The vision, the design, the sandbox, the potential.. I mean, Star Citizen appeals to a wide demographics, including some with comfy finances. While not everyone invests heavily in ships, some players find value in the game's sandbox, which has enough granularity to create value in the various ship designs (unlike some games that offer only non-essential cosmetics). Purchasing a ship in Star Citizen means buying a well-crafted vessel in every nook and cranny that enhances the feel of "living, working and traveling" in it.
Many of us anticipated things was going to start to increasingly materialize after CIG showed their no-BS progression at CC 2023, and explained how they after a feature-complete SQ42 moved most of their developers over to SC. Despite the turbulence of the past, 3.23 in particular is quite the relative leap into something that feels like a step towards a more complete gaming experience.
Anyway, I was one of the first original backers back in the days, but my interest faded after just a few years, and I didn't start to give a shit about the Live alpha until 3.22 last year.
Played 3.23 in the last two days and It's surprisingly good. HOLY shit the change in combat and AI though. Hammerheads now can rip. What used to be "soloable" because of bugged AI, now you stand no chance alone, as it should be. I love the new map and UI. There's also many changes overall that change the vibe of the game such as fog and lighting, something definitely changed in how it looks. It used to be more "grey" and now the colors and shadow grading are much better.
Loreville looks stunning.
I was surprised in 3.23 to see the ships I bought with in-game money were still there, not wiped. At some point when there's gonna be 1.0 and no more wipes, I really don't see the point of buying ships with real-life money. I guess its like any collection hobby for some peoples, they collect them over the span of a decade. But it's otherwise really easy to ignore all that. But I'm also used to buy plane modules in DCS and nobody gives a flying fuck for that do they? Can't even buy the planes "in-game". No articles about it. The game that is in constant evolving patching/debugging/additional features since Flanker 2.0, erm I mean DCS, in 2008. But it's "released" so it's fine
I backed in 2013 along Elite Dangerous too and just went on with life and doing what I needed to do, such as going back to university for becoming an engineer. I don't care really how long it takes. Now Elite Dangerous is at risk of closing down Frontier and they didn't invest in their core technology for so long that the Cobra engine would have to be redone from the ground up to realize a bigger vision and better implementations to satisfy the fans, which is unlikely to happen. Elite dangerous is so far away from the kickstarter's concept vision that it's so sad.
New world MMO is gonna close because as soon as the devs hit a bump they folded like a chair.
So fucking KUDOS to CIG for not losing hope/focus and not folding like a chair as soon as fans criticized. It was a bumpy fucking road. Thanks to the dedicated fans who paid monthly fees even to BUG TEST or the others who bought ships. I don't care if you call them whales, because contrary to Elite dangerous, they financed a nice fucking piece of technology and emergent gameplay.
Yes they fucked up their release timeline and yes there was feature creep, but after seeing Citizencon 2023, them telling us that all the features seen would release tentatively in the next year (everyone LOL'd) and now seeing, 6 months later, half of those features implemented and not being a bug fest in the PU.
I don't know what happened over there, the return of Chris Roberts back to UK Manchester to work on Squadron 42 or something else, but they walk the talk now. I really believe SQ42 at this year Citizencon will knock socks off.
