Star Citizen - sandbox gaming vs scripted gaming

..why the hell are the makers of Star Citizen not spotting this?

They’ve got telemetry, server-time, play-styles and preferred content of EVERYONE WHO’S IN THE ‘VERSE right now. And why are they not seeing that Sandbox Gameplay run by the Players for the Players is the only thing the majority of them are interested in? 50-man battles. Pirate-bounty missions. Drug couriering. And I think it’d be the same even if Careers, Ships and associated Game Mechanics were in. Player’d still be bored with all this ‘introducing another fucking Mission Giver’ on a new planet or this ‘other kind of narrative insertion’ or this ‘you can only play the game how we say’. People are moving away from (and will continue to move away from) that in their droves and just having fun amongst themselves. They literally won’t play the game you want them to…

This gives CIG a problem, “They’re not set up to take advantage of such a rebellion.”

What do I mean by this… well, they want to C.O.N.T.R.O.L. everything that happens in ‘the(ir) verse’. They want an NPC-driven economy. They want (as already discussed) scripted mission givers. They want YOU WILL NEVER RUN THIS GAME only be a tacit participant in the simulation. They know their idea of the game runs without the player. It has to. Or the simulation doesn’t work. The number engines don’t crank. But surely they’re making that kind of game catering to the kind of hand-held player in Squadron 42, a totally scripted and cutscened one-player MIL-sim due for some kind of ‘episode one’ launch late in 2020 now. With episode two due 2022 and episode three due 2024 but they’ll never make schedule unless they’re all set in the same three sectors of ‘the verse’ as episode one because ‘bespoke game level content’ that’s taken ep1 six years to achieve, and still changing, still altering, still not working right. Because it’s a story, in a 3D world with shifting player input. Not some cutscene, though it plays a lot like this…

But you can’t control the verse, it’s… the VERSE, where you can be/do/is anything you want it to be.

And to be able to allow the player to achieve that you need a totally hands-off approach involving nothing but the best SOLID 3D GAMING TOOLS that’ll help the un-expected sandbox experience, like: an interface that works and isn’t just borrowed from the MIL-story game, a quantum-travel mechanic that makes sense, an economy that spans star systems, a method of using elbows on interfaces when carrying boxes, a climbing sim for rocky terrain, ladders that make sense, a group system that’s not all kinds of bullshit, FOIP/VOIP that’s integrated into MobiGlas functionality, faithful-horse ships with personality… instead, it’s all (currently) hammered together from a totally different gaming style i.e. SQ42, scripted and proscriptive.

Star Citizen has to start standing up for its own identity, not blithely using its Big Brother’s sartorial cast-offs that makes it look like a sugar-hyped kid in clown-suit let loose at a crucial corporate business meeting.

Star Citizen is played by citizens of the adult world, not children. And it has to LET THEM BE. Let them live, explore, invent. Have good adult fun. And yes that probably means strip joints, at some point….