
My very first PC was a 386 Pentium that I purchased with my own money in the early ’90s. And I dearly loved that machine, reveling in the wonders of Windows 3.1, configuring Autoexec.bat, and going on adventures in amazing titles like Star Trek 25th Anniversary, Master of Orion, and Doom. But for a while there, the hot ticket that everyone was talking about was Wing Commander 2, and you best believe that I was there shoving in Disc 1 of 15 to play the best space sim ever made.
It’s safe to say that I have strong feelings for the Wing Commander games and the space fantasy that they offered to me during that decade. So you might believe that I would be a prime candidate to hop on Chris Roberts’ bandwagon and cheer Star Citizen — the spiritual successor to the Wing Commander and Freelancer games that I so loved. But I’m not, and that bugs me. Why is it hard to get on board with this project?
Pledging the stars
When it was announced back in fall 2012, Star Citizen was huge news not just for the MMO industry but for video games in general. Chris Roberts’ name had serious pull, and his next project tugged hard on the nostalgic strings that attached so many fans back to his famous works. It exploded onto the crowdfunding scene, raking in sums of money that weren’t seen in this space before. With a gigantic pool of money, a strong vision, great talent, and a broad pool of fans, success was all but assured.
Yet we’re now in the 13th year since this announcement and have yet to see the full potential of Star Citizen arrive. Sure, there are hangars and alphas and partially playable spaces, but this isn’t a full launch. It’s a tease with a bare minimum product that’s been stringing players along since Obama’s first presidential term.
On paper, I really love a lot about this project. As much as I like fantasy, sci-fi is where my geeky heart lives — and I’ve been dying for a great space sim. It’s an area that’s only seen limited engagement and success in the MMO genre, and thus should be prime for a World of Warcraft-like giant to stomp into town and take over. For the longest time, that’s what everyone believed Star Citizen would be.
There’s this promise of a game that’s so fantastic that it fully satisfies anyone’s desires. And that’s what we’ve been fed by RSI for over a decade. It’s easy to pledge the stars when you don’t actually have to make good on those promises for a long, long time (if ever).
Riding on the back of that promise, the studio began selling outrageously priced starships players couldn’t use to their full potential. And once players began buying those with the belief that the game was just right around the corner, Star Citizen revved up its sunken cost fallacy machine. You were either hooked deep into it, or you found yourself horrified at the naked display of greed.
Biting off more than it can chew
Listen, I’m not here to do an expert analysis on Star Citizen or vent about it. I’m simply a fan of space sims who can’t see this project as anything other than a good idea that experienced the largest feature creep I’ve ever seen and then expanded to the point where it became an unwieldy beast of studios and sales of pretend ships that didn’t have much of a chance to make good on any of its goals.
I see Star Citizen‘s development like how I used to play Sim City. My problem is that every time I started a new virtual burg, I would try to do a lot of everything all at once and absolutely fail at accomplishing any of it. The only way to succeed was to start small and reasonable, building outward only when the core town was stable and sure.
In another universe, RSI would’ve put out a smaller but fully functioning MMO space sim within a few years of that 2012 announcement, growing it steadily from there. Instead, it tried to bite off everything all at once, and now there’s no chance that it can achieve anything other than partial viability.
If Star Citizen does, within my lifetime, launch for real, I’m game for trying it out. But it’s not getting any of my hope — or money — before then. One red flag would be enough to warn me off, but this project is fluttering with them.
