I think there's an essential appeal to that childhood fantasy of a game where you can do anything. The thing is, as I grew I realized that it simply wouldn't be really fun to have that much choice in a game. A game needs to be a streamlined, focused experience, not just an open sandbox, because no matter how open that sandbox is, it can never truly be everything, it's simply not possible to have an infinite world that's a parallel to our own, but fanciful and devoid of real consequences.
In other words, I think that the reason why Star Citizen is such a successful grift is the same reason why Ready Player One was so successful: just like the Oasis in the novel/movie, Star Citizen would present this childhood fantasy in a tangible form that we could actually interact with, and people aren't ready to admit to the fact that they were taken in by a promise that simply cannot exist in the real world.
I've been playing Breath of the Wild lately, and while the game gets pretty excessive in how much it'll annoy you with things like rain and weapon durability and horses you can't ride half the time because you can teleport but not your horse, with no real way to work around it except by randomly wandering into a DLC item that just completely erases the problem, it's still an unusually fun open world game. All of its systems work together, you've got a single goal of beating Ganon and everything in the game helps you towards that goal. Horse taming gets you a horse that you'll need to move around to get all the other shit on the map, the cooking system gets you healing items and eventually really powerful buffs you can afford to keep up for every tough fight, shrines increase your HP and energy, seeds increase your weapon slots so that you can deal more damage before finally running out of weapons, etc. There's a ton of different things to do and there's a variety of unique interactions between your powers, but everything works together as a cohesive whole so that you can feel like you can engage with any one part of the game and be rewarded with something worthwhile for it.
Meanwhile, something like Star Citizen is just filled with parasitic design, with all these disjointed systems that are half baked and only really promise to interact with the other systems at a much later date, maybe. The only long term goal seems to be accumulation of credits, but that keeps resetting regularly and the whales in that game already buy the endgame sh it you'd buy with credits anyways.
There's still fun to be had in what exists of that game but the economic incentives of the devs do not line up with making a good, finished, fun game. They make millions of dollars selling ships, so that's what everything else has to be in service of.
on that note, its surprising more games havent become successful minecraft clones/spiritual sequels, because minecraft is way overdue for an upgrade.
all those people are scratching that itch with shitty minecraft mods
yeah but their all so shitty. It just seems like someone would have ran with the formula, I think its been almost 20 years since minecraft came to the scene.
not approving, just my observation. I am definitely interested in a more Dwarf Fortress-y Minecraft, but I feel like that might be sacrilege since DF is too pure of a concept to taint with mortal ambitions of creating a procedurally complex voxel world.
From what I've read about Chris Roberts, all his projects need a steadying hand, or else he goes completely off the rails with scope creep. Seems to be an issue on every project he's worked on, except this time around there's no big bad publisher to keep him focused.
Sniff, zhe promish of inshtant gratification, ash Lacan would shay, delayed infinitely, ish the perfect representation of zhe relationshhip of the shelf to the objet petit a. Zhe Big Ozher, in zhis reshpekt, ish hidden behind zhe sublimated cash flow into zhe developersh pocket.
Star Citizen is a hilarious waste of money, but $2000 spaceships are almost practical in the age of NFTs worth hundreds of thousands, I'm not impressed anymore
Star Citizen is much closer to being a real thing than FSD beta tho. And you at least can't get run over by the Star Citizen digital download.
made some profit on this game by selling my ship with long-term insurance. 30$ turned into 150$
I think the Star Citizen grift will have to collapse before 2050, if only because Chris Roberts will be 82 by then. The real question is whether China moves up its socialism time table the same way they've moved up some of their green energy ones.
pay thousands of dollars for internet spaceships
We already have EVE.
lol star citizen is actually kinda fun but i dunno if the world is ready to hear that
Don't care about either of those but how many years do I have to wait for Ashes of Creation?
Star Citizen is playable now. I'm not making any excuses for the price, but you can jump in to a ship with your buddies and do bounty hunting, ground combat, trading, and some other standard space game stuff.
yeah but star citizen kinda got a wild feeling to it in general. it feels fuckin gigantic and all the shit to scale is pretty wild.
that said it barely works lmao
