As buggy as this game is. I love it
I’ve been playing Star Citizen on and off for about 8 years now, and I’ve basically always had the same cycle with it:
Play obsessively for a few months.
Get frustrated/burnt out.
Take a few months away.
See something cool.
Come crawling back again.
And every single time I come back, I’m reminded why I adore this stupid game so much.
There’s just something about Star Citizen that scratches the open-world space sandbox itch in my brian in a way that literally nothing else has managed to for me.
Obviously, I love the ships.
I love that the different manufacturers actually have their own design language and personality, to the point where you can usually look at the interior of a ship and immediately know whether you’re in a Drake, Crusader, Origin, MISC etc.
I even got into that “architect reviews YouTube guy” becuase I cannot get enough of the effort in some of these ships.
I love how different two play sessions can be:
One night you can basically be a glorified space Evri driver, flying around a system dropping boxes off at outposts. The next you’re stripping the hull off a wreck with a Vulture. Next hauling cargo. Then mining in the middle of nowhere. Onto tracking down bounties. Exploring some random moon or getting involved in a massive player org operation with a load of ships flying around.
And somehow it all exists in the same game.
Obviously I’m not blind to the problems with Star Citizen. It’s been in development forever, patches can be hilariously broken, servers sometimes decide they’ve simply had enough, and right now we seem to be going through another particularly buggy period.
Today I did an interstellar hauling mission from Stanton to Pyro. Spent forever picking up the boxes and dealing with a stutter frame rate and server errors I finally made it to the destination. Only to have my ship bug out and have me fall through the floor and get stuck inside the body of the ship. After a load of wiggling, I fell out of the ship, to then be half stuck in the ground of the planet. The only way out to knock myself over with some boxes. Finally free of the ground, turn around and my ship has been stolen. Rage quit activated.
But I’ll still be thinking about the game, the fun, the potential and I’ll come back, walk through a station, get into one of my ships, open the hangar doors and fly out towards a planet and think… oh yeah. This is why I love Thai game.
There are still moments in this game where I genuinely just stop and look around because it looks incredible. Flying through the clouds at sunset, coming across another player in the middle of nowhere, landing somewhere completely remote, watching a massive ship slowly come into view, or just sitting in the cockpit travelling between planets with music on.
No other game really gives me that same feeling.
Maybe Star Citizen eventually releases as the game we’ve all been waiting for. Maybe it takes another decade. Maybe it never properly “releases” and we just carry on with this weird forever-development thing for years.
At this point, I honestly don’t think I care that much.
As long as they keep building it, adding weird new shit, making ships I definitely don’t need but will somehow convince myself to buy (with credits - they have enough of my real world cash) and giving me this enormous sci-fi sandbox to disappear into every few months, I’ll keep coming back.
It’s buggy, frustrating, ridiculous, occasionally borderline unplayable…
…but fuck me, when Star Citizen works, there really is nothing else quite like it.