Star Citizen remains one of my favourite worlds to catch up on, not just because of the crazed amount of research I put into that first demon-sized article about them that I wrote- but due to the fact that I genuinely believe that this has to be one of the longest running games industry lol-cows of all time. To perhaps match the absurdity of Yandere Simulator- although I suspect we might actually a working game out of Cloud Imperium at this point, as opposed to Yandere Dev who I expect to just give up working on the game and announce it's actually totally feature complete literally any day now. There's just really no matching the comedy of basic conceptual errors on the development front that Chris Roberts has stumbled into time and time again which paint a terrible picture for someone who, I genuinely believe, wants to deliver a game. Although at this point, I'll but wanting to keep the cash cow milking is a petty present concern on his mind at all times too. Considering, you know, he's got half his family employed to the nowhere project at this point!
Of course, even though Star Citizen has good and royally scuppered any chance they had of creating that brilliantly effectively open world swansong game that would have supplanted the industry, through pure merit of turning it into such a money-sink hell hole that no casual gamer will ever touch it in a million years- utterly destroying his potential for building fans with even the most well publicised launch in history: that isn't to say there's nothing of value tucked into Star Citizen. I still remember that sneak peak we got at the long belated Squadron 42 campaign mode for the game which looked- I'm going to be honest- really freakin' good! Like a solid Sci-fi themed COD campaign that you blast through on a spare weekend and walk away with the kind of fond memories that last a decade- I would definitely give that kind of game my time of day! Provided, you know, they ever actually release it!
But of course that single player game is not the draw for them- because that isn't where the Cloud Imperium game get off selling their thousands of dollars worth of ships to people in their Alpha which at this point might as well be considered the full game because you ain't getting nothing better anytime soon! Where's the recurrent monetisation going to come into a product you buy once? Nah, they need to siphon your money and funds as much as possible if Roberts wants to keep eating out the lap of luxury for the rest of his natural life- which is why this promising Single Player footage we've seen probably won't start materialising into anything real for at least another year. Until then, the man must protect his baby at all costs.
Which is what leads to a very interesting conundrum involving where the team place their priorities in development. Namely the amount of effort it has recently been revealed that they put into hunting down and removing 'cheaters' from the game with as much prejudice as possible. Now this is nothing new, of course- Cloud Imperium famously have paper thin skin and jealously guard their inner forums like a cadre of degenerate discord moderators, (they probably have a Discord too nowadays, come to think about it) but the fervour of the cheater problem really drove the team into overcharge. Over 600 cheaters have revealed to have been banned in a recent purge- which is valued work for any multiplayer game. Provided the game is finished.
Because you see- Star Citizen still hasn't launched. It still can only be accessed directly from their storefront as part of a 'starter pack' with fluctuating prices throughout the year. These are supposed to be those gooey formative years where the product is given shape and purpose. Systems are ironed out, scope is- well scope should have probably been solved before entering Alpha but this is Cloud Imperium so I guess they're arguing about scope literally every other day- these are the months that should not matter. Of course, bug fixing is important- but you won't find most developers hunting down the riff raff of their Alpha playtests. Then again how many Alpha playtests last multiple years? These are unprecedented waters we tread.
The big 'cheat' which was brutally afflicting the game wasn't really as fundamentally compromising as the old GTA Online cheat engine issues nor the bot spam in Team Fortress 2. All it actually was was an exploit that allowed players to generate vast amounts of ingame currency at little investment of their own- which of course means it threatened the very fabric of Cloud Imperium as a company. How could they possibly allow such a brazen assault at their supposed bottom line as was present in this glitch? How could they go on when such filth dared to undermine the Star Citizen money mill? When people can get what they want without dedicating their entire lives or wallets to the company, that issue overrides all over concerns- because unfortunately that is bottom line of what Star Citizen is.
The game exists to funnel you into a never-ending cycle of grinding for the sake of grinding. What once existed as a utopian depiction of open space exploration underlying a championing of 'player chase' has rotted and given away to a much more rank and insidious cycle of locking players into loops that incentivises retention and plays up the 'fear of missing out' for the brand new ship the team squeeze out of the increasingly unfocused universe of design which supposedly unifies the brand. There's talent behind the scenes, programmers, artists, modellers- but it feels like there's no head at the top of it all to bring all those pieces together. Even when it comes to design philosophy, everything has denigrated over time to the point where the game feels past it's prime before release.
There was a time when I thought Star Citizen was a scam that was funnelling money out of the dumb and overly excited. There was a time when I considered Star Citizen to be an overly ambitious project undetaken by a team too high on their own supply to realise the pipe dream they'd fallen into. Now I see Star Citizen as a successor to the Grand Theft Auto Online model. A amusement park of promises, pay extortionate prices to test out some preliminary rides, hear promises about how cool the next update will be and then grimace through your disappointment when it doesn't go the way you want it to. Only in that context, where the visage is all you have, wouldn't it make sense to protect that integrity with everything you have?
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