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 TimeThe 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 Sum of All GenresThe Incredible Star Citizen
The Incredible Star CitizenThe not-so-long-awaited
Dune: Awakening [
> ] is releasing tomorrow, and I just... can't muster the enthusiasm to try it. If that planet—because the game is basically a planet—was coming to
Star Citizen, I'd be peeing my pants over it, but since it isn't, I just... don't care. Isn't that strange? Put it in
SC, and I am all over it. Put it outside
SC, and I don't give a damn. Why does it work this way? Because I live in
SC's verse, you see, while I don't—and really can't, even if I wanted to, since it's so small—live in whatever the Dune team is making.
And what they're making is a sci-fi planet with 3 vehicles (or is it 4 now?) and no spaceships. Is their planet even in space, since I can't interact with space or even see it? "Trust us, bro, it's there", the programmers say. Meanwhile in the last mission of the 1992 2D RTS
Dune II: The Building of a Dynasty the goddamn EMPEROR arrives FROM ACROSS THE GALAXY to attack you and ruin your day. That 2- or 3-floppy-disk game took the concept of planets, galaxies and science-fiction far more seriously than these programmer clowns do 30+ years later. That's why I can't bring myself to take their game seriously.
Don't get me wrong, compared to previous survival-builders/FP4Xes,
Awakening seems to stack up pretty well, from everything they've shown. And btw, whether the game is FP4X or survival-building depends on whether or not you can conquer territory. If you can, it's FP4X, if you can't, it's survival-building. But I couldn't tell you which of the two
Awakening is, because I can't bring myself to even look into it. I just don't care.
Even the mere IDEA of playing the new Dune produces mental groans in me. Like, they expect me to learn a new UI? A whole-new UI just for a new planet? It's one thing picking up a new fighting or shooting game with a stick and three buttons, where you basically don't need to learn anything because there's nothing to learn. But survival-builders have the most complex mechanics and UIs in all of real-time gaming, so learning a new one is entire hours if not days of training, all the while I STILL haven't learned all of
Star Citizen's mechanics and keybinds after nearly three years of playing it! Just the other day I learned how scanning works, and focus shooting mode, for example. I learn basic functionality all the time in
Star Citizen, and that's without counting the NEW functionality that's added several times a year. And you want me to set all this aside in order to learn A BRAND-NEW FROM THE GROUND UP MECHANICAL SYSTEM AND USER INTERFACE JUST FOR A SINGLE NEW PLANET WHICH DOESN'T EVEN HAVE SPACE AROUND IT AND THREE OR FOUR MISERABLE NEW VEHICLES WHEN
STAR CITIZEN HAS THREE FUCKING HUNDRED??
Let's not even get into how inferior
Awakening's 3 or 4 vehicles are compared to
Star Citizen's. Or its clothes and gear, etc. Everything is far lower fidelity- and functionality-wise. Even its crafting and building—the centerpoint of the game—seem far inferior to what's coming to
Star Citizen later this year. In detail some parts might be superior, but overall there's no comparison:
Star Citizen will send you ACROSS THE STARS IN SPACESHIPS to gather the materials needed to build up parts of your infrastructure. You'll be mining asteroids and liquefying gas giants while the
Awakening players are doing what? Shoveling dirt in a desert? And as for Dune's worms, they'll be in
Star Citizen within a couple of weeks, and with rain and lightning to boot:
My friend recoil isn't one for lengthy treatises on gaming or anything else, but when he opens his mouth to offer an opinion on the state of the industry, he very often nails it. So when, a year or two ago, we were looking at a game announcement touting some new feature, he said "I'll just wait until it comes to
Star Citizen". Damn right that's how it works now! He nailed it! So what will happen is that Chris Roberts will play
Awakening with a notepad next to him, and write down all the features that he likes. Then he'll give that to his producers, and they'll set the teams under them to putting them in the verse. And eventually we'll have all of them available to us, and perfectly compatible with our hundreds of vehicles and items of clothing and gear, and with the exact same UI we've spent years learning, and that'll be the end of that. And
Dune: Awakening will end up being a mere prototype and tech and feature demo for Chris Roberts to evaluate and take from it what he wants, just like the entire rest of the real-time game industry now is for him (and the turn-based one for me). That's what it means to be a metaverse director.
Ultimately I don't even have the TIME to play
Dune: Awakening. Chris Roberts and his producers will make the time because that is their job. THEY are not playing THEIR game, they're merely making it, but I AM playing it, and it takes a hell of a lot of time! Merely in the short-term I need to organize assaults on the Hathor mining/orbital laser platforms for loot and also to get the laser working and follow that route to Wikelo's rewards; prepare for the upcoming sandworm missions in Pyro; train for the Contested Zones so we can gather military- and stealth-grade ship components and also access the Executive Hangars; figure out the Idris layout so that I don't spend ten minutes running around it in circles like an idiot every time I need to find the bathroom; train up the 2-3 new recruits to work well with the rest of us; write the fleet-assembly and command protocols and make sure the Commanders understand them; update our existing specs and add a couple of new ones; get more dark market contacts as a source of rare components, weapons and gear; spend more time running missions and just exploring the newer locations like Distribution Centers, Asteroid Bases, and basically all of Pyro... and that's just off the top of my head: I have an actual notes document with pages and pages of tasks of varying urgency! My list of things to do in the verse rivals my real-life list, and that's BEFORE base-building and territory capture have been put in the game! And you want me to put all that on hold—and for how long? for months?—so I can learn a brand-new UI in order to control 4 vehicles in a desert?
Gimme a break.
Dune: Awakening is just a poor man's
Star Citizen, and my friends and I aren't poor: we've put 60,000 dollars in the game so far, and nearly three years of our (gaming) lives. We aren't gonna put all that on hold so we can invest in a game that will be dead within months of release. Because you just know its programmers will abandon it after a couple of half-assed DLCs. Whoever switches over to
Awakening will spend the next couple of years begging its programmers to add something—anything—to it while they watch
Star Citizen's 1,300 staff add update after update after update to it, and all of it fully compatible with every vehicle and piece of gear they've bought since 2012. Moreover, everything I achieve in
Star Citizen I'll be able to leverage into further achievements in it in the future, but anything achieved in
Dune: Awakening will stay locked in its desert forever. Which sounds like a complete waste of time to me, in comparison.
Again, don't get me wrong:
Dune: Awakening could very well turn out to be the best survival-building/FP4X ever, and if it had come out a few years ago I'd have spent months playing the fuck out of it with anyone who would join me. But it's not the 2010s anymore—the decade of the survival-builders/FP4Xes—it's the 2020s—the decade of the metaverses—and these games are so deep that they demand the player's full attention to a degree no real-time game ever has, making everything else look lame and simplistic in comparison. In the end,
Star Citizen has managed to make survival-builders and FP4Xes seem shallow. And that's a truly incredible achievement.
To be continued...
