Star Citizen - game identity crisis - real design conflicts

…so, “What kind of a game are CI or Cloud Imperium making?”

We know the genre, it’s science fiction. We know the year, it’s 2949. We know (instinctively) that that’s as far as they’ve got. The original KickStarter pitch kinda set the design flavour as ‘world war 2 dog-fighting in space’ but even films like Star Wars have g-dampeners because of the insane torque of space combat machines.

But there’s a more sinsiter conceptual spectre hanging over development that never seems to be address and (from all the evidence of released footage of both SQ42 i.e. single-player variant called Squadron 42, or SC i.e. the multi-player sandbox called Star Citizen) it’s understandably hard to put one’s finger on.

• Is it the fact that Items 2.0 has only recently been introduced?
• Is it the fact that Planetary Landing has only recently been introduced?
• Is it the fact that CI are no longer making the game that was pledged in 2012?

Of course, it’s all of these things, and a few more, but mostly it’s about, “What is the player’s relationship with this game?”

And by relationship with the game I mean, “Is it an adult game, or a game for kids?”

I also mean, “Is it a sim game for nerds, or is it a fun game for the masses?”

But I can also mean, “Are the tools of the multiplayer sandbox enough, or does the player need more story, more interfaces, more hand-holding?”

And these three questions aren’t either mutually relevant or mutually exclusive but they all have MASSIVE IMPACTS on how you design the content of and interaction with and systems of control for the game.

I asked myself this question a couple of years ago, in the above graphic. As soon as I saw early builds. It was evident to me that CI don’t wanna go anywhere near this question. Not only do they not want to talk about it, they want to keep their options wide open. Publicly at least. Just in case. In case of what? Surely a game team has to know what it’s making, so that it can actively contribute. Games aren’t made by one person dictating everything. They’re made by teams of creative individuals. Otherwise you get hideous productionline scenarios where gaming factories kick out product for EA and the like.

And should we stop calling it a ‘game’?

Do we have to invent new marketing terminology for what Star Citizen might eventally evolve into? It’s a sci-fi product but it doesn’t appear to be anything like Eve Online or Elite Dangerous, AND THAT’S A GOOD THING. And while SC does ‘borrow’ from its neighbours, there’s nothing worse than Product Magpie-ism that sees ‘the shiny’ in all things around it and tries to meld them into The Experiential Homogeny. But it’s got this Best Damn Space Sim MMO tag uncomfortably associated with it. And that’s heavy with consequences, trying to cater to all those markets but not be beholding to any of them….

Star Citizen now needs to put on its Big Boy Pants and start proudly stating its exact intentions as a thing you might buy into. Or to put it another way, “A useful way to share some of your time and money with others.” If it’s not a ‘game’ what’s with all the gamey/geeky name over head stuff or even worse in SC’s case names of those in your Group or Party which (as you can see from the image below) can highlight players who are 2.5 kilometers away?

It looks like a kids game but it can’t be a kids game, because kids aren’t represented in this game. All the inhabitants of ‘the verse’, as Chris calls his gaming territory, are adults. There are no plans to include child-characters into ‘the verse’. No one is ever going to celebrate the first conception and no one is ever going to revel in the first birth in the verse. Player is going to be spared ‘that realism’.

Plus, you know that with city-air-quality fashions like this bag-head, the kids are gonna try this at home. They just are. And the first one to die because of this game… etc. And then there’s the racist/factionalist element that’s rarely discusse aka Tribalism which always leads to Us vs Them, or verbal depersonalisation of one’s enemies. For example:

So, it’s an adult adventure, with bars, where you can buy drinks? Does that linearly extrapolate to space truckers or space tycoons renting out ‘professional entertainment’ for their professional long-haul between star systems? Should the ‘game’ introduce a hands-on pound and grind functionality for all the sordid delights of ‘a galaxy of opportunity’ and ‘nice easy sales’ for those who are of a capitalist mindset? Should the game include people trafficking? Alien species trafficking? Live animal trafficking? Safari-style animal slaughter gameplay? Scorched Earth Economics? Armageddon simulators? Rebirth generators?

A ‘verse that’s this open, “Can be everything to every player,” right?

Well, no it can’t, because then you have an on-going and never-ending tier-zero mulch of potential interaction systems that don’t really ever get fleshed out or fully cater to ANY OF THE AFOREMENTIONED GAMING ATROCITIES. There’s not even a unified model for Crowds in game; scatter, curiousity, alarm, anger, mob revenge, so scratch cities. There’s not even a unified solution for ladders, ffs, so scratch unified locomotion. In fact, there’s no locomotion that doesn’t take place on the gaming plane i.e. scrambling up hills or across uneven surfaces hasn’t really been addressed to any covincing level yet, even with the recent addition of a German IK-solution for foot placement.

Foot placement isn’t the ability for a group of players to manually drag a Size-6 Hurston Dynamics scatter cannon across rough terrain, water, bridges, oceans and then manhandle it onto a space ship. There is no group play whatsoever unless you mean ‘the internet’ embed’d into the hideos overlay 2D interface this game suffers from. Yes, the game has taken two steps back with such an early introduction of planetary landing because it BROKE their carrier-launched space-shooter sales pitch. And because all the star systems are planar, the whole mechanic of the game is TWO DIMENSIONAL IN STRUCTURE.

Six years since this game went into full production and still the answer to the question, “So what is this game I’m flying?” has yet to be answered.