With my usual metric of game enjoyment - hours of interesting playtime divided by price in $ - Star Citizen actually does rather well, for a $45 entry it’s definitely generated way more hours of actual fun with friends than most $60+ games we’ve bought.
It’s definitely also generated lots of frustrating hours, but that’s rang true for said $60+ games as well. I really wish there were more other games which do some of what it attempts.
ED was fun, but me and every one of my friends who’re into space stuff have all individually burnt out on that game due to the frankly insulting level of grind.
NMS turns out to simply not be the gameplay we’re after, so I have even less playtime in that than ED.
So far, Space Engineers and Avorion have been doing the best in that regard, still hosting a 24/7 Avorion galaxy for us in fact.
X4 has been collecting plenty of hours of playtime for me as well, but it’s lack of any kind of meaningful multiplayer with friends does lessen the enjoyment somewhat.
Space Engineers has a bit of a learning curve, but it’s definitely a nice sandbox-style game, just unfortunately a bit lacking in PvE content without mods.
Avorion on the other hand is much easier to get started with, but it’s also quite shallow in regards to story and such. The galaxy it generates can definitely be interesting though, it has a remarkably robust system for reputation, organizations, etc - and it applies between NPC factions as well.
I can personally also recommend Stationeers if you’re a fan of physics (in this case temperature/pressure/gas instead of movement) sandboxes, it has an even steeper learning curve than Space Engineers though, but it can also be loads of fun.
Good. Free trial is continuing to be all but the 3 latest expansions, and is expanding with the next expac launch. It’d be nice if I could switch my account to limited-access so I can do free trial content on my main even if my sub lapses, though.
But them being driven by subscriptions has helped them keep the game focused on player enjoyment. I hope it never goes F2P q-q
I believe a generous free trial paired with a subscription model is currently the best way to go about MMO monetization when it comes to ethics and financial viability.
I take monthly cost over aggressive fomo advertisements of dumber and dumber immersion breaking skins and performance hogging flashy effects any day. Even worse if there is also pay to win. Most of those mtx monetization models prey on wales who fall for this type of addiction easily.
Yeah I spent 60€ to get the avenger titan much later.
The bright side is, it is about as finished as No Man’s sky was. That is, buggy as hell game, but playable. It is fun to go in and fuck around in, but I definitely pity the people who have sunk hundreds or thousands into it.
That’s not an accurate comparison, The game breaking bugs in NMS on release were patched a day or two after release (I stupidly preorderd and experienced the hyperdrive blueprint issue). But the issue with NMS wasn’t really bugs, just over promises by the developers that didn’t match the final product. At least there was a few hundred hours of gameplay and complete gameplay loops.
Star Citizen, another game I stupidly preordered / Kickstarted (I’ma sucker for space games; kickstarted Elite Dangerous too) is a totally different kettle of fish. A decade later, there still isn’t a single, non-buggy / non-broken game loop in the entire game.
I so desperately want to like Star Citizen but for $600mil, having a few hours of “mucking about” with no real purpose nor way to achieve anything meaningful without experiencing migraine-inducing bugs, it’s pretty much unforgivable.
For the same money, I’ve been able to play Elite Dangerous for almost a decade and sink 1000s of hours, build a massive fleet of ships, and hang out with my buddies without screaming at the game. Sure, it’s shallower, but at least the loops are complete and the management were able to regularly make meaningful feature additions to the game over the years (although Odyssey was an utter shitshow at launch and took a year to patch into something stable and fun).
I’ve been playing it on the Steam Deck (haven’t had a chance to play on the desktop yet as it’s currently extremely hot where I live so I’m huddled next to the aircon). And yes, it actually plays. Low frames in big cities but otherwise seemingly playable!
I love it. It’s more Skyrim than No Man’s Sky but I’ I’ve been playing Bethesda games since Redguard so I’m biased and a fan of their jank.
Nice! That’s good to know. I was actually waiting for feedback on how it runs on the steam deck before taking the plunge (since that’s where I’m planning to play it most of the time). As long as it’s playable, I think it should be good.
You’ll be playing it on low settings for everything and there are major frame drops in the big cities. But I’ve sunk around 8h in on the Deck and so has my partner. So far, so good. Only crash to desktop happened after resuming the Deck from sleep mid play.
I kickstarted it 11 years ago, I'm sure squadron 42 will be out any day now, right?
Luckily, I really wanted a space sim, so I kickstarted elite too. It was far less hyped and star citizen fans always big up how they're not the same scope (which is true if you ignore everything else about SC), but at least it was released and very enjoyable.
I usually try star citizen out every time I get a new PC to see if it's any better just to make myself happy that I never sunk money into ship preorders etc
Need to develop a system that doesn’t serve up cancerous ads and relaxes on the rules so uploaders don’t feel the need to do dumb, unnecessary shit like censor a car crash.
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