminal players, or become a pirate and take other people’s cargo. There are in-world race tracks you can go to, players have created some cool racing orgs with player-run events and stuff. There are also some recurring official events, some pve, some pvp (some buggy, some less so)
One of the most fun experiences I personally had was one of the in-game events, Xenothreat. Basically you have to go with other players and fight off waves of enemy npc ships, protect transport cargo ships, and recover cargo from the destroyed transports. You do it all at the same time and you kind of have a choice to go to the destroyed ships, unload the cargo to your own and deliver it, or you can fly to protect those people against incoming fighters.
There are also purely PVP events that recur, like Jumptown, where you basically go and fight over a drug lab on a moon that just spawns free drugs while the event is active. Orgs will come and lock it down on some servers, while others a solo can just slip in unnoticed and skim some loot.
It’s very cool when it works, and kind of gives you a sense of what the game is aiming to become.
There are also two “modules” Star Marine (FPS round-based PVP) and Arena Commander (Racing, dogfighting, wave defense etc.). These are outside the MMO universe, and are sort of mini-games. They’ve been neglected for a while, but they just announced recently they are releasing a lot of improvements for them (better UI, matchmaking, new maps etc.)
To put it in a nutshell, the most fun for me comes out of player paths converging while doing stuff in the world, you hear people talk about “emergent gameplay” and that is what Star Citizen is aiming to create, a big sandbox with stuff to push people together and make stories out of it.
Spec/performance seems to vary. I have a fairly beefy system (RTX 2080 S, Ryzen 9 3900, lots of cheap Chinese RAM) and the client-side stuff generally runs pretty good for me, but it can vary from patch to patch but has progressively gotten better over the last few years. If you do install it, installing it on an SSD will give you the biggest benefit. Game size currently sits at around 90Gb.
The game is still in very active development though, so I think they optimize it to the point that its playable without spending too much time trying to optimize stuff that is being iterated upon.
This would be the part where I need to stress that Star Citizen can be really rough sometimes. Imagine a bucket of water that is being filled, the water is always churning a little and occasionally if some big feature comes along it gets dropped in and causes a lot of waves and chaos for a bit before things smooth back down. That’s what playing SC is currently like. The bucket is not full of water yet, it’s never fully calm and polished, and you need to be ok with some choppy turbulence sometimes, but the bucket continues to always fill.
I love the game and I can talk about it forever, but this above section is really important for anyone to understand, my explanations here are not to hype the game as perfect, it’s a struggle. Let it be known that I am a masochist who is interested by and enjoys the struggle. If you are interested in the game, I always tell people to wait for a free-fly event, they do them a few times a year.
No subscription is needed. There is a voluntary subscription that gives you perks, like a monthly skin or item, access to a “ship of the month” in-game, access to early concept art and work in progress of features or locations, access to early test versions coming down the pipe to Live etc. None of it is anything necessary for the game itself.
I did a bit of the mining and trading gameplay wipe before last. Haven’t gone back since but I likely will.
Having a great time with myself and a few friends that I’ve drafted. We launched a Mirai Fury from the cargo bay of a Constellation Taurus and it was a blast.
Also found this new community in these post reddit days:
https://lemmy.ml/c/starcitizen
I come back and mess around with it once a year or so. I’m an Original Backer so it’s become kind of an annual tradition at this point. Also I have one of those red AMD ships which I think are kind of rare or something?
Having a great time with myself and a few friends that I’ve drafted. We launched a Mirai Fury from the cargo bay of a Constellation Taurus and it was a blast.
Also found this new community in these post reddit days:
https://lemmy.ml/c/starcitizen
I would like to get into it, I do have a basic ship of some sort from many years ago. But I just can’t run the game well enough and only get 20-30fps in most places.
deleted by creator
I was an original backer and I’ve dabbled on occasion but I’m waiting for more of a tutorial and better technical stability.
deleted by creator
I bought a Reliant Kore game package a few years ago. I didn’t have enough PC horsepower to run it at the time so it just sat. Just before 3.18 came out, I got some upgrades and could actually run the game.
I had quite a bit of fun with it before 3.18 came out. Since then, it’s been too buggy to enjoy much gameplay unfortunately. So I’m back to waiting for more updates (and maybe more upgrades on the PC) before I jump back into it.
I did upgrade my Reliant Kore to a cutty black. So I’m looking forward to getting more use out of that ship in the near future.
Yeah, the Cutlass was the first ship I bought in-game with room to walk around in. My friend helped me escape Klescher in that thing, neither of us knew what we were doing and by the time we got out of range of the turrets the thing was just gouting fire and smoke from every pipe and we had to limp out to Kareah to clear our crime stat before we could get it repaired.
It will always have a special place for me, it’s like that old beater car that you got as a teenager. You get better cars later in life, but nothing quite captures the spirit like the first one.
I’ve gotten to fly it a little, hauling scrap for a Vulture pilot. It definitely seems like it’ll be a blast. Here’s hoping they can get things a little more stable in 3.20.
I dropped $90 wayyyyy back in the day and still have my login. I install it again every once in a while to see how things are progressing. Can’t believe how slow the gameplay progress is but I will say the work they’ve done on the engine is really cool. But like… That’s not why I backed the game. I’m not mad about the game, I’ve had my fun testing it out over the years and I like the idea of what it could be, I just don’t expect it to be finished anymore.
I imagine it’s more of a watched-pot kind of situation than it will never finish. Starfield reserved its trademark way back in 2013, but you don’t get the sense that people think it took overly long.
Open development definitely skews people’s perspective on how long development of these big titles takes.
Yeah I’m not saying it’ll never happen, I’m just not hyped for it getting finished like I was in the past.
I got my founders towel in my hanger and a sweet leather interior general purpose spaceship, I’ll be ready whenever it does decide to launch.
The only reason I don’t play currently is due to my PCs CPU being about 9 years old. About to do a rebuild in the next few months.
I enjoyed it when I did play, for me it was more about discovery. I had a few PvP battles which were fun, not that iwas any good. Flying around in a group was great, especially when they implemented linked quantum jumps
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This thread scratched the itch to reinstall it. I see it’s 3.19 now. Has the dumpster fire been put out?
Nvm, I’m dumb and missed where you wrote that it looks like the bugs have smoothed out. I’ll give it a shot!
3.19.1! It’s been much better so far (fingers crossed). With the freefly over, no major events going on and this stability patch out it might be good timing to get back in.
hey, so racing was probably my favorite thing to do back when I originally bought the game (late 2015)
what is available in the racing gameplay now? is it still checkpoint based with leaderboards or can you actually race against other people at the same time?
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thanks for the info!
I’m gonna update my client right now to take a look!
(just hope performance has improved since the last time I logged in)
Honestly, the game does work on a Steam Deck, though with some caveats due to the low amount of RAM - ILW was low single-digit FPS due to it.
I wouldn’t consider it a good experience, but more than performant enough to join up with friends to be a turret gunner or gunboat pilot.
I play it occasionally. I generally have runs of good times and then runs of bad times, 30ks, random explosions/deaths. I would say I have gotten enough fun out of the starter pack that it is worth it. I probably wouldn’t pledge if I could go back in time, but I do enjoy the Vulture, so I hope they go back and make salvage profitable again, so you can make good money on something besides just bounty hunting, since most other stuff isn’t that profitable on a aUEC/time ratio. Things have been wonky for the past bit after Invictus, so I’m waiting for the next update to roll up to the live PU.
Regarding profitability, my understanding is that they shift that kind of thing around to incentivize people to test a given feature. Sometimes it will be bounty hunting, mining, salvage etc. But in the end the balance will come back around.
It can definitely be frustrating if you like a given thing though. I know people really liked salvage because it was sort of a chill way to do something without involving yourself in combat. Perhaps with the new salvage missions there will be better opportunity for cash.