Choose My Adventure: Taking the steering wheel of Star Citizen

Star Citizen’s recent free fly event, and in particular the time I spent with MJ and friends riding an extremely swanky ship, has gotten me to dive further into Star Citizen than I ever have previously. During the free week-long rental of various spaceships, I was merely content with enjoying the ambiance of carefully crafted ships that felt like they were built by an obsessive model maker, but now it’s time to actually dig into Star Citizen with this edition of Choose My Adventure.

I’m not lying when I say I haven’t actually played the game. I think my last dive into Star Citizen was during the 1.0 patch series or so, when all you could do was wander around the Self-Land hangar and admire the ship you have with your starter pack. As of this writing, the 3.3 patch has added some more content to dig into — emphasis on some — and I’d like to root around a little bit of everything over the next month. Still, where to start first is where I need your help. First, though, a bit of information on what I have available to me.

Right now I have two ships available to me: the MISC Freelancer and the Aegis Avenger Titan. These ships stood out to me the most during the free fly events, and since I was pretty tired of the dumpy little Aurora MR that came with my starter package, I decided to trade up and improve my hangar options. Just this one time, though.

The Freelancer stands out to me as a great space truck; a sort of Winnebago that’s capable of interstellar flight. It has this workhorse aesthetic that I adore quite a bit and steers like a bus, but in a pleasant sort of way. It feels substantial. Of course, that also means it’s not exactly the most amazing combat ship, but its weapons complement seems like a reasonable array of things to defend myself with.

The Titan, meanwhile, is what I understand to be a great all-arounder. This feels like the kind of starter spacecraft that the Aurora MR wishes it were, with nimble maneuvering, a satisfying bundle of weapons, what appears to be a decent amount of defense, and space enough to at least carry a few things. Plus it has a sleeker and more satisfying shape than the Aurora, which I often referred to as a shuttlecock with a space engine.

Finally, there’s one other option I have floating in my mind and would love some help with: the MISC Prospector, which is effectively a mining ship as its name suggests. I watched one of MOP’s readers Scopique broadcasting some mining on livestream with this particular ship, and mining looked like a huge amount of fun to me. Tedious, but an entertaining tedium like crotchet or cross-stitching, if that makes any sense.

Of course, there’s always pilot’s choice, which basically means I make up my own darn mind and choose the ship I want to pilot, whether it’s for the sake of changing things up or to best suit the parameters of the mission.

So that leads into our first poll: which cockpit seat should I plop myself in to?

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Next is what to do with myself while in-game. The oft-repeated refrain is that Star Citizen just doesn’t have anything to do, and that’s not quite the case. There are things to do, just admittedly not a lot of it or not much of consequence to the machinations of the game’s wider universe. Still, as I mentioned previously, it has been a while since I hopped into the game, and there was even less to do before, so this will all still end up being new territory.

There’s the persistent universe, which has missions you can take up, exploration you can do, and mining to be had. There’s the Arena Commander module, which basically has you entering a dogfight with the ships available and seeing how many waves can be taken out. Then there’s the Star Marine portion, which is essentially the FPS game.

I haven’t really done any of these activities, so I’m wide open to your suggestions. Bear in mind, though, if the mining choice wins out, I am going to have to get a mining ship or find out how to mine otherwise, which I’m pretty sure requires a mining ship.

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All polls will close at 1:00 p.m. on Friday, December 7th, so be sure to get your votes cast and help me traverse the ‘verse. I’ll be sure to report in next week with what I experienced in my opening chosen adventure with more polls. Naturally.

Welcome to Choose My Adventure, the column in which you join Chris each week as he journeys through mystical lands on fantastic adventures – and you get to decide his fate. Which is good because he can often be a pretty indecisive person unless he’s ordering a burger.