If I'm being honest, the last time I paid any special attention to Star Citizen was when it was garnering breathless coverage by major outlets like Wired five years ago — and when it was also more or less dismissed with snarky headlines like, "Fans Have Dropped $77M on This Guy's Buggy, Half-Built Game".
But a funny thing apparently happened while the world looked away: Star Citizen kept on growing, evolving, and expanding. It now counts over 2.6 million registered users (i.e. "Star Citizens who have joined the universe"), while its homepage garners about as many monthly visits. Based on both figures, it's a safe bet Star Citizen has active players in the low-to-mid six figures, possibly more.
My colleague Joshua May, an indie game developer for Second Life and other worlds, has been avidly playing since 2016.
"It was playable, but sparse. A few space stations, planets that you couldn't land on, a couple missions," he says of it back then.
"Now it's missions all over the place, a ton of planets and moons and stations everywhere, so many ships."
The missions aren't always typical to what you'd expect in a persistent space sim. For instance: “They just added prisons recently, to help discourage people being dicks. But the prisons themselves have their own gameplay loops.
"It gets a little better every quarter," May adds, "they do a big patch every quarter. Basically think of it as an Early Access game at this point. A lot of game systems are in, but there's a lot of bugs, and some systems are missing or unfinished, or a first pass implementation that will get more complex later."
As it happens, Star Citizen is launching a free-to-play event starting May 22, so if you're intrigued, read my chat with Mr. May (along with copious images he's taken during his adventures) — effectively, his notes from a new, new world:
Pictured: Joshua's Star Citizen avatar which comes with face over-IP, "where your real emotions are projected onto your avatar."
So there’s actual gameplay like ship-to-ship fighting and quests and stuff?
Yep. Fully explorable planets. The planets are incredible.
About 90 or so playable ships at the moment, although some are missing gameplay elements.
It's amazing to take off from a space station, fly to a distant planet, fly down to the surface, land, get out and walk around the trees, all seamlessly, no loading screens.
They're on version 4 of their planet tech now, it's pretty amazing.
And more updates to come.
You can trade cargo, do delivery missions, get into fights, blow up pirates (or other players), mine ore with a ship or with a hand tool, there's some incredible caves you can go down into on the planets too, random missions and quests like find missing people lost in the caves, investigate stuff, wipe out drug dens, etc.
There's both ship combat and FPS combat.
You wake up, go request your ship from the hangar, run out to the pad, open the hatch, climb in, walk around inside your ship, power it up, take off.
Everything from tiny fighters to 210 meter long mega space yachts at the moment. Bigger ships coming, full fledged capital ships, destroyers and stuff.
All with completely 1:1 fully realized interiors.
People can man your turrets or fly their own ships.
Some ships have like medical bays on them, armories, brigs, vehicle bays, hangar bays for shuttles, living quarters, etc.
One of Mr. May's personal ships — 125 meters long with four decks
I think a lot of people assumed it was all vaporware.
Yeah, a lot of people still do.
But [players are] still here, and they just had their best funding year ever. Like $48 million more in backer funds coming in last year.
It's getting real enough now that people claiming it is vaporware are starting to have serious credibility issues.
They're knocking down hurdle after hurdle for the tech.
And every 3 months we get more features.
The main thing to keep in mind is:
7-10 years is a normal development cycle for a game this size, you just typically never hear about games until they're in the last year or two.
And of course, at the moment it is early access, bugs should be expected.
Also this isn't coming from an established studio, they had to start from scratch and build up a 600 employee studio from nothing. There's a lot of overhead involved with just doing that alone, in terms of time, especially a studio that has like 4 locations around the world.
And also, the project 'began' in 2013, after the kickstarter ended December 2012.
But the project also had a dramatic shift in 2013/2014 because they ended up with SO MUCH money coming in (they didn't expect it to be ongoing after the Kickstarter) that they took the whole thing back to the drawing board and re-concepted the game with a new MUCH larger scope and goals. They asked the backers at the time, 'Do we keep making the simple game, or do we make the game we can actually make with this much money' and overwhelmingly got 'Make the bigger one.' "
Since then, it seems like, the "bigger one" has become quite large, while somehow still being a behemoth beneath the surface of our every attention. Most of us, anyway. But don't be surprised if your sense of Star Citizen suddenly changes.
All pics here courtesy Joshua May.
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 
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