The Allure of Star Citizen: A Buyer's Guide

A curious individual's introduction to the star citizen project

Word Count: 4433

Published Jan 27th, 2024

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Star Citizen is one of the most incredible games to exist both in planned scope and what already exists for people to play. It’s also one of the most broken, infuriating games I’ve ever played. And yet I continue to play it. What even is Star citizen? What pros and cons are there to the game? How does the monetization system work? Why do I play it? And more importantly, should you subject yourself to Star Citizen as well?

What is Star Citizen?

Plainly put, Star Citizen is an open world MMORPG that takes place in space. It features 100 player lobbies (at the time of writing), and has a local gravity system that allows free movement inside moving spaceships, regardless of orientation or location. Star Citizen is also firmly a systematic game, prioritizing the freeform nature of its systems over a more straightforward ideology. This results in a lot of consequential gameplay that emerges from systems interacting with each other rather than pre-defined quests driving gameplay flow. This results in both a replayability factor that sparks joy and a level of flow in the gameplay that can turn a simple hauling mission into a cutthroat, vendetta-driven quest for revenge. This flow extends to other areas in the game, most notably, in loading screens! There aren’t any! Once you load in, it’s a seamless experience, start to end. And once you realize this game has fully scaled walkable/ drivable planets, and space stations scattered everywhere around the system, this lack of loading screens becomes something truly awesome.

Before I can talk about anything else though, let’s get into how the game works.

Gameplay

At a base level, gameplay consists of a few distinct “loops” that allow the player to gain in-game credits that can be spent on ships, which in turn allow the player to access different loops, or improve performance in other loops. For example:

Eddie likes bounty hunting. He has a Mustang Alpha, which is an entry level fighter ship. He plays a bunch of bounty hunting missions until he saves up a lot of credits. Now he can either purchase something like a Cutlass Blue to improve his performance at bounty hunting, or instead buy a Prospector to try his hand at the mining gameplay loop.

There are a plethora of defined gameplay loops. These include the following:

Regarding the flow I mentioned earlier, the nature of the game’s systems and the way these loops are structured, many loops overlap each other. This is what drives the flow of gameplay. Here’s an example of this in action:

Dana is a hauler. She buys goods in bulk for cheap at one location, loads them onto her ship, and brings them to another location, selling them at a higher price there for a profit. Rex, having a ship with good firepower, decides that he wants dana’s goods without having to pay for them upfront. So, he intercepts her after she buys and shoots her ship down, stealing the goods.

This is the Pirating gameplay loop.

However, by doing this, he has now obtained a crimestat. This puts him up on the bounty hunting database. Emily has been doing bounties and finds Rex’s bounty. She accepts it, hunts him down and collects her reward.

This is the bounty hunting gameplay loop.

Quinn also has a ship with good firepower and is offering their services for a small fee. Dana doesn’t want to lose all her investment again, so she hires Quinn.

This is the ship combat gameplay loop.

This is only really one example of a pretty common systematic emergence in star citizen. It’s truly incredible how well systems are built to link with each other and even themselves.

These loops aren’t your only options, however. Star citizen, being a systematic game, defines systems and allows players to do what they wish with them. This allows you to do stupid things to an amazing degree. Want to sneak onto random peoples’ ships and mess with their shit? Go ahead! Want to see the biggest vehicle you can fit in the trunk of your Drake Corsair? Time to find out! (So far it’s a C8R Pisces). And the best part about this is:

Multiplayer

Guess what? There’s a reason this game is an MMO! And thank the gods it is, because this game is easily 10 times more fun with friends.

All of this stupidity that you get up to solo gets punched up to an 11 when you’re doing it with friends. You wanna put tanks on large ships and play battleship with your friends? Fire in the hole! You want to have a hover quad rally where you see who stays alive the longest? Rev the engines! Heck, let’s drive the hover quads off a moving ship and see if they can survive the fall.

Having backup also enhances loop gameplay, as now you can have someone in a cargo ship move the salvage from your vulture into their ship, allowing longer salvage runs and higher profits. You can haul cargo in groups to deter piracy, as a squad of hauling ships is significantly more intimidating than just one.

Bottom line, If you get into this game make sure you either cyberbully your friends into playing with you, or just straight up join an org. In terms of orgs, there are plenty of options out there (here are the listings) and here’s mine. Whatever you do, play this game with other people!

Ships

There are a lot of ships (you can check out a comprehensive and descriptive list here) But to summarize, ships are the bread and butter of star citizen. As of right now, we don’t have base building yet, so ships are essentially the sole late game toys that you can throw your hard earned in-game currency at. Predominantly, ships are seperated by two main distinctions: Size and Function. Size is primarily a function of number of crew members that the ship can accomodate (A stat that is usually lower than officially stated). Function is usually any specializations that the ship has that makes it better at or allows it to do a certain gameplay loop. More granular listings can be found at the site I provided above. In terms of bigger and more expensive ships, though, you don’t need to get something huge to have a good time. Most of the time, large expensive ships require a crew and are close to inoperable solo. Small ships like the Drake Cutter and the Aegis Avenger Titan are great solo; Ships like the Drake Cutlass and the Misc freelancer are the perfect balance between flyable solo but better with friends; and Huge ships like the RSI Constellation and the Anvil Carrack are borderline unplayable solo. I’d encourage those who are curious to look around at what the game offers because it’s truly beautiful what CIG have been able to make here.

All you really need to know about ships is that they’re the game’s backbone. You can’t do anything in Star citizen without a ship. Wanna mine? Need a ship. Wanna salvage? Need a ship. Wanna haul? Need a ship. You get the idea. To be clear, there are also non-ship related activities, but you’re gonna need a ship to get to them.

Scope

The game’s scope is jaw dropping. As you’ve seen throughout this section, there are so many damn systems and ideas. This game has something for almost everyone. It’s incredible how many different games Star Citizen has managed to combine. That’s why it’s taken 12 years and counting. Most of the time, sky high scope is a developer’s deathwish. In this case, I don’t believe it is, as they have taken the time and raised the money to do high scope correctly. There are, however, a lot more planned features and systems that are a part of this scope that I have left out above, as they don’t actually exist in game yet. And here’s where we get to:

The Drawbacks

You’re probably thinking: “Wow this sounds great! How did I not hear when this was released?” Well, the answer is twofold. First, the game hasn’t actually released yet, and second, it’s been in alpha (not beta) for 12 years now, with really no end in sight. There are a few issues with this being the case, the biggest being:

The bugs

Dear god there are so many bugs. Ask any star citizen player their favorite bug moment and they’ll prattle on for hours. One time a friend dropped me a shotgun on my ship while we were flying and the ship just straight up exploded. The game has semi-regular crashes called 30k’s that just thanos snap the world to smithereens, sending everyone in there back to the main menu, potentially losing them progress and/or money. Ladders are hell, and elevators should be avoided whilst in quantum. These are just a handful of the numerous bugs that exist.

Performance

The game needs a good PC to run. I’ve put together a list with the minimum specs that I’d recommend for running this thing enjoyably at 1080p resolution. I’ve taken some tips from the public facing telemetry site so feel free to check that out as well for more detailed data. At the time of writing, most of these reccomendations are above base spec, aiming for an ideal experience, so if you’re a bit below spec, you should be fine depending how below spec you are and in which areas.

The subpar performance coupled with the fact that the game is only really supported on windows, also makes it harder than usual to get friends into it, which is a damn shame.

The balance issues

The game is also pretty bad off in terms of balancing. Patch to patch, you’ll be going back and forth between dropping 25 mil on an anvil carrack for the memes and barely scrounging up a few hundred k like a poor victorian orphan.

The point

Point being, this game is half broken, and anyone considering getting into it needs to understand this. It’s definitely not broken to the point of being unplayable, but it’s definitely broken. Why isn’t it being fixed? Well that leads us neatly into:

The development strategy

CIG, the developers of star citizen, have put a focus on making the game feature complete before polishing out the non-game-breaking bugs and balance issues. Now this isn’t inherently a “drawback”, per se. Polishing and keeping a game in pristine quality takes a lot of dev power and would make the already sky high scope of the game take far longer to complete than it already will. (Which is long. Very long.) This strategy lends itself very well to fast prototyping and development, which I believe will benefit the game in the long run. Additionally, It’s ideal for private builds of the game that aren’t made for the consumer side. However, star citizen is very much consumer facing, which brings a lot of the more ignorable issues in private development to the surface.

My point isn’t to discount the many bugs and grievances that players have; It’s to contextualize them. There are so many valid reasons why players can and should be unhappy with the game’s current state. I’m among them in many respects, however, I also see the long term vision and I would rather continue as things are and get to see more systems and actual progress being made than have something polished being perpetually worked on at a snail’s pace. Every prospective player should decide if this is a sacrifice they’re willing to make, though. If you’re not happy with this development style then you’re well within your rights to wait until the game is more complete and stable to invest your time and effort into it. I don’t fault that decision; Just know there is a decision to make here.

Devtime

The amount of time taken to develop this game, 12 years as of now, is vast. I personally don’t see a full beta release happening anytime before 2030. I’d be happy to be proven wrong, however, the speed at which development is going and the sheer scope of the project all point to years of devtime remaining, even with this expededited development strategy. There’s another force at work here as well: Squadron 42. Squadron is the singleplayer game designed by CIG alongside Star Citizen. They chose to direct their main focus onto it rather than Star citizen for a few years, slowing down SC development considerably, however, It was recently declared feature complete, and now developers are moving back to Star Citizen, porting over the many finished systems from there into Star Citizen. I’d predict a 2025-2026 release for Squadron, but I still don’t know how much this will speed up development. Regardless, 2024 is looking like a very promising year for the project, and I’m looking forward to seeing what progress is made.

Monetization

The monetization for star citizen is a subject of controversy, for good reason; The game has raised over 600 Million dollars of pure crowdfunding. There are rewards for spending over $25,000 in the game’s “pledge store” on mostly just ships. This is an immense amount of money, and just looking at that as well as the cost of just buying a ship from the pledge store would probably be enough to make most casual gamers weep. However, this is not the full picture. Allow me to explain.

In-game availability

Every ship that can be purchased with real money is currently, or will eventually be, completely available in game for in game currency, no credit card required. The usual timeline is that on release, a ship is exclusive to those who bought it with real money for about one patch cycle, which is usually a handful of months, then is made fully available to all players through a reasonable amount of in game cash. This means that you don’t need to buy anything more than a $45 game package to fully enjoy the game.

The Pledge store.

The pledge store is the digital retailer of star citizen, selling game packages, ships, in game items, and even physical merch for real life money. You can also purchase upgrades between ships and only pay the difference between the two. The main focus though, is ships. A small ship will run you ~60-80 dollars, an medium ship that can be well run solo can head up into the $120-130 range, and bigger ships just scale from there. A sizable multicrew ship can cost you upwards of $300, a huge ship can cost 500 or more, and capital class ships are comfortably over the ghastly $1000 mark.

What the F*@k?!

Is an understandable reaction. “If there is no real barrier to buying ships in game then why buy ships at all? And why are they so incredibly expensive!?” First off, good questions. The first answer to both of these is: to support the game’s development. These are primarily marketed as a way to support and fund the game, as the game is solely crowdfunded via these very sales. Even if you choose not to buy anything, (as I earlier outlined as 100% a possibility), you’re still benefitting from others’ use of the pledge store in their resources redirected towards the game’s development. Next, There are some creature comforts of owning a ship bought with real money, such as keeping it when a server reset comes around (where everything is wiped and everyone starts from scratch), or with certain ships, being able to customize and name them. But, I’ll say it again, you really don’t gotta spend shit! If you think this is garbage, splendid! Buy the game and never look back. If you want a slightly nicer ship, you can throw 20 bucks at the game and be totally happy playing the game from there. If you love the game and really want to support it while gaining a literal armada of ships, then that option is available to you as well.

The key point here is that this is not a vital part of the game, and can be ignored with little to no consequenses.

Who is this for?

Star citizen is a game by game developers for game developers. There also might happen to be other people who enjoy the game, but I am firmly convinced that game developers are the main body of players and fans of this game, especially in its current state. I know for sure that’s why I’m as into it as I am. I know that every second this game spends in development a developer at CIG out there is living their best life and I’m so happy for them. But other than the developers out there who will spend their first play session inspecting the glass materials and making conjecture about refraction equations, who is this game for? And more importantly, should you play it?

Audience

First of all, there isn’t exatly one main target audience, (barring game developers of course); You’ll get a lot of different people with many varied gaming backgrounds playing star citizen. Chill gamers opt for the relaxing gameplay loops such as salvage, mining, and hauling. More “hardcore” gamers will opt for FPS/ ship combat or just straight up piracy. And the options in between can be fun for almost any kind of gamer willing to put up with the downsides I described above. If you’re looking for a multiplayer experience to play with friends, however, I’d definitely encourage you to overlook the downsides more than you already would.

Should I buy it?

Here’s a handy dandy flowchart to help you decide if you should get into it or not.

Do you think there are cool things that you’d like to experience in Star citizen?

  • No
    • Don’t buy it.
  • Yes
  • Are you willing to live with the downsides?
    • Yes
      • Buy it.
    • No
    • Do you have friends that you’d like to play it with or are you planning on joining an org and playing with them?
      • Yes
        • Consider buying it
      • No
        • Wait until it’s in a better state.

Those of you have decided to wait or not buy it, I’m glad I was able to help you make a better informed deicision. Those who have decided to buy it, I have a few tips below on how to get the best out of the onboarding experience.

I decided to get it! What do I do now?

First off, Welcome to the verse! Here’s a quick intro to the game so you can have the best onboarding experience.

Steps

  1. First off you’re either going to head to one of webpages, depending on what ship you want to start with.
    1. Anyone who just wants the game go here. I fully reccommend this option over the other one, as you can always upgrade your ship if you wish.
    2. If you insist on getting a better ship to boot, go here instead.

      It also might be worth snooping around the 2nd link to see if there are any good sales going on. I got my first ship, the drake cutter, during a halloween sale where it sold me the ship & starter package for only $45 and threw in a green paint job as well. Since there have been a few sales, lowering starter packs to $40, so it’s always a good idea to be on the lookout!

  2. Next, You’re going to choose which ship you want to start with.
    1. If you went with option 1 in the step above, you’ll be choosing between the RSI Aurora MR and the CO Mustang Alpha. The Aurora is better equipped for general use with 3 SCU of storage, and has a small walkable interior with a bed, (which allows you to bed-log while in space). The Mustang can only really do ship combat and has no interior, bed, or storage. It is, however, significantly better at combat than the aurora is.
    2. If you’ve opted for a better ship, the viable starters other than the Aurora and the Mustang would be, in order of ascending price: The Drake Cutter, The Aegis Avenger Titan, and the CO Nomad. If you’re a sucker for alien tech, check out the Syulen as well. I wouldn’t reccommend anything over the nomad unless you really want a solid multicrew vessel. If that is something you want, pick between the drake cutlass and the misc freelancer. I, again, don’t reccommend this, as you can buy ships in game with ingame credits or you can upgrade your starter to another ship later on.
  3. Now it’s gonna ask you to sign in. Press “Enlist Now” to create an account.

    Here is where you can put in referral codes as well, so make sure to find one and plug it in. These will give you additional starting credits (both in the alpha and on full release) and if there’s an event on, potentially some other goodies. The most recent couple I can recall are a full set of pretty armor and matching weapons, and a literal CO Hoverquad with a skin & LTI. I’d reccommend asking a friend who already plays (if you have one) for theirs, then looking elsewhere for one. Here’s mine if you feel so inclined: STAR-C6PX-673X. Regardless of whose it is, make sure put one in there!

  4. Pay for the package and download the launcher. If for some reason you can’t find it, the link to download it is here. This will download the launcher and not the actual game, so make sure to allocate that 100GB of SSD space and buckle up.
  5. While it’s downloading, find yourself an org! As per my advice above, here are a couple links!
    1. The org Listings
    2. My Org and our Discord

      Alternatively, feel free to google relevant orgs and skip the listings. I actually found my first org through googling!

  6. If at all possible, once the game is done downloading, get someone in your org to show you around, or find a youtube video to do so. Here’s the one I used but it is a much better experience if you’re doing it with other players so I encourage you to find an org and ask someone there to show you the ropes!

    If you can’t find any that suit your interests, please join my org’s discord and ask for a quick intro! We welcome visitors and prospective org members alike, and would be more than happy to give you an intro to the game.

And that’s it for onboarding! There’s a lot more to this game that I plan to go over in future blog posts, however this is all you need to get started learning the ropes. To sign off, I’ll leave a bunch of other resources here at the bottom. Thank you so much for reading; I really appreciate it.

Closing Notes

Here are just a few more things i’m putting here at the end that might be helpful!

Resources

Don’t concern yourself too much with these to start, but they do get very helpful later in game once you really get into it.

Disclaimers

I am not affiliated whatsoever with CIG or any related group that would lend additional bias to this article. This is an independent assessment of the Star Citizen project from an outsider perspective. Still, I would like to cite aspects of my situation that could contribute to any relevant biases that I may conciously or unconciously hold so that you may read this article with them in mind.

While these involvments help contextualize this article better, I try my utmost to keep my work as unbiased as it can be.

Support me

If you think this post was helpful and you want to support me doing more stuff like this, you can find a link to my ko-fi here. Every donation, regardless of amount, helps my work immensely and will likely go towards buying more coffee, which is essential in the creation of things like this. Thanks so much again for reading, have a great day, and I hope to see you in the verse.

~ Kai

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