Gosh- we all know this is a con- simply a way for an IP owner to make a *very* good living for himself and members of his extended family over a decade or so.
But a con that essentially advertises itself *as* a con is fine in my eyes- it vacuums that worst class of gamer into their own little world of nonsense, hopefully raising the bar elsewhere in the gaming world.
This also shows how nostalgia over the 'original' game devs is plain stupid. In the ancient age of PC gaming, any old load of tripe could find a fanbase. I was there at the time. I loathed the low effort PC rubbish - and very few of these original devs went on to make excellent games when the hardware improved.
Good games are all about the gameplay loop. Fans of Star Citizen all rant and rave about how the gameplay loop is the *last* stage of development if it is even needed at all. Which tells you all you need to know about the non-game that is Star Citizen.
But there's an intersting psychology here that links to traditional role-players. Such people have an enduring *fantasy* about living within a particular environment. They want to be their own 'Mary Sue' in their own genre story.
Being a giant fan of Skyrim and Fallout. while as a coder recognising the gameplay loop in those titles is just about as basic as you could get, I have long understood that first person computer role playing games are somewhat unique in the computer game field. A seemingly 'boring' game paly concept can actually be a lot of fun if the world is good enough.
*But* this does not mean your open world does all the gameplay work in and of itself. Look how many attempted to clone the success of Skyrim and fell flat on their faces.
A blame the conceptual failure on non-wargame/non-strategy RPG space games on the original Elite. While Elite amazed a lot of ill-informed gamers, it was nothing but a copy of Atari's Star Raiders crossed with the old green-screen mini computer game, 'Star Trader'. But Elite, for all its poverty of game design, has been the *hopeless* inspiration for most RPG space games since.
In other words, space games that are not strategy or wargaming just don't know what game loop is even a good idea. No Man's Sky proved this in spades, and Star Citizen is worse (and so have been all those 'sequels' to the original 'elite')
Once we had hopes that Beth's next open world game, Starfield, might crack this problem- but Beth is the crappiest of all the major game studios now.
Here's the thing. What is needed is *not* any form of state-of-the-art space game, but something at the level of Dwarf Fortress- a simple conceptual testing ground for the game loop ideas that can make for fun and sustaining Spacefaring role-playing. When we know *what* we should be doing in a space game, then the giant investment in a AAA state-of-the-art form can begin.
Myself- I've always thought the problem will only be solved by crowd-sourcing- in other words the endless space problem solved by allowing gamers to also guide/create content that appears in everyone's persistant 'galaxy'. But the biggest flop project in gaming history (a british project that allowed crowd-sourced content on a map of our entire planet) showed no promise at all after burning thru nearly 100 million pounds in cash.
However, computer generated content from 'seeds' will always be unsatisfying crap filler. There is no magic 'AI' solution to this, no matter what the mainstream *fake news* outlets claim. On the other hand, finding a way to crowdsource the 'rule-sets' used by the creation algorithms would prevent the problem of the player seeing the repeated pattern of too few rules/building blocks.
Star Citizen shows *zero* innovation. Star Citizen shows *zero* progress to solving the fundamental issues. Star Citizen 100% invents new ways to *delay* a project using the old con of 'feature creep', so that the owning *familiy* can continue to receive massive levels of pay each year. Star Citizen will never deliver anything worthwhile.
At the other end of the scale, the creators of Elite will never deliver anything good either. Their new project is modest, delived a finished program, but made no worthwhile gaming progress over the first 'Elite'.