CONTENTSPrologueThe Insomnia Best Game of All Time Award: Star CitizenThank you God"There has never been anything like it"How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the WipeThe Chow Hall DramaToo Good to be TrueThe Most Released Game of All Time
The Year of Chris RobertsThe Coolest Thing You'll Ever OwnStar Race, or The Whitest Game EverGo On, Play Some More SteamCitizen AnnihilationThe Birth of Quantum GamingThe Project Game In Your GarageThe Greatest Screenshot EverThe Most Released Game of All TimeA few days ago was The Cult's 1-year anniversary in
Star Citizen (August 6, 1 PM UTC, to be exact [
> ]), and I was planning to do something special about it, maybe run an all-day session or something. In the event, I don't remember what I did, I probably slept in or was otherwise occupied, but I never removed the item from my tasklist, and so today, 12 days later, I decided to honor the occasion with a new chapter in my
Videogame Art essay on the game explaining what motivated me to finally get into it just over a year ago.
I had of course been aware of the game for years, but not super-interested in it because I thought it was a "space game", which of course it isn't (you can spend your whole playtime on a planet without ever leaving the atmosphere). That's one of the many misconceptions that persist about the game, since no one writes about it. Another misconception is that the game is not "released". Another that it must "make back its investment". The list of misconceptions is endless, as you'd expect of one of the highest-IQ games ever that the public therefore struggles to grasp, and no one seems to manage to write intelligently about. But let's take a few of these misconceptions, some of the chief ones, one by one, and finally explode them here as a way to celebrate The Cult's 1-year anniversary in the game.
So first off,
Star Citizen is not a "space game"—or at least it no longer is. I don't know at what exact point in time it became possible to spend your whole playtime on a planet, but at least ever since The Cult got into the game, it has been possible, for two of the planets: Hurston and microTech (and it's coming soon to Crusader too in the next update, which adds more floating platforms on which you can take missions). You can fly or drive across these planets to all kinds of ground or air missions without ever leaving their atmospheres (or "atmo" as players call them). "Space game" btw is a BAD thing for a game to be, something which I think I have already talked about in my
Out Run essay. Space games are boring because SPACE is boring, it is EMPTY, and therefore BORING. Capish? It shouldn't be hard to grasp this, unless you're autistic. The only interesting things in space are the PLANETS, but once you're on a planet, THE GAME IS NO LONGER A SPACE GAME, with space having become merely the way in which you get between planets. Now you might say that many space games have planets, but they aren't real planets because you can't go on them: they're just dots in the background, barely larger than points of light in the sky. It is only very recently, due to improvements in hardware tech, that we've seen space games add actual planets that you can visit and roam on, and in fact
Star Citizen is probably one of the first ones. I think that Elite piece of shit added them AFTER
Star Citizen, and No Man's Faggotry has randomly floating planets in space but with no orbits or rotation lol, really a faggot's understanding of space. Meanwhile a bunch of survival-builders such as
Space Engineers,
Empyrion,
Starbase and the like—games that is to say which hail from the
Rust tradition, as opposed to the space sim tradition—do feature planets, but they are barebones and ugly; depressing places really; certainly places you wouldn't want to spend any time on to the point where even the barren boring emptiness of the space that surrounds them seems more attractive than them.
Star Citizen's planets, meanwhile, are MORE ATTRACTIVE THAN SINGLEPLAYER SANDBOX ENVIRONMENTS like your GTAs or Far Crys or whatever, which is a stupendous achievement for a "space game". Moreover,
Star Citizen's planets aren't barren, like all other planets in games ever: they feature entire freakin' cities, in one case even a planet-spanning city with 2 trillion citizens! That's why you can spend so much time on a
Star Citizen planet: because it is a gorgeous fully-fleshed environment, uniquely among space games. I mean, once you're IN a
Star Citizen city, it looks and plays exactly like any GTA or Shenmue to the point where you wouldn't even know there is space and that you can go to it if you saw someone playing the game and you didn't know what game they're playing, and for what other space game can you say this? That's how
Star Citizen TRANSCENDS the "space game" label, to become a UNIVERSE game, or more simply a metaverse. And btw, yes I played
Wing Commander on release and loved it, despite it being a space game, but at least that was a SPACE OPERA game, with a level of plot and drama worthy of Hollywood, and THAT'S what kept me playing, NOT the empty barren boringness of space! Apart from that I ABSOLUTELY FUCKING HATE SPACE GAMES, whether we're talking the original
Elite (which I played for half an hour in the '80s and hated), or
Master of Orion, which I've already reviewed at length and which despite what everyone else is saying is merely a mediocre game, and not by any means a 4X as everyone else thinks it is.
So STOP referring to
Star Citizen as a "space game" and get a fucking clue: it is a new genre, and this genre is called "metaverse" because I just baptized it thus, because that's the best and most accurate way to understand it. And to grasp the revolutionary nature of the tech powering this new genre, watch the "Pupil to Planet" video CIG released a good 7 years ago:
Star Citizen: From Pupil to Planet
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yLTm8DZ8s4
@DamonCzanik wrote:This, for me... is when the project ballooned FARRR beyond its original scope. Making planets is easy (NMS, and E:D do it). Making them interesting, feel alive, and unique is something else. It can't feel like the same planet with a different color sky and grass. It required them to make stuff explorable: cities, an entire city planet, a floating city, dynamic weather, outposts, towns, apartments, wreckages, fauna, bases, caves, trains, planetary mining, prison planets, varying levels of gravity, gas giants, ringed planets, different biomes, trees, dust storms, clouds, blizzards, orbiting space stations, hospitals, nightclubs, bars, refineries, environmental dangers (freezing, overheating, winds, etc.), new server tech, flora, rivers, canyons, cars, speeder bikes, tanks, food, etc. Why is SC taking so long? This. Because making a believable universe with free exploration, interesting planets and locations isn't easy. They had to dump old stuff, and it's almost like they decided to make a new game from scratch here.
It's taking forever! Still, I'm glad they did. Walking from a space station, to my ship, flying down to a planet, grabbing my space suit, walking around then out of my ship, and taking my first steps on a new planet... all without a loading screen? It's what I've wanted since I was a kid. Nobody else does it like this.
@finalform11 wrote:Honestly, without planets being what they are now I would not have jumped on. I've had some of my best gaming moments in SC thanks to this one addition and how amazing it is, rolling into a desert planet with ZDF while War Children is being played over someone's headset before we do a 25v25 battle...
@shaggnar2014 wrote:In-engine footage doesn't mean a lot. But in-engine footage rendered in real-time sure as hell does. Great work.
@ORYG1N wrote:Dear god, you people are creating art in the form of a living, breathing universe! Every time I see something new from Star Citizen I get more and more excited!
@commanderdon4300 wrote:This video brought tears to my eyes, it is like the game I have always wanted but never thought they would be able to make.
You have never seen a game engine that powerful: everything else is a Game Boy microgame in comparison. It even has a name, it's called the Star Engine, though you'll never hear of it from journalists because they're too retarded to know about it. They'd rather talk about how rolling on the floor for 100 hours is game of the year experience. And it probably is—if you're a midwit, and can't parse anything more complex.
So that was one of the reasons I was never in a hurry to get into
Star Citizen: because I hate space games, and I had mistakenly thought this was what it is. In my defense, this WAS what the game was SUPPOSED to be, back when it was first announced: a space-focused game where the only interaction with planets would be via small "landing zones" navigable via menus or at most limited FPS controls. But eventually a programmer showed Chris Roberts that the engine could handle rendering entire planets in "millimeter detail", as CR puts it, and so, once the funding also exploded and allowed for it, the entire game was reworked to feature full planetary surfaces.
But all the above was lost to me in the early days, since I wasn't following the game closely enough to learn of these things. And then in 2017 CIG made waves during CitizenCon 2947 by demonstrating a planet-spanning city that was instantly hailed as "pretty much Coruscant". That's when journalists finally started to notice the game beyond its budget, and several breathless articles were written about it, and that's when I saw the segment where they take off from the city and land in a space station overlooking it, all seamless in real-time with no loading screens. Watch CR's keynote at 12:53 for the planet, and at 25:15 for the space station landing.
STAR CITIZEN: CitizenCon 2947 - Chris Roberts' Keynote Address
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGcG0g7GsOI
"There isn't really a skybox. Everything is real."@regu1ar_ryan wrote:If this game really turns out great, plays smoothly, and includes all the features they've shown... I cannot imagine playing any other games.
@fraydizs7302 wrote:I second that thought. Like... with as many planets and entire star systems, black holes, discoverable alien life forms as they plan on making, if they actually manage to pull off everything they promised at launch... this will be THE game. How would it even be possible to get bored of this?
@Genesys1040 wrote:The talent in the CIG team is incredible. From music to tech, passing through design, this demo is a work of art.
@gigadude556 wrote:The amount of work you guys put into this project is mind boggling. This is going to be the best game in history, at least for me.
@Holammer wrote:I never expected to see something like this when I played Elite on my humble C64 as a child. What a time to be alive.
@DarkSideSixOfficial wrote:This is no longer a game in development. It's possibly the most expensive Art project now. This is Art.
When I saw this, I finally understood what CR was making, and at that point I was hooked, yet didn't see a reason to jump in yet since none of these features were in the game yet, and there was no clear date on when they would be. So I filed the game in the back of my mind, and forgot about it since I had plenty of other cool games to play at the time and look forward to, specifically
Rust, and all the games in that vein such as
Life is Feudal,
Atlas et al. which were basically delivering what
Star Citizen meant to deliver—a real environment to adventure in, as opposed to old-school videogame "levels"—but at a smaller scale. Those games, however, were already out, and
Star Citizen wasn't, so I focused on what I could play, and got lost in it for years, since these games are so deep they can suck you in for months at a time.
Then a couple years later
Star Citizen again attracted my attention with its trailer for Alpha 3.8. By that point, the planet-spanning city, ArcCorp, was already in, together with several other planets and cities, and the trailer was showcasing the latest version of CIG's planet tech that allowed for far more detailed and realistic planets "with no biomes or repetition", plus a brand-new planet that was built using these tools. Have a look, it's a remarkable watch to this day; you haven't seen anything like it in any other game, and probably won't for many years.
Star Citizen: Alpha 3.8 Now Playable
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAQx7i0 ... PZP7ZdyIAC
The snowstorm, trees and tents blowing in the wind and driving in the snowy conditions blew me away, and in retrospect I should have jumped into the game then and there since unlike the previous videos this one was, after all, titled "Now Playable"; but the stupidity of thinking of the game as "not released" was still stuck to my head from all the misinformation clouding the game online, and I went back to my normal games, filing
Star Citizen once again as something to "keep an eye on" in the future, but even more closely now than before. Around the same time (4 days later in fact), CIG released a
Squadron 42 trailer that was even more impressive, if such a thing is possible; but
Squadron 42 was even less playable than
SC—it was not playable at all, and still isn't—so it didn't change anything about my decision to delay my entry into
Star Citizen. If anything, it reinforced it, as in the back of my mind I probably unconsciously thought I'd wait for
SQ42 to come out so I could use it as my entry point into Chris's "verse", as he and the community were now calling the world they were building.
Squadron 42: 2019 Visual Teaser
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_aCE7gxQOVY
So ultimately the main reason I wasn't in a hurry to get into the game, even after multiple videos convinced me it was a must-play, was because of the "release" faggotry. I thought there's no hurry, since I can always play it later, "on release", or at least closer to "release", so that I'll play a "more complete" game or whatever. But then what happened finally last summer was that a new trailer came out, showcasing the latest version of the game, Alpha 3.17.2, and when I saw that trailer, the whole "release" faggotry collapsed and I just HAD to jump into the game RIGHT THERE AND THEN. I mean for christsake watch this trailer and tell me if the game looks "released" or not to you:
Star Citizen: Alpha 3.17.2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eH0ppWX ... PZP7ZdyIAC
This is a cooler trailer than 99.9% of the games coming out every year on the market, and it's a mere quarterly update! If
SC is not "released" by this point, everything else might as well be considered a fuckin' prototype, since they have way fewer features!!!
So this trailer made the game look like a next-gen PlanetSide, and it blew me away. There's barely any "space" shown in it, by the way; almost all of the scenes are planetside, and even the few space scenes shown look cooler than any space game I've ever seen, with EVA and FPS action inside giant derelict spacecraft that make the game look like
Shattered Horizon or
Boundary in addition to
PlanetSide and even Halo (the Siege of Orison Dynamic Event launched with this update is basically an MMO Halo level).
So at that point, a mere 2 days after the 3.17.2 trailer dropped, I made the "Cult War Journal #9: Star Citizens" post on Patreon and accompanying
Scheduling thread in the forum, and all the rest is history. And here we are, one year later, still putting time into the game every week, tens of thousands of dollars into our fleet, and with an entire new subforum featuring dozens of threads and thousands of posts that is the greatest
Star Citizen resource on the internet [
> ]. And by the way, to clear one more common misconception, spending money on the game is not an "investment", and the game doesn't have to "make its money back", as my friend Ciaróg thought when he tried the game out with us some time ago. He's worried about the game "making its money back", because it's "raised" half a billion dollars; but this is money that we threw at the game with no expectation of—and no right to—a return. Chris Roberts and CIG owe nothing to no one, and they're making quite a nice living out of the project since they're all paid wages above industry average (CR is making $400k a year, for example). So if the game shut down tomorrow, no one would lose anything—apart from the industry losing the best real-time game ever, of course. Which would be a tragedy, and unthinkable at this time when the game is making over 100 million a year and accelerating. HOWEVER, all things must come to an end, and perhaps a global economic downturn will stop people from throwing money at the game (it certainly would stop me), so it's not impossible for the game to shut down at some point, and besides, any one of us might drop dead at any moment and never get to try the best real-time game ever just because the braindead journalists have convinced us that the game is "not released" and we must wait for the "release" to play it. But the "release"—whatever that stupidly outdated term might mean (and for a metaverse in open-ended development it means next to nothing)—might take another decade or more! Are you certain you'll be alive at that time? Plenty of OG backers have died in the last few years, without even seeing the coolest stuff like the planets, and much is made in the community about this real tragedy. We're talking about day 1 people way more invested than me, who flew around to CitizenCons when there was no more to the game than a hangar to walk around your ships in. And these people are now DEAD and will NEVER see the GLORY that they funded! It's almost like I feel a MORAL OBLIGATION to fully explore and enjoy the game in their honor! The game certainly wouldn't exist without them, since I didn't bother to fund it before buying my measly $45 game package last year.
To recap:
1.
Star Citizen is not a "space game": it is an open-world sandbox game on a galactic scale, or as I prefer to call it, a metaverse game.
2.
Star Citizen is the biggest crowdfunded project of all time, and
precisely for this reason it doesn't have investors or shareholders to "pay back". That's why its design can be so ambitious and open-ended: because only Chris Roberts controls it, and he makes $400k a year doing so.
3.
Star Citizen is OUT NOW and is even the #10 most played online game, by some metrics, and quickly rising in the rankings, receiving more new content every year than entire other new games thanks to the no fewer than FIVE STUDIOS working on it, totaling 1,100 employess AND RISING (they had 68 job openings last time I checked). Check this playlist for trailers of its quarterly updates to get a sense of the sheer amount of new content and technologies that are packed into the game every few months:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=P ... PZP7ZdyIAC
In conclusion: there's nothing that Chris Roberts and CIG need to do to attract anyone's attention; no gate they need to pass to get the "okay" from the press that their game is suitable now for players to jump into it and enjoy it ("released"). Chris Roberts and CIG are WHOLE DECADES ahead of ANY CONCEIVABLE COMPETITION and their game is therefore THE MOST RELEASED GAME OF ALL TIME, and now it's up to each individual player to figure this out and hop aboard, because the devs aren't waiting for anyone, and the future doesn't need every single person's approval to go ahead. It just needs enough people to fund it, and
Star Citizen already has more than enough. Anyone beyond that just needs to ask themselves if they are interested in the future, and if they want to be a part of it or not.
So, are you? And do you?
