The State of Star Citizen in 2024 | It's Getting Better, But Why Now?

[Music] 2024 has proven to be a different kind of year for Star Citizen a multitude of improvements introduced last year are in the game server mhing has proven a functional system the studios in general seem more in step with each other though still have some issues Squadron 42 is a tangible possibility and the player facing side of the game the part we actually play and care about seems to have been getting some much needed Direction compared to Before from major shifts at the top of the company to the very pillars of Star Citizen finally showing face it's a big year for the game and a big proving Crown but are they sticking to their beginning of the year promises and even if the year is different does that mean that Star Citizen is going in the direction players want first today we'll look at why Star Citizen is different in 2024 then we'll check out how it's actually playing different as of June thank you for coming to my tomato talk [Music] [Music] one thing that has become clear to many following Star Citizen is that they are pushing for faster progress this is made most apparent by Richard tyer essentially second in command of Star Citizen when earlier this year he emphasized a push to get more of what they've been talking about actually into players hands absolutely I mean when I look at Star Citizen itself I want it to be a cohesive experience that is all tied together and and I want to get there as soon as possible I want somebody to be able to play the game and understand all the things that they have available to them now don't get me wrong we have a lot of gameplay already in the game but it's in isolated pockets it's like if you wanted to be a miner great you can go and do mining you can do that Loop but I want I want the connections I want the inter webbing that's the difference between features and content and a game and I want to I want to push towards that as as quickly as possible this generally sounds like marketing speak but this has proven fairly true this year a multitude of changes were introduced at last year's annual convention and more than two dozen of them have been added to the game since with one of the biggest freight elevators persistent hangers and cargo hauling improvements coming within weeks at the time of riding I went over this in my stream this past week and if you want to get into the Weeds about this stuff we have these Deep dive sessions every week or you can watch the summaries over on my second Channel space Tomato 2 in this episode we went over everything that was posited as coming this year back in December as well as everything discussed on stage at citizen con last year it should be up on the second Channel by now we determined that unlike previous years they are actually delivering on the things they're talking about now the reason for this is a few different things that may or may not bore you to certain extents but also explain a bit of the long development cycle when this whole project started the company was very small a true upstart vibe compared to what we see now the game engine they wanted to be used cry engine was a a very singleplayer small scale tool set that would need an absolute gargantuan effort to make viable to build a space Sim again very limited compared to what we see now and to be honest back then when it all started the idea of the game was a lot different even the CEO Chris Roberts admits this a bit of a Pandora's Box that got opened when we realized we had the level of support to really go all the way because it's a completely different scope of game now than 10 years ago when I got on stage and I was pitching a much more limited you know sort of private freelancer online and a you know next Generation Wing Commander what we're building now is a completely different experience in terms of a lot more Fidelity and scope and possibility in the idea that you can do and be anything you've certainly heard about future creep when it comes to Star Citizen and it was a reality for several years there I would say that aspect of the development mainly died down towards 2018 when 3.0 came out in the persistent Universe we play today really started to see better development but in those early years there was just so much the money only continued to pour in as many many people wanted to experience the same magic of space games that the 9s brought us well the US that weren't toddlers like myself in these early stages like many kickstarters pledge goals were made q&as about possible ideas were made completely public Theory crafting happened right on camera and the community got to make the call to expand the game with no end in sight obviously that wasn't possible possible and cig did start to brain things in at some point but by then there was a lot to live up to and it was going to be really difficult to fund all of that development so of course as is still true today the ship sales existed back then proving a very successful means of funding the game without a publisher or previous products to use to fund development the crowdfunding model stuck and players could and still can buy ships with real money to help pay for development I advise anybody who is new to the game to pay the minimum $45 in or $60 if you're feeling extra spicy and experience everything the game has to offer before making a decision as to what you want to pursue and buying a ship with real money but back to ye olden days tons of promised features a pickup of a ton of the original Engineers that worked on cry engine at CCH ridiculous hype from the community and the newly solidified ability to create entire explorable worlds made things rough Management in my opinion did not do a good job of prioritizing and triaging the right things for the game to progress leading to a ton of communication but not much progress and what felt like a whole bunch of treading water for quite some time until it felt like the teams really started to effectively work together better only really in the last few years nobody was really certain where things were headed just that the game was being worked on now don't get me wrong at this point people were playing a version of the game the game engy was seeing pretty clear major changes already and things were moving along features were were coming out ships were releasing and people were enjoying missions and features but look at what we have now communication has been dialed in in multitudes expectations are set much more carefully and things are only really talked about if the company is pretty confident we'll see them in the next year or two updates are releasing with much more usable features that actually make a difference to the game the necessary features needed are more clearly laid out the game engine is seeing its first 1.0 version release the company is now Lar enough to properly tackle major tasks and initiatives and the teams have been built out enough to work in tandem to deliver an actual game kind of there's also the fact that Squadron 42 the separate narrative single player game on a completely different Dev branch has reached what they are calling a future complete State meaning many of the development efforts dedicated to that game over the last several years can be brought back over to Star Citizen to focus more on the MMO so they say there are still plenty of problems with the development but from the positions being filled higher in the the company and the things those positions are saying the maturing of the game's engined and backend Tech like server meshing the focus on tightening up gameplay and actually making the new player experience not a disaster there's a lot more to this game now than any year prior but with all that being said what is it actually like to play the [Music] game something else you may have heard about start citizen is its stability it's bad awful and frustrating at times currently every instance is running on one server and with a game that tries to persist everything that happens from weapons dropped to ships destroyed to Cargo scattered in space this causes problems over time if you want to learn more about the solution of this problem server meshing I'll leave the video linked down below for now the game is still going to be a pain to play at times no matter your PC and this isn't just due to the servers the optimizations of the game have barely started yes dlss and FSR were just added to the game but with the game engine only just reaching 1.0 and the game still not being feature complete the balance of stability and feature growth are a bit at odds this can be very anger inducing for some if that's you I highly advise you stay away from this game for now it's fun but it's not a stable game and you'll run into bugs problems and game design decisions that don't make sense in a vacuum gameplay-wise 2024 is the best year this game has ever seen mining has its problems of course but you've got ground vehicle and ship-based Mining available to you right now and you can bring along friends for multi crew or even multi- ship experiences while there aren't handholding missions or tutorials for this just yet you can just fly out into space and find things to mine whenever you want Salvage is even more approachable with less danger involved and plenty of legal and illegal missions to take you can get dozens of hours of relaxing Hull scraping ship disintegrating and cargo acquisition across various wrecks and deric ships in different places combat is all the rage while ship-based bounty hunting gives you easy quick money and a fairly exciting space combat experience it's really the reputation progression that makes it work well reputation with companies and government entities is one of the main forms of progression in this game and as you move your way up you'll receive harder Bounties in different scenarios for more pay the variety is still low but we've seen Master modes better turret gameplay new targeting and weapon balance bances better ship AI VFX and general experience when it comes to ship combat making this much more fun for players that are looking for General space combat experience on the FPS combat side an experience that I've universally hated for this whole project is now probably my favorite thing to do this gameplay is also tied to reputation and feels a bit more Progressive to me moving you from small bunkers to large multi-structured facilities FPS aai has seen improvements the entire HUD looks different features like backpack reloading and magazine packing make the experience feel a bit more deep and rewarding guns have seen updates across the board and the new environments are much more interesting to fight in as long as your server is running fairly well FPS combat in the game is a lot more fun than it used to be that being said you aren't going to find a Cod or tarov level experience here yet but it's headed in a good direction and continuing to become more approachable there are other Mission assisted options in the game too maintenance missions have you disposing of waste research missions could have you deploying a probe and investigations can be a simple find the lost body in a deep cave or a narrated space station disaster mystery hey Darnell it's R over at corporate Ops give me a shout back when you clock in they are scattered and there's not much Rhyme or Reason to the way that they occur but you'll find plenty of entertainment on offer here there are even entire racing leagues where you can top the public leaderboards cargo hauling is an option through smaller Courier missions or free trade on the market where you just buy and haul but we'll be seeing a big update to that gameplay overall in the next few weeks game types like true exploration Farming Base building crafting passenger transport refueling refining and Engineering are all still in the works but you can keep up with their development here on the channel besides game Loops the general quality of the game has improved recently new rendering options allow players to more finely tuned Graphics settings cargo physicalization means you can steal transport and trade cargo with other people and ships you can also use these boxes to carry your goods around with you if the backpack is too small and you want to be a mule the arena commander game type allows for offline custom closed servers where you can dog fight FPS battle play Star Citizen's own version of gun game and eventually PVE horde mode race or just free flight and practice controlling ships in atmosphere and in Space the replication layer a new piece of backend Tech has now been added to make players much less likely to experience a full crash out of the game but rather just continue their progression on a different server when their server does crash the single player game Squadron 42 is approaching content complete and many of the features and development efforts of that game are beginning to show up in Star Citizen providing a more polished experience points of interest are thriving through caves deric ships outposts small settlements and the new distribution centers and above all the community has exploded more players have joined the game after 2020 than before and you'll have no problem finding friends guides and groups to join and play with the official public forums Reddit and Discord are all great places to discuss and learn and my own org does offer a pretty cool group of people to come and play with we're always looking for new members to get started in the verse so I'll leave our Discord server linked down below and the link to apply and as I covered in one of my recent supporter exclusive videos which will release publicly a few months from now the game just keeps growing yes the features might not be what we want the development doesn't always seem to focus on making the best experience for players right now and often times it feels like it can take a long time to do things that you just wouldn't expect to but without fail every 3 to 4 months the game sees some kind of an update we see new features develop we see things improve bugs be fixed and the general design take a step forward there are slow years and there are fast years 2024 is definitely a faster year but overall players continue to jump in because things continue to move towards a goal and I think out of every year we've experienced 2024 feels like one of the biggest signs of that so if you're looking for a good time to jump into Star Citizen and you're okay with the instability delayed features and possibility of the game not heading in the direction you like this is a pretty good year to jump back in and try and there are plenty of free fly events throughout the year where you can jump in without spending any money you can also keep up with development through weekly sitdown interviews Weekly News and development updates monthly development reports and regular Communications with devs across the different services like Twitter Discord and Reddit there's a lot to know about what's going on with Star Citizen right now in 2024 and there's going to be even more to know about what's coming up next cuz I didn't talk about most of the features in development for the rest of this year and early next year that we already know about if you'd like to know more about that stuff I just recently released a video detailing the next major update scheduled for the second half of this year after that with things like Base building crafting Capital ships and new star systems on the horizon there's going to be a lot to discuss if you want to keep up with it I published weekly looks into the development here as well as more casual updates on features and news from the last week in my feature watches whatever you decide thank you for watching this video I hope you learned something new and I'll catch you in the next [Music] oh [Music]

Channel: Space Tomato

Views: 29,719

Keywords: starc itizen 2024, star citizen update, new star citizen news, star citizen news, star citizen in 2024, space sim 2024, new space sim 2024, best space games 2024, space game 2024, star citien ships, star citizen new features, space tomato

Id: 9NXn9W98hsI

Length: 15min 7sec (907 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 20 2024