Spoiler:
spoiler
Almost everything being hyped in this year's CitizenCON has been hyped in previous years, often under slightly different naming. 
Spoiler:
Almost everything being hyped in this year's CitizenCON has been hyped in previous years, often under slightly different naming.
As a normie who's only heard a few bits of Star Citizen second hand, my mental image for "only Star Citizen can do this" is the player character insrantly falling to the planet's core while assuming limb configurations not yet seen by man because the physics engine is too busy simulating the inner parts of a coffee machine in the room next door.
Maybe just shooting for "generic AAA" wouldn't be so bad at this point
You might really enjoy this video series. It's old now, but almost nothing has meaningfully changed in Star Citizen since these stopped coming out so the videos are still timely and very fucking funny, especially when they get into the "ship sales Tetris" sequence and "whale fracking."
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7SIP0NDfM2yyHKfRmCAociCcJKZHHY0E
There's been quite a few great spaceship games like this in the past 10 or so years, too.
Best spaceship game out right now is Cosmoteer, IMO. It's 2D and mostly created by one guy (he managed to hire some additional help after getting some cash). The game still gets major updates - for free - with more on the way.
The next best spaceship game is Faster Than Light, but it was finished years ago and the devs have moved on to other projects. They'll update the game for bugs and maintenance, but not major content updates.
When the super cinematic epic interactive movie about space fascist Roman LARPers is also a super open ended do anything be anything sandbox of infinite spankbank wish fulfillment possibilities just like le OASIS in the Ready Player Onerinos where each mission will allow infinite deviation from course but also still make sense as a le epic cinematic masterpiece of space fascist Roman LARPing. Also there will be all the same tired story beats from Wing Commander but worse but that's okay because you can wander off into space at any time or hide in the wankpod
That's their horizons for what's impressive? Video game tech from over two decades ago? Truly this justifies the decade of development hell and the small country's worth of GDP burnt.
They're stale, boring, aging reactionary gamedads that haven't really gotten committed to an actually new game since... fuck... Crysis, maybe?
One of the prevalent slogans among the gamedads in the official forums really is "make space sims great again" so you can guess the boomer-ass and Gen-X-junior-boomer-ass overlap.
If you look at CitizenCON attendee footage, it's
aged up a few decades.
The game that was largely just a way to wank off over how much money you spent on stupid video game bullshit? Couldn't be MY Star Citizen patriots!
Store Citizen
used CryEngine as a basis for its jank machine because Chris Roberts is very very smart and saw the le epic graphics in a small group shooter intended for island sized maps and decided "this should be the engine of an entire fucking star system, then 100 of them!"
Maybe if all your "cool systems" bring you to gameplay indistinguishable from CoD they weren't so cool after all
Saying "fine gunplay is enough"? The fans really tolerate anything, even getting an average shooter when you were supposed to get a space flight game.
A mediocre game with unremarkable gameplay is the greatest thing ever if invisible background tech magic is happening