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Comment by throwaway743 | Hacker News Reader

Barely playable.

Forget the name of the location, but when I tried playing again about a month or two ago, I tried moving from the wake up point to the elevator to head out to the lobby. The elevator never rendered and it's the only way out. This has been going on since first playing it some years ago, and it requires reloading the game which takes ~10-15 minutes.

When the game works and you're not experiencing lag, it's fun, but yeah it's still essentially a digital paper weight unless you have a rtx 20 or 30 series and a gigabit connection...

Oh and rather than putting focus on making the game actually playable, one of their recent dev goals was making bed sheets have more realistic physics... this kind of shit is a joke.

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I had even less luck than this with the elevator. I couldn't open the door! Apparently it's unlike every other video game in existence, where door opening is a matter of a) walking up to the door, or at worst b) walking up to the door and hitting a button. But in Star Citizen, someone apparently coded an elaborate "door opening simulator" that requires you to switch modes and active your arm and do something complicated. I tried reading all the button prompts, and hit all the buttons, and I was able to open the door once, but then I was sent to another lobby with another elevator door and that one I couldn't open.

I was an original backer. Years ago I was able to get to the hangar and fly my basic ship around and shoot aliens and asteroids. Today I'm confounded by doors. I expect that when I try the game again in a few years, I'll probably have to read tutorials about how to make my character breathe and blink his eyelids.

This is fake right? You enter a minigame to move your digital index finger around on the keypad sim and punch in the right opening code for the class of ship you're on and its commanding officer? And people paid 500 million bucks for this?

EDIT: It looks so easy in that video! I'm not sure why I had so many problems opening the door, but I did. Maybe I'll try it again. Maybe I'll just wait a few more years to see if the game gets better first, though.

I suspect that the rationale for adding more and more complicated systems is to increase the sunk cost fallacy for existing players, who will have invested increasing amounts of time into learning how they all work. (And perhaps, to make everything seem less like a video game and more like a "real life simulation").

There is no way that a new player would do anything but bounce right off this game, but perhaps that is by design.

Just tap F, instead of holding it. Holding it brings up the equivalent of a context menu, like right clicking in a 2D application. Some items have more than one action, rather than make you open up a dialog to pick from a list of actions, they tried to simplify it into the context menu. For what it's worth, the actual design goal is that most things are in-world buttons or screens, and that the context menu is less necessary.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_BILL49nos

Haha wouldn't put it beyond them to get to that level of detail.

The minute details don't bother me much, just that they're focused on so many of these (at times ridiculous) details, yet in my case and others, the elevator doesn't even appear.

At the least they should focus on making a playable/accessible game, then drill down

Last time I tried it, it didn't crash but after taking the lift and walked around the space station for a while I got bored. Apparently there's a game in there somewhere but I couldn't find it.

Apparently there is a way to actually find a ship to fly in, but they sure made it difficult to find out how to fly it.

Ah I understand that sentiment. One time I had the luck of getting to the lobby and experienced less lag than usual, only to be stuck in a similar way. Ended up having to dig through posts to figure out how to find shops, purchase from them, get my ship, how to start the ship, and take off.

Ngl, it was enjoyable when it worked, but I'm also the type who likes to aimlessly explore. Found myself heading to a random space station and then to a random planet and that was fun enough for me... until I got booted after walking around the planet for a few moments. Didn't know you have to rest at a location to have it count as a checkpoint, and upon reloading the game ended up starting back where I first spawned in the beginning of the game... only to find no elevator yet again...

Heads up though, when you get to a lobby there's usually a location nearby with screen panels or kiosks, and they usually have a yellow UI (forget if the UI is visible prior to interacting with the screen). You can use those to call your ship to a hangar

> Oh and rather than putting focus on making the game actually playable

Do be cognizant though, this is one of the reasons why the game is taking so long to make. They have a split focus on getting the game done off in another build, whilst maintaining the playable alpha that hasn't got all the game systems they've built connected to it. Most games don't have a requirement to be a fully playable game during development. If something isn't working in a dev build, you just say "Hey, don't go there, it's broken in this build." But with the alpha, everyone expects a working game even though the whole codebase is constantly in flux.

I'm fully aware of this reality. Wasn't suggesting "fully" playable in alpha, just "playable". If one has difficulty achieving something as simple as getting into the only available elevator since it's the only available exit, then the proper and consistent functioning/rendering of that element needs to be focused on in dev. For something like that to fail to function/render a high percentage of the time a player loads up the game, it makes the game unplayable and the game's initial load time not worth waiting for.

I’m thinking the actual customer is the person that’s dedicated enough to implement systems in the game, not the player.

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