Star Citizen Extra Points (And Thumbnails) (Patreon)

Star Citizen has begun pulling players away from its competitors, Elite Dangerous prime among them. That’s a full game. This is just alpha. That should tell you something. And it would. If becoming the dominant player in this genre was a difficult task to accomplish.

Since release in 2014, Elite’s shallow core mechanics have been neglected further development, in favour of surface level expansion, which I mean both in terms of expansion onto surfaces, but mainly in the sense that that’s just as shallow as everything else. Which is why the only place Elite has truly arrived is squarely in the shadow of Star Citizen.

It has almost as many features! But few of them compare. Because Frontier Developments have a fraction of CIG’s resources, yet they have chosen to chase a breadth of systems instead of the potential depth of their core. The community’s patience has stretched as thin as its world, and for many, Odyssey snapped it.

Elite’s recent attempt to tack on a weak FPS, in a disastrously broken launch for a 40 dollar price tag would make any alternative look attractive. And If No Man’s Sky’s simplicity and crayola aesthetic doesn’t appeal, all Star Citizen has to do is stand there and look pretty. Its genre dominance symbolises little more than the void in the genre.

There is nothing creative about its people, their language, their systems, their morals, their economy, their technology, their religion, philosophy, laws, you name it, if it involves a wildness of thought, Star Citizen doesn’t have it. Its planets have pretty colours, but like No Man’s Sky, the wildness is assumed to be little more than different shades of tree, grass, and river.

Discovering what’s actually available to do in the game as of right now, is the biggest grind of them all. Flash trailers may generate hype, but it’s the greatest failure of the marketing team that it took me as long as it did to discover exactly what I could do, in game, now. I had to learn about the prison system from a fucking BedBananas video, I learned about the combat mechanics from an Ex-Elite Dangerous YouTuber. What new players are going to jump on board, when the only thing you can make out behind the online flame wars, is further obscurity and inspecific marketing from CIG?