How Broken is Star Citizen?

Short version, things aren't great right now. I'm still hopeful they get better. With major patches just around the corner, maybe everything will change, however in my opinion Alpha 3.23.1 and 3.24 represent a step backwards in playability, not forwards.

I’ve been here for a long time, and I’m usually the person saying “this is Alpha, let it cook.” This is just the first patch cycle that I’ve lost a chunk of hope, and this video is more to just get stuff off of my chest to my small following.

#starcitizen #bestgame #spacegames

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[qutatron]

Yesterday I got into my Cutty Red to collect some gasping weevil eggs and maze from the bunker contract.
I flew to the bunker, parked nearby, got into the STV, drove to the bunker, destroyed the turrets with a railgun, went back to get the ship, parked it at the entrance to the building, went down and after a rather demanding fight I noticed that the drugs had not spawned at all in object. Waste of time. So I got on the ship, packed it in a safe place, logged out to take a similar contract again and try again.
This time, after reaching the destination and trying to get out of the cutlass, my STV exploded and the character's body disappeared along with all the equipment and the expensive railgun. However, I managed to destroy the turret using Cutty Red, parked, and this time the drugs were already in the bunker. Good thing I took a spare multitool with me. After almost 3 hours and many deaths, I collected several dozen packages of drugs and went to sell them. Near the scrapyard I met a patrol who wanted to scan my ship, I gained a crime stat, which automatically canceled my mission, and all the drugs simply disappeared from the hold. I was left with nothing. It's just a tragedy how many missions have been broken since 3.23. there is nothing to do in the game.

[christiankirkenes]

I think CIG doesn't realise:
I'm a starship captain. Not a forklift operator. Even in the real world, I got someone else to load vehicles

[zedorda]

The costs related to playing Star Citizen should deliver a premium experience.

[williamhux]

Finally, someone says exactly how many of us feel....thanks!

[thommyqc]

I totally agree with you. I love the immersion of the game but at a certain extent. Now as I can see from you guy's Evocati testing 3.24 it's not going to be a fun game anymore. I'm a casual player that do not have a lot of time to play, so having to spend a hour getting ready to go on a mission is game breaking for me. Keep up the great work mate.

[Karackal]

The thing is, SC isn't a study sim either. As long as I can't fly unpowered Keplerian orbits around celestial bodies I'll laugh in the face of everyone who use "realism" to defend any design decision in this game. Currently, SC feels like a tedium simulator: I don't mind running through different stores and clicking a lot of buttons to get geared up. I do mind having it to do all over again each time my spacecraft explodes randomly because the server wasn't feeling well. Doing the same boring thing over and over again, never getting to the good parts isn't a game; it's a day job. And I happen to already have one of these.

[antwan]

6243 hours space trucking in elite dangerous and listening to star citizen videos.

[Scott-zeyr]

There is a bug where you have no pitch and yaw for the prospector with key board and mouse, or sticks. So far not a lot of help from CIG to fix this other than wipe my files and redo all my setting and hot keys. I should just be able to play the game. It takes me almost an hour to get where I need to be, kitted out for what I am going to do. If I am lucky I have two hours to play 3 times a week. But I spend most of my time trying to find a work around or giving up.

[Seeking_Asylum_]

I'm in the same boat as you. I play a ton of hours and I have put more money into the game than I would like to admit. I have never been down on the game at all until now. I agree with you on all points here. Besides everything you have mentioned here. I'm also blowing up randomly sometimes 2 or 3 times an hour. I hope to start seeing a silver lining soon.

[RN]

I'm glad you used the word 'cumbersome' as that's the perfect description of the UI and design of much of the physicalized stuff so far. It's not a problem that it's 'immersive' it's not a problem that it's 'complex', it's a problem that it's slow and fiddly to use and often makes zero sense. For example, why must we go through so many steps to drink some water? Like in what way does it improve the experience to have six or seven steps to drink and discard a bottle of water and is implemented in a way that breaks if you're SITTING IN A PILOT SEAT!? I think it's unlikely at this point that they're going to shift direction so I'm also asking myself if this is going to be a game I want to play much even once it gets out of alpha. The direction they're going will instead probably soon require us to play a minigame to unscrew the cap on the Cruz or pop the tab on the can before we can drink it and still won't work if you're piloting something.

[ShigueS]

Don't understand why you are getting so much hate. I find your perspective very reasonable and I agree that SC shouldn't "waste our time" with mundane tasks that are cool when done sometimes, but cant get really tedious when constantly repeated.

[ScarredCitizen]

I've been feeling this way for a long time. Finally, I had my own meltdown the other day.

[j.d.]

I think master modes are meh, but that's how I felt about the previous flight model too, so it's not saying much.
Maybe the problem is less the flight model and more that they need to find a way to stick with it and refine it, but obviously that only works when you are passionate about something, which they seem to be about master modes and that's what's giving me at least some hope they will turn this weird system into something nice.

[cyberrascal]

Hi ya. To be honest I think that you have voiced most of the things that most of the community are feeling and thinking at the moment. Personally I couldn't agree with you more. Since the the latest patch dropped from the start I have been noticing way more issues than the previous version. Things are just broken all over the place and things that have been broken for ages have still not been fixed and so many of those issues arent even that big but are often very annoying. I have been finding it quite difficult to get motivated to play at all with the way things are and i have also noticed that so many SC content creators are currently making content for other games while SC is in its current state. Normally I'm all over jumptown but since they nerfed the value of maze I have found its just not worth the stress and the grind. God forbid you should go there and dare to shoot at anyone. this usually just results in making other players cry or at best you just leave with a crimestat. I'm not even sure what jumptown is supposed to be anymore. Everyone seems to just want it to be empty so they can fill their boots and get free cash and that's pretty much all it is these days. The previous jumptown was pretty empty most of the time and I cant for the life of me understand how nerfing the value of the maze helps with that when everything else has stayed pretty much the same. There were times where I spent hours stacking and loading maze without seeing a single person. Yeah it was nice to get some easy money to buy some more ships to test out but in the end i just gave up out of sheer boredom. There needs to be some more interesting mechanics and incentives that give this event the identity it sorely needs. Master modes is just boring and the new weapon stats are completely illogical. The most satisfying guns to use in the game have been nerfed into oblivion. I mean who doesn't love the the brrrr of a ballistic repeater or a gatling? It was bad enough that we had such limited ammo before the nerf and now we still have really limited ammo and the guns are now ineffective. How do u get to a conclusion where this is a solution or even a temp solution? I used to enjoy the salvaging mechanic before that got destroyed. It been a bit better since xenothreat ended as i discovered there are still lots of dead ships at the wreck site that i can salvage so i have been doing a bit of that to keep my wallet happy. In terms of really small changes that could have been made while they were changing the in game pricing would have been to increase the value of salvaged weapons and system components to make it more of a worthwhile venture. this would have been very easy for them to do. and lastly its bloody annoying to lose ships for no reason that i have grafted to get for no reason every time there is a new patch. I lost a Cutlass Black, a Hurricane and my beloved Valkyrie in the last one and now that a valk is nearly 20 mil to buy again its just not worth it. There isn't even any justification to make that ship that expensive given it doesn't really offer much more value than a cutlass just without the pilot fire power that the cutlass has. at least the prowler has some decent firepower and as much as I hate it so does the cutlass silver. It should have at least 4 size 3 pilot controlled guns if they are gonna ask such silly money for it. Even when they upgraded the size of the weapons on all ships they gave it stock size 3 laser repeaters but the punchline was that you can only swap them out for size 2 guns and if you do that u cant go back to the size 3 repeaters again and are stuck with size 2s. I mean who is checking this stuff? Stevie Wonder. Even in spite if all that i still love the thought of what it could be . Its still a damn cool looking ship. Sorry but I needed that valk rant. While there are many things that I am looking forward to in 3.24 like the cargo updates and hangars there are some major concerns about the item banks. This is looking like its going to be a major cluster f!!k. Like it doesn't already take long enough to get ready to do missions. I can see people bypassing this completely with storage crates in their hangars which we still cant get them to put labels on. As a placeholder they could colour code them which would have been easy given that they have just updated the look of all of them. Sometimes I feel like I'm being railroaded into doing things they way that cig wants us to play the game even though some of their ideologies are going completely against the grain of what the majority of the community not only wants but also needs. On a positive I have found that the game has been more playable in terms of some of the bugs and not having to deal with the constant 30k dramas has been a bonus but there are times when its completely unplayable. The ship expo was pretty much stop motion at best a lot of the time and this is an event that you want streamers to be able to cover so to have it being that broken was a real shame. These things feed the bad publicity and stops people from wanting to try the game. I hate to think how many people came in for the free fly to experience a 5 fps ship expo which would have been their 1st chance to see all the ships for the 1st time. That being said I do love this game and its still my favourite game of all time when it works. I just wish they would get their shit together and stop making stupid decisions. I just find it frustrating to see them get some things so right to then have something stupid go and ruin it. Mega rant over!

[OrvilleX]

The game have a steep learning curve and like you said more key binds and more and more complication, damn is a game. I understand inmersión but complication is just too much and unnecessary. It’s going to keep a lot of people out of the game in my humble opinion. 3.24 it’s going to get worse and CIG is not getting it or just lost direction. I personally don’t have a lot of time due to having a full time job like a normal guy but now takes too much time to prepare and it’s going to get worst on 3.24. Ohh well I hope there is a plan for all casual gamers.

[jamieford]

Yeeted out of the Carrack in quantum.
Killed by an Ursa door.
Landed a half full reclaimer in Lorville and a graphic glitch blew me up.

Its never been like this before...

[justinwilson]

I left just before the server wipe. I started playing it just the other day, and i agree this is more broken. I have spent 2 days trying to do missions and not a single merc mission works. I could do trade and cargo but id rather go over to elite dangerous to do that, fyi i havent played elite in over 2 years. It was when i looked at doing population control on wild life for 5k i new i wont be back for a while

[sephiridan]

Thank you so much for this video! You've done a great job of explaining exactly what I've been feeling and trying to explain to some of my SC friends myself. Very much in agreement with what you've said about realism vs. immersion!

[amalekedomite]

They wont reward you with more in-game money for doing the legwork because the whole point of the game is to get you to buy ships, and if you have ingame money you will be less likely to buy ships.

[quigonlynn]

Just tried this for the first time today. I get that its still in progress but I literally couldn't even get out of my room at the start or do basic things...