Anna and the Bunches

There has never been a better time to jump into Star Citizen. The long-belabored alpha is finally starting to come together as a game. There is classic space sim action: piloting spaceships, dogfighting in asteroid belts, manning turrets. If flying spaceships isn’t your speed, you can also engage in FPS shooter-style combat at various points of interest. There’s also more laid-back gameplay for the Space Trucker: hauling, mining, and salvaging. And all of it happens in an immersive and seamless universe where you can fly right down to a specific spot on a planet, walk out of your ship, and tractor some cargo into your hold. It still has plenty of rough edges, but when it all comes together, it’s an unbeatable space sim experience.

Alpha 4.5 adds Engineering and ship armor, highly anticipated (and delayed) features that start to make the spaceship experience feel even more engaging. Now you can run around repairing your ship’s damaged components, fires can break out on board, and doors and other systems can be monitored, locked, and controlled.

Cloud Imperium Games (CIG) has also recently re-organized the available game packages and given them descriptive names that suggest what the ship is suited to. In theory, this makes choosing a starter ship easier. In practice, some of their chosen monikers feel a bit more like marketing than actual useful signposting. It’s still a solid step up from just presenting new players with a largely meaningless list of ship names, but some new players might like a little guidance. We hope we can give you that here.

This post contains spoilers up to and including “Layer 4” of the game Animal Well. Even explaining what that means is a bit of a spoiler. If you want to avoid spoilers for Animal Well, don’t read this until you are absolutely convinced there is nothing else to do in the game. Then stop reading again if things start to sound unfamiliar.

If you’ve completed the game or don’t care about spoilers, read on. This game isn’t as sensitive to spoilers as, say, Outer Wilds, and some of the puzzles are intended to be solved in collaboration with other players.

Star Citizen can be super frustrating, but it also creates some truly magical moments. Throw in a little narrative license, and it is suddenly a fantastic vehicle for story-making. Here’s a little story based on one adventure from it.

So you’ve watched some Youtube videos or Twitch streams and decided you want to play Star Citizen. Your interest piqued, you go to https://robertsspaceindustries.com and click the “Pledge Store” link, and then, being a naturally thorough and curious sort of person, you click the link that says “View All Game Packages.”

Now you are presented with a full 15 options, ranging in price from $45 to… $1100? What is going on here? A new player has no way to actually judge these relative to each other. You can play during the few “free fly” events scattered throughout the year, but the game can be overwhelming at first, and trying to test drive over a dozen ships while the servers are overloaded is a stressful idea even for many veteran players.

If this is you, and you’ve got decision paralysis, maybe I can help. This is an opinionated guide to choosing which ship to start out with in Star Citizen.

Star Citizen is an incredibly weird game.

I often describe it as “a game I deeply enjoy that I would never recommend to anyone else.” It is next-level buggy. It has a weird, arguably predatory business model. It is the single biggest example of scope creep I have ever seen. Nearly everything in the game is shoddily half-implemented because the scope creep means they’ve never done a real polish pass. The zealous dedication to (sci-fi inflected) realism means that you spend an awful lot of time traveling. (on the planet-side cities you even have to wait for the train, which I have to say just makes me avoid the planet-side cities as much as possible) And it’s been in alpha for a decade, with no signs of a stable release any time soon.

But it scratches some very particular itches—mining, salvaging, hauling goods around the star system—better than any other game I’ve ever seen. If you want a game that gives you the specific experience of living and working in a space opera, it just presses those buttons really well. This “industrial” gameplay is one of my favorite ways to unwind when I just need something soothing and repetitive. It’s like meditation, but with flightsticks and laser noises.

Like most spaceship simulators, the game also has combat, both ship-to-ship and FPS action. This usually doesn’t appeal to me very much. But the other night I teamed up with a couple friends to check out one of the bounty hunting missions the game has to offer. The result was a buggy mess of an experience that was frustrating as hell, but also had a couple moments that sent so much dopamine racing into my brain that I wrote a blog post about it. Which you are now reading. So if an after-action report for a naff space game sounds like a good time, read on. The story has been changed very slightly for narrative flow, but it all happened more or less like this.

When I first played Outer Wilds, I bounced off of it after a few hours. A few months later, I picked it back up and gave it another shot, and it hooked me. By the time I finished it, it was my favorite video game experience of all time. I recommend this game to almost everyone. If you’re reading this, and you like puzzles and mysteries and heartfelt stories about humanity and hope, you should probably play Outer Wilds.

Like every other person who is obssessed with the game, I recommend going in with as little knowledge as you possibly can, because one of the game’s major themes is the joy of discovery. You play this game by learning things, and you can’t unlearn things once you know them. Well, not reliably anyway.

That said, it’s hard to sell someone on a game without telling them something about it. You need to know at least what kind of game you’re playing, what it’s going to ask of you at a basic level.

So read on for my extremely spoiler-free summary of the game. If you go in knowing only this, I think you’ll have a great time. I’ve also got some gameplay tips - they don’t spoil anything, and they will make your journey considerably less frustrating.

For years, I struggled to find the right solution for hosting a simple blog. Nothing quite felt like it fit my needs; it was either too opinionated, not featureful enough, or way too much infrastructure overhead for a simple blog.

This post sat in drafts for years, and is being published as-is. I might update it at some point, but probably not. Sorry!

There are a lot of reasons I might not want someone to knock on or open my office door. I work from home, which means meetings get interrupted. I have sensory processing issues, which means sometimes I can barely deal with human voices. I have an anxiety disorder, which means other times I can’t deal with, well, human interaction.

I mentioned on twitter that I’ve stopped using Github because of their continued support of ICE. To be clear, it’s not just that ICE uses Github. It’s that they think supporting ICE is okay because ICE is responsible for things other than putting children in cages. Their statement misses the point in so many ways, I have very little hope they’ll ever see past their own justifications on this.

So, no more Github. This has some very real impact for me - I’ve used github for a long time, I’ve used its social media features and been a paid subscriber for years. Dropping github is annoying. But we must stop supporting organizations that are in turn supporting fascism. I encourage anyone reading this to follow my lead and give up on github.

I have one last guest post over at Eruditorum Press. This one actually posted almost two months ago, but I forgot to advertise it over here. It’s about the rise of Gamergate and the loss of hope. Again.

This is my fifth and final entry for the SNES Project.