[Pfhreak]

I agree with you and disagree with you.

I am not a hardcore supporter of Star Citizen, and I have not put any money towards the game. But I have played the Alpha during their free weekends, and they are slowly making me a believer.

I played a game with three of my friends where we loaded into a space station, jumped into a multicrew ship, and headed out to find our way among the stars. We were able to do things like jump out of the ship on EVAs into open space, jam speeder bikes into the back of other ships and drop them out over the surface of a moon, and generally do awesome (read: silly/idiotic) space adventure stuff.

It's not really a 'game' yet, but they are pretty clearly putting together some sort of experience that is very much playable. It's not enough to make me spend money, but it's closer than anything else I've seen in the genre for sure.

[Agentlien]

As someone who hasn't looked at it closely, does it still feel like a set of diverse tech demos or is it beginning to come together as a cohesive experience?

[Pfhreak]

What I've played:

You start in a space station, you have a set of four ships you can take out to go explore -- a quick racer, a speeder-bike, a small multi-crew gunship, and a mining vessel. You can fly around a single solar system at super-light speed, doing missions, mining, pirate hunting, and generally doing space game stuff (like deliveries, commodity trading, etc.) The basic game loops are there, including player driven quests.

For example, I received a notice that a player had stranded themself on the surface of a moon with no fuel, and needed transport back to the station with some cargo. They were offering N credits. I accepted the mission, got a marker, flew out to the moon and rescued them. They turned in their mission, payed me my reward (I think this was automatic), and then went on their way (presumably to refuel their ship.) It was super slick.

You can buy upgrades for yourself and your ship, and you can fly from space station to the surface of planets with no loading screens or barriers. There's little to no consequences for failure, so that part still feels very demo-y. Lost a ship? Click the 'Gimme my ship' button back at the space station and wait 10 minutes.

It's still janky from a performance and stability standpoint, but it's a prerelease game, so expect that. (FPS stuttering, difficulty connecting with other players in my squad, etc.) Initial load times are very long, and sometimes UI elements don't work correctly.

[kidsnow]

>> payed me

Should be "paid me". I see this so frequently on HN, is this how it is taught in school now?

[Pfhreak]

Nope, just fat fingered that one while typing up my response. I'll keep you in mind if I need someone to check my posts for typos in the future though!

[kidsnow]

It was not meant to be personal, it was a serious, if off-topic, question. For example, check out this search:

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=payed&sort=byDate&prefix&page=...

[karanlyons]

Not everyone speaks English as a first language and “payed” is a completely reasonable assumption given how a bulk of words are conjugated.

[ocdtrekkie]

I personally still feel like it is a set of tech demos at this point. Star Marine could easily be built out into it's own game, but at this juncture is just a way to test FPS mechanics. Arena commander is a focused place to test dogfighting. The hangar is still totally disconnected from the "world", and mostly just a place for you to view your shiny bling.

Probably one of the biggest steps of "convergence" is on the roadmap, in that ArcCorp is currently a separate location from the persistent universe: You can spawn into it and walk around, buy stuff, etc. But the planet isn't in the persistent universe, you can't fly to it. The next major release, 3.4, is supposed to bring that really into the main "world" of the game.

Probably the biggest thing I feel holds it back at this point is that there really isn't a realistic sense of progression and accomplishment yet. There's some missions you can do, you can technically pick up some beta currency that isn't necessarily persistent between releases. Ship insurance times are extremely short, you'll get your ships back free by the same time tomorrow. You still can't get ships without real money, so there's nothing to strive to accomplish in the game at this juncture.

There's a lot of cool mechanical work, the universe is really starting to come together, but unlike other games I play, there isn't yet a "reason I need to go get on Star Citizen".