What Do You Even Do In 'Star Citizen'?

you almost certainly have heard of Star Citizen at this point and you also almost certainly have the one question which is at the core of everybody's mind who thinks about trying this game and that is simply what on Earth do you do and this is a really fair question because Star Citizen is a massive game they've raised over 500 million dollars through Public Funding and private Equity stuff which is kind of insane and for many Star Citizen is the staple example of feature creep when you have an idea for a game then you keep tacking little bitty things onto it until eventually you reach a point where the game is so massive it's not practical it's been delayed a thousand times and players don't even really know what the game is even supposed to be anymore because it's just been promised to be everything and so I thought it would be interesting in this video if I broke down with a little more detail what exactly you do in Star Citizen because nobody's able to really give a concise answer that I've found even people who have played this game a lot I've played it a fair amount as well and it's weirdly difficult to answer because it's going to be different for everybody but before we get into all of this a big thank you to our sponsor LG they sent me their 45-inch Ultra gear OLED curved gaming monitor with 240 hertz refresh rate and a .03 millisecond response time and I'm not joking when I say this is like the greatest monitor I've ever used in my entire life like it's insane with Nvidia g-sync a 240Hz refresh rate and a .03 millisecond response time this monitor is not just great for RPGs and slower moving games thanks to its huge aspect ratio wide vision and amazing color depth and accuracy but it also is very viable as a competitive shooter monitor not just because it's massive so you get the full field of view but also because it has such a high refresh rate and because of that low latency and the g-sync support like this thing is ridiculous and because it's an OLED monitor it means that every time you see a darkened pixel that pixel is actually turned off individually meaning the contrast levels on this thing are just outrageous I know that with these cameras and stuff I can't do it justice but seriously this is the best monitor I've ever looked at in my entire life and the fact that I get to use it day in day out here in the studio is just crazy it's crazy over the course of this video you're gonna get to see this bad boy in action it's pretty cool if you want to check it out yourself you can go to the link in the video description box below or in the pinned comment and honestly I cannot recommend it enough it is seriously a phenomenal Monitor and I am truly truly thankful that they sent this over to me so thank you LG for sponsoring the video again if you want to check them out Link in the description and in the pin comment okay let's get into it now the original plan for this video was for me to go through and show you by hand each of the different jobs and things that you can do however that's proving to be a little bit more complicated than initially planned because they just dropped update 3.18 which introduces the persistent entity streaming which is basically their Tech which allows an object to be left anywhere in the game's universe and so long as nobody comes and picks it up or moves it it will stay there forever which is kind of insane basically like if I dropped a water bottle way off in the distance there on this planet and I came back in six months of real world time as long as nobody had taken it or moved it it would still be there which is kind of crazy but what I guess should also not surprise anybody is that this update has also broken the game entirely and a lot of people are having trouble even getting into servers to play the damn thing I mean right here I had to load in over the course of like 10 minutes and even then like it barely is is running smoothly it's very hitchy it's uh definitely a rough time to be a Star Citizen player I think but I guess while we're just flying around I can give you a little bit of information on the rough goings-on the first play style which is probably the most common is to Simply explore and fly around having a good old time just being a space pilot I mean that really is as simple as it is you can just fly around do whatever and this is a great thing and if you haven't noticed already I'm actually not the one flying this ship I actually am inside laying on the floor because the g-force keeps throwing around uh throw me around and uh in the driver's seat is a member of our Discord Community who wanted to take control of the the ship so I am just along for the ride as he loops around and uh does some some flying for us very generous of him but way to just explore the game I mean everything you see here is just a very small area on the map I mean we literally are navigating or are able to navigate a planet I mean there's there's a freaking planet to explore and that's no joke I mean if I pull this up here you can see there are tons of different planets there's moons around all the planets it's absolutely ridiculous how big this game is and when we're talking about like planets we mean like actual planets like full earth-sized planets it's actually ridiculous and it's all procedurally generated so as far as you can see in the distance you can fly there and then it's seamless from the ground to the Stars I mean you can go wherever you want it's pretty pretty wild and because of the online Universe element to this you can play with dozens of friends the last video I made on Star Citizen where I showed off a space yacht somebody gifted me the money for and a ton of cool stuff you can do in the game we were playing on stream and we had dozens of people all with us they all from all corners of the Galaxy while playing and joined in on the fun showing off their various ships and things we had one character die in a tragic accident so we took him up in the cargo hold of a ship and held a space funeral it was kind of amazing here's a little clip of that space funeral for you go ahead and open the the cargo hold we're gonna dump the bodies not dump sorry we're gonna we're gonna send the bodies off to a peaceful end [Music] challenge [Music] [Music] did you think you were going to attend a space funeral today so that is I think where the core fun of Star Citizen lies it's not going to be for everybody but it certainly is a fantastic way to experience everything that they have to offer here just going around having fun with your friends there's a ton of fun to be had and it's that Dynamic sort of gameplay where you just get into hijinks in trouble and that in and of itself is hilarious and fun and kind of like sea of Thieves or one of those other multiplayer games so that's where I would say I spend the majority of my time now some of the other play styles that you can pursue are a little bit more specialized and focus a lot more on actually treating this game like a space simulator basically where you can go out and perform various jobs for all sorts of different corporations or for different players and make your own of it it's pretty cool the first and perhaps most well-known job or career is bounty hunting this career is pretty straightforward it's exactly what it sounds like you will go around the solar system collecting various people who have committed crime crimes against humanity or crimes against various spaceports or other players and stuff and it honestly is pretty crazy and fun I tagged along with a few people who were doing this and we had some good fun with it according to Star citizen.tools this can involve chasing down wanted criminals under the uee laws or chasing down private bounties you'll find the target subdue them and turn the person or body in for credits and they actually have entire ships dedicated to this play style with like this one The Avengers stalker which has six different transport pods for you to keep prisoners or their bodies within as you transport them back to wherever they're wanted from it's it's kind of crazy and cool and then the other piece of this is if you're like subdued by somebody who is chasing you down for the Bounty then you can have your friends or buddies come and then jump them to try to break you free like there's so many cool things that can come of systems like this but this is one play style that some people really enjoy pursuing and it's one that you might as well another play style would be the barterers or the Traders or information Specialists there's a few different terms for this overall style of gameplay but it's pretty simple you just find things that are worth a certain amount and then sell them at another place for more in order to do this effectively you have to get a ship that's very large has a large cargo hold and able to transport a ton of different stuff but that leads me into another playstyle which is piracy because if there's a gigantic ship filled with valuable cargo that you could sell at a Spaceport it's inevitable that there's going to be players who come along as pirates to steal it this is also a really really fun way of playing the game I also tagged along allegedly with a couple people who were doing something like this and they saw a big cargo ship filled with a ton of stuff and they decided to try to jump them and things got pretty crazy pretty quickly with a shootout on board and then we it's got all the sorry allegedly scuttled the ship it was like a whole big deal allegedly another thing you could find without a lot of strict requirements or anything is you can race you just be like a a Pod racer basically I will warn you though some people take this really really seriously and like really deck out their ships for it it's a little crazy so if you find that interesting definitely check it out but uh this one is I mean if you're gonna do it you gotta fully commit it's pretty crazy there's also the concept of a transporter or passenger transporter I guess or a show for I mean this type of role can take any sort of form there's uh basically chat commands where if you hit F12 you can see people in chat and you can uh talk with them if they're on the server that you're on and if you need transport from one location to another you can request it people can come they might be able to deliver you to that place if you don't have a ship that could get there reasonably quickly and in exchange for that you're probably going to pay them and they're going to happily accept all of those funds because they helped you you know it's a really simple bartering system but it goes a long way and this once again just re-establishes this overarching concept of Star Citizen which is that they want to treat this as a Sandbox and in many ways they're just trying to create a world for you to explore and have fun in and they don't really want to put too many guidelines on it they just want to encourage that Dynamic gameplay where you are just doing whatever fun thing you can think of and that's about it like they don't mess with you too much and some people might look at that and be like well actually I prefer more strict structures I prefer like a really expansive quest line and narrative beats and stuff and while that stuff will eventually come with like Squadron 42 and things like that it's just simply not the focus of the persistent Universe stage that Star Citizen is mostly in right now so I agree that stuff is great and could be a great addition in the future if they can emerge all this stuff together but right now this game is about being a Sandbox being sort of a really space flight simulator but also a space I guess mercenary pilot businessman simulator you can make a whole life in this game building credits and influence and power and a fleet of ships at your disposal and it's absolutely insane how much you can get going on here and let's just say there's a reason why so many people end up committing so much time and so much of their money towards this game when I first started playing Star Citizen I'll be entirely real the thought of somebody spending like 600 bucks like 600 real world human dollars on a video game spaceship was just so insane to me but weirdly after playing the game a good amount I sort of get it like for some people this is all they play this is their bread and butter and they are willing to put money into this hobby like some people think of gaming as their hobby but people who play Star Citizen and get really into it Star Citizen is their hobby it's not gaming anymore it's Star Citizen specifically is their hobby which is why they spend so much money on it just like people who are really into painting Minifigures spend a lot of money on it some people are really into like racing Sims so they buy like the vibrating seats in the realistic steering wheels and stuff and people like that's so stupid just use a PlayStation controller it's like well because this is bigger than just a video game to them this particular video game is their hobby if that makes sense so while it certainly makes sense that a lot of people would look at Star Citizen and be like uh it really seems like this is a game made for either rich people or people who are very financially irresponsible I I think that that is a very small Niche group of people and it doesn't have to be you everything that you're seeing in this game so far in this video is what you can expect to get if you are playing the game yourself with the basic ship and in fact everything that you've seen in this video so far is reflective of what you could expect to see in the game if you bought the base package for like 40 bucks which pledges to the game even though it's still a work in progress but gives you access to the game as it is right now you get the basic startership and you get a good chunk of credits to use and you can just start working start exploring and you can use these various jobs and play styles to earn more money to upgrade ships get racing ships like this one you see here or transport ships or cargo ships whatever you're looking for there goes another player just racing off into the distance and eventually you can work all the way up to where you're playing with friends and you can get massive ships like this one you see in front of me which is just a behemoth but uh I I don't even know if that one's playable if I'm being honest I mean it probably is because of course it probably is but like for real it's insane buy now fly today that's insane like look at this monstrosity imagine if you're running a cargo ship and you see this thing fly up to you this is why this game can be so fun in groups like if you have a group of friends from college or high school and there's like six of you and you guys just like playing games together you could get really into this game and then get one of these ships eventually and just imagine like rolling up on a cargo ship that's thinking they can just get by quickly and as pirates you just take the whole loot the whole Bounty and then race off somewhere else in the universe and because of the new persistent entity Tech you can just take that stuff and like stash it on a far away planet in a cave somewhere or something on this planet-sized planet you find one cave you really like you stash it there and then you can go off you can come back in a year's time and all that stuff will still be there because of how their server infrastructure is working it's kind of crazy to think about but that's why people love Star Citizen because it's extremely ambitious and that ambition sometimes causes issues such as the fact that right now the reason I'm running around is because the servers are so clogged up I can't actually uh redeem my ship again so I can't fly out of this Spaceport it's a little bit of a an issue and that's why listen I'm not going to sugarcoat it like Star Citizen you can pay 40 bucks to get access to it yes but sometimes stuff like this happens where it just breaks and you can't play it for a couple weeks while they fix it and get it working again because it's still a work in progress and for some people that sounds like horrible it's like that's absolutely insane and my issue usually is with games that are fully released and they're charging full price for it and they're selling it as a complete product and then you get that quality of course I have a problem with that with this you know what you're getting into or rather you should YouTubers should communicate to you that this is not a done deal and you shouldn't expect it to run phenomenally well you shouldn't expect it to be super polished but when it does work it's super freaking cool that ship right there that's another player right there that's a player taking off okay that's not like an NPC they just took out of the hangar and they're flying straight up into space how cool is that but what about some other playstyles let's get back on topic probably the most common one I've seen for generating a ton of income is mining in the game mining is defined as the discovery extraction and refining of raw materials to be so sold on the open market using ships to conduct most of these tasks the Orion is actually the biggest uh mining ship that's currently at least planned for the game I don't think it's done yet um no in concept whole concept complete okay so it's still in the process they're still building it for the game but this is a ship that you will spend a lot of money on for the express purpose of mining everything gets extracted put into these containers and then you take it off to Spaceport to sell it off it's kind of insane uh how into this some people get but it's because buying one of these ships is like a major commitment and in some cases it costs a lot of real world money so when people commit to a career they usually commit pretty hard now like I said mining is probably the main occupation for most people it's very reliable it's really well established in the game as it is and so a lot of people are going to do it and there's a ton of money to be made because there's plenty of things to mine it also isn't super risky it's not super tedious it's pretty straightforward so it's a great way to gain wealth early in the game and by early in the game I mean like for the first few hundred hours because this game is massive and now one of the more interesting careers that's just been added to the game with this 3.18 patch that sort of broke everything is something called salvaging basically a salvager is somebody who goes around scrapping crashed ships or old dilapidated buildings that type of thing you take the old hole of a ship that crashed again because of the persistent entity streaming Tech if a ship crashes on a planet in the game it will stay there forever until it's fully scrapped and removed so if you're a scrapper or a salvager you can just fly around planets look for crashed ships and then Salvage those pick them up and move them take all the valuable stuff off to a Spaceport and sell that stuff it's a really cool way of taking advantage of this persistent Tech to be like okay well if ships crash we just Salvage those so boom now it's not like wasted and then we'll incentivize players to like actively clean up the game as it gets like dirty and polluted and stuff that'll be super cool right and the last major career that I would describe would be that of basically a mercenary somebody who's just kind of like a gun or a ship for hire to do whatever other players or Quest givers in the game are gonna ask you to do it's pretty straightforward it is the height of dynamic gameplay and honestly it can often be the most fun in addition to just plain exploring because you'll find yourself regularly getting into situations which are just kind of crazy because what I could do is if I had a ton of money and I wanted to like screw with one of my friends I could be like okay I'm willing to pay 200 000 credits to whoever can blow up this guy on this space yacht go figure it out and then there's a mad rush where people are going off there trying to do it because they want the Bounty and all of a sudden all these mercenaries descend and are like okay yeah we'll do it we'll be temporary bounty hunters and then the ship gets blown up and then the salvagers will come in and clean up the wreck and it kind of creates this web of different gameplay styles that all end up sort of interacting with each other in a pretty interesting way and that's when Star Citizen is at its best where it's at its worst is when it's constantly breaking and running into bugs as you can see just in this chat here on the left there are tons of people in this server very frustrated that they can't get access to their ships they can't do much of anything because the game is just sort of broken right now and it's been a few days by the time this is coming out it's probably been a week week and a half two weeks since 3.18 dropped and it's a little frustrating because we want to be able to play the game and continue exploring and doing stuff and uh so it's a bit of a bummer but you know what they're gonna sort it out eventually they're gonna figure it out this 3.18 Tech was working in the test server so we know that it works in theory they just have to figure out how to scale it for thousands upon thousands of players so we'll just have to wait and see and before we wrap this up I'm gonna show you what it's like to actually fly from the ground up into space uh in one Fell Swoop hopefully it'll work fingers crossed I'm not actually sure if not we'll show you some gameplay of another session I had where I recorded myself doing that so you get the the gist when the servers aren't melting but you know what we'll we'll just see how this goes but what I will say in the meantime is that while Star Citizen is far from perfect there is a lot of fun to be had I'm never gonna suggest that you put money up for something in Early Access because you are by definition buying an incomplete product something that is broken and buggy and doesn't run super well and that's just never something I want to recommend however if you're interested in the game if you think that this could be something compelling that you could have some fun with maybe with your friends I think it's worth checking out at the very least maybe watch some more videos of people playing it and just see what you think what we've done today in this video is very very Bare Bones I will not even pretend as though this is a comprehensive breakdown there is so much to do in this game it's absolutely insane and even some of the play styles that I described in this video are not in their entirety complete yet like the Salvage specialty is something which is in theory going to be in the game with 3.18 but it's not done yet like it's still in the works and then also the servers are currently melting so it's not really that viable of an option right now though right now I guess no career path is really viable so it's it's complicated other things like you know the the dynamic Bounty systems sometimes work sometimes they don't I've had bugs where like Communications with players just in general doesn't work so it's sort of Hit or Miss but when it works it's awesome when it doesn't it's it's less awesome but usually after like a month or two after a major patch like this one things work pretty well okay okay it's been like a like a video I was gonna put it right away but I just didn't really want to because Star Citizen was just like totally totally broken and I felt really weird being like look at this cool stuff you can do in the game by the way it's broken right now um I didn't want to cut it out or scrap the video because the reality is that is a major part of Star Citizen and for me to hide that from you would be dishonest so I want you to be aware that Star Citizen does have these periods where it just totally breaks but there are also moments when you get to experience it and enjoy it to its fullest and they just fixed it to be more precise they fixed it so that I'm able to hop in a ship now and it doesn't totally break the game I've had to wait about a week and a half testing the the game every single day to see if they would get it working and running they just now did so I want to show you basically what it's like to leave a planet and fly freely the way that you would hope to be able to do in a game like this okay we're gonna turn on our engines here we've communicated with the landing Services here who are going to tell us if we can take off okay to launch okay now we are ready to go this is our little ship this is the starter one so this isn't anything like stupid fancy or nothing this is what everybody flies when they start the game and we take off just like this and just like that we are out in the open air we will pull our landing gear up because we don't need it Nomo and let's just take off straight into the sky and try to uh show you what it's like to actually leave the planet now like I mentioned before this is something that's not even in some of the other upcoming games in this genre of space exploration adventure games like Starfield won't have this basically when you try to do this in Starfield it'll give you a loading screen and then you'll pop back into the game outside the planet's atmosphere at some point after maybe 10 seconds of loading or something like that but in Star Citizen you just take off you fly straight up and after a little while you will leave the planet's atmosphere looks like we're going to go through some storm clouds but then we should pop out in the uh the open I was gonna say open air but it's more like open space so we're just gonna keep going I guess here Jacob you can insert a time lapse of us doing this people don't have to sit here for 10 minutes while we do this [Music] and right here we're pretty high up we're not quite in the region of space but we're pretty high up we're going to keep going we're about 18 kilometers up and we're going to keep going [Music] and just like that we can zip away from the planet without having to do anything we can just use our warp drive head to one of the moons and in real time just like this it's a little startling isn't it just to go zooming right back in it but just like that we are now at one nearby Celestial body this is where we came from way over there wherever it was and now if we want to head just down here we just spool calibrate our warp drive to it and then we're gonna go for it and you're gonna see in real time we can just warp to that area of the planet and give her a land and bear in mind at any point on this planet we can land we can stop there we can do whatever and it I mean it's a planet-sized planet as you're seeing I mean this is there's no fakery here this is an actual freaking Moon uh the planet to explore are actual planets there's where we came from that's it oh that's what I get for trying to look around while we're doing this if I level out I'm going to turn off that and now I can show you that's where we were that's where we left that planet above the ship right there and now if we want to land all we have to do is for one deploy our landing gear because that'll be important and then we can go down low and you see the altitude dropping just under two kilometers now I can pick any spot on this planet let's land up here in the brown because the Brown's where you want to be and we're just gonna gently approach and then we'll level out a little bit I like going into the sort of third person perspective for this and then we just gently set her down on a boulder take off a little bit we'll we'll rock it a little come back a little bit and land like that Booyah and then we're landed on a freaking moon in a place where probably no other player has ever been and if we want to get out right here I can I can just get out and I can uh kind of glitch out a little bit while I open the door and then step out and you can see just like this we are exploring a a place where again it's probably another player has never been now is this something that's going to be worth doing for its own sake eh probably not other than like it's just kind of cool to be running around a planet like this or a moon like this um like it's a vast expanse of nothingness so it's not going to be fun to do just for the sake of doing but with a group of friends when you're doing one of those careers that we've outlined in this video it can be really really enjoyable because this universe is your sandbox and when it's working like you see right now it's pretty magical just being able to take off and go wherever do whatever however you want and again we have a whole solar system at our disposal we take off from one place and we go to the other if you don't like where your home base is you can go to a different planet and choose that you can go to a freaking Starship station Galactica whatever and have that be your starting point like this is a pretty insane game when it's working that's not all the time as we've demonstrated in this video but when the time is appropriate the game is actually something pretty cool this is not meant to be like a an advertisement or anything for Star Citizen because frankly I do think it's really weird to give 40 bucks to a company that's raised half a billion dollars for a product that's like kind of broken half the time I think that that's really really odd and frankly if I weren't covering it and making videos on it and streaming it I probably wouldn't do it myself either however if this is something that's interesting to you and if you go into it with the understanding that this is kind of a broken thing this won't always work the best then I think you can make an informed decision and do it you know I've heard people say oh star citizens just a scam and for me scam is a term that has basically built in this perception question of deception and if there's no deception I don't think you can call it a scam at least in the traditional sense because if somebody's being upfront with you and they're like listen this is a play test basically it's gonna break there's gonna be periods where we do wipes so all of your character data is going to be lost as long as they're making that clear I don't have a problem it's if they were being deceptive about it that I would have a problem with it but in this case they are very upfront saying no listen like the game doesn't always work but when it does it's pretty cool and as long as you understand that I think you can have a really really good time with Star Citizen and hopefully this video in a weird roundabout way sort of demonstrated that point even though I'm trying to keep the good and the Ugly in here so that you don't get it twisted I mean this game is not always the best thing ever like some Fanboys will have you believe sometimes it's a broken pile of garbage that you can't even run you can't even leave basically the starting bed that you start in every time you load in and then other times it works great like you're seeing here and you're having a great time but it's very Hit or Miss but what I do know for certain is that I really want to uh play this game for the first time in like probably three four weeks that have actually been able to play it since it's been broken all this time so I am going to run around explore I have some missions to complete some deliveries I need to do so I'm going to finish this recording and get back to it and um I guess I will just see you on the flippity flip catch you on the flippity flip okay I'll see you bye

Channel: Luke Stephens

Views: 227,778

Keywords: luke stephens, star citizen, luke stephens star citizen, what do you do in star citizen, star citizen careers, star citizen jobs, LG UltraGear, OLED gaming monitor, 45gr95qe

Id: 1U_KOnwp-e0

Length: 32min 1sec (1921 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 28 2023