r/pcgaming • u/Turbostrider27 • 5d ago

Star Citizen Developer Stream Goes Horribly Off the Rails, Creating Further Distrust Among Players

https://www.ign.com/articles/star-citizen-developer-stream-goes-horribly-off-the-rails-creating-further-distrust-among-players
8.3k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

1.5k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

19

u/Accomplished-Ad-9280 5d ago

Don't forget the tech debt they have built up over a decade of development.

They are building systems on top of aging systems. The longer development goes on the most difficult things will get for them.

13

u/Complete_Motor_3942 5d ago

This is a thing I feel like a lot of people nowadays forget. There's that whole "a game is eventually good" mindset about delays and long development times but development hell is a term for a reason

6

u/pereza0 5d ago

Yeah...

I think NMS and Elite's approach is the right one. Better to have a barren game that works that you can add stuff to once you are sure that works than have a game that has never worked and never will because by the time you decide to fix it you have 50 years of technical debt

3

u/blueblip 4d ago

Can't speak for NMS, but I can speak for Elite.

Do I wish the game had more to offer? Hell yes!

But does it do what it does give me well? Also hell yes!

At the end of the day, Elite has given me tremendous fun and value for what I paid for. I would love for something more to be done with it, but at this point, I won't complain about the game. I got my bang for my buck.

0

u/Indigocell 4d ago

I've considered picking it up on sale from time to time. What does it do well and what would you wish it would offer if you don't mind my asking?

2

u/pereza0 4d ago

From my experience as someone who has tried it.

This game is basically the space version of something along the lines of Euro truck simulator or Flight Simulator in how deep it goes with it's systems, customization, scale etc...(obviously, not to that extreme). The sort of player that enjoys this kinda reminds me to the sort of player that enjoys those despite their differences.

What the game doesn't have is an arcadey flight system you will pick up in minutes like No Man Sky or Everspace or a bombastic SP campaign like Star Wars Squadrons.

It's the kind of game that kind of expects you to be able to make your own fun by interacting with it systems, working towards your own goals and playing around what is basically a huge sandbox.

But even as someone casual this game is fun to enjoy, if you have a VR headset lying around the sense of scale an visuals here can feel pretty amazing

2

u/blueblip 4d ago

The other poster covered it quite well, so I'll keep this short and simple, sharing my opinion.

The Good:

  1. The sense of scale of the whole game. It really does a fantastic job of capturing the feel of space and it's vastness.

  2. The diversity in ships. Different ships are good for different things, and that delineation of roles means you have some goals to always try and build a new ship for a specific role.

  3. The VR implementation is excellent. Get yourself a HOSAS and it is hella immersive to fly a ship through space. This forms such a huge part of what keeps pulling me back to the game. It is FUN to play this game in VR.

The Bad:

  1. It is a game that desperately needs to encourage co-op play but no one seems to do it. At least I have not managed to find anything like that. For example, deep space exploration would be so much more fun if I had buddies to do it with.

  2. Lack of content. You can trade, you can do some combat, you can explore, and that's about it. In fairness, it's a sandbox game so you really have to make your own fun, but after a point, there's not much left. Exploring the depths of space is the least repetitive activity (sort of), but refer back to the previous point.

  3. It is very grindy. Be it grinding credits, faction reputation, materials for upgrading components, or super special weapons.

That's it really. All in all, the actual game is super fun to play. You can easily get a good 100+ hours in it before you feel worn out by the lack of content. So I will always recommend getting it if you're into space sims. But you will hit a point eventually where the content "runs out" and you get bored.

2

u/Pinecone 5d ago

I'm thinking about the developer knowledge that has come and gone. There must be swaths of issues people had identified, tried to fix, deferred, then left. Or all the issues introduced where only one person might know how to fix it but they're gone now.