Star Citizen! Seriously, makes me feel like a kid every time I boot it up. None of the pay to win DLC nonsense either. If there's a ship or piece of equipment you want, you can just make enough money in the course of playing the game to get it eventually. Plus, it's one of the only games in recent memory that can put my 3090 to good use. The graphics the engine spits out are so impressive, people have started making movies with it and they're not bad!
This is still a thing? What actual gameplay is there in the game now? Last I saw they had a hangar and some crappy FPS demo and seemed like a total money-grab... it's better these days? Is it actually released or still in perpetual early access?
It seems very broad and very shallow, like an engine proof of concept more than an actual game... how is this the result of ten years of effort?? Mass Effect had three games in that timespan, The Old Republic reinvented itself and added space combat in less time, and so did Warframe...
I know that for the past 3 or 4 years they've basically rebuilt the backend in micro services on K8s, so that they can scale the game horizontally and add the really crazy persistence features they have planned. I think they founded a separate company just to create this new graph database to support the persistence features as well. I think a lot of the delays have come from that work and wanting a game like Mass Effect, but where 100's of people could be playing and interacting with each other concurrently.
I only found SC a couple years ago during the height of the pandemic. I just had a great time flying around in the giant space ships with my friends and I haven't spent much money on it, so it's hard for me to be too upset about the delays.
I love ripping on my friends who play it, but it's graphically impressive and could definitely tax a graphics card. It's hard to separate the idea of the game from the fact that those friends have spent thousands on in-game stuff and the gameplay doesn't look very compelling to me, beyond the graphics.
I certainly haven't spent thousands and I do feel like anyone that's spending $1000's on a video game is pretty far gone anyways to be perfectly honest.
As for the game play, I can only speak for myself, but I mean I'm having fun, so that's enough for me. I also only picked it up during the pandemic, so progress has appeared to be far faster from my perspective than those following along for 10+(?) years.
Well last night I played for a few hours with a friend. We met up at a space station and hopped into my 3 person ship, which I had stored a small car in its cargo hold previously. Then we did some mercenary contracts. We attacked some criminals holed up in bunkers on some moons of the planet Crusader. The bunker was guarded at the surface level by a few large automated repeater turrets, so we landed 10 KM away on the other side of some terrain to break line of sight between the turrets and our ship. Then we got the car out of the cargo hold and drove to the bunker and snuck in and attacked our targets, looted, etc.
We made a good deal of cash from this which we can use to purchase new equipment, new ship modules, or new ships.
I also was pleasantly surprised by the mining gameplay. It's a lot more fun than I expected and almost its own mini game.
In the last patch of this year they'll be adding a salvage/scavenging mechanic that let's you extract and recycle raw materials from recently destroyed ships to repair your own ship with or sell for cash.
These are a few of the ways you can play and broadly speaking I enjoy most of them. Does that answer your question?
