Elderbean posted:

A little late, but Star Citizen is the product of a failed society. I feel silly trying to effort post about a dumb video game, and a lot of it is hard to articulate, but so much of the marketing and community surronding the game is deeply exploitave and unique to our current hell of alienated consumerism.

Nearing a decade of producing nothing close to a complete product, but people are still throwing piles of cash at it. The marketing team releases lifestyle ads where they promote digital yachts as if they were real luxury goods and nerds dip into their credit cards to buy them. They go onto the official forums and write vivid stories about all the parties they're going to have on their fake yacht and speculate about gameplay features that don't and won't exist. In the early years, the forums were filled with these stories, and they all had a very sad energy to them where it was obvious a lot of the whales were chasing a pipe dream.

These speculations universally feature the player being the owner of the best ships, with a crew of underlings who carry out their orders. No ones real life ever seems to intrude, the crew is always there and ready to go. Emergent gameplay features that couldn't possibly exist anytime soon are presented as being certainties.

The most dedicated whales will sometimes post "actual play" stories where they describe what would be a routine or mundane mission in any other game as if it were an immersive, VR experience. They'll use all kinds of purple prose, or they'll describe the conversations they had in game as if everyone was in character the whole time.

It seems like these people are all just desperate for some shared imagination/empowerment in a virtual space but are being tricked into spending thousands of dollars on JPEGs. They've projected so much time and energy onto a fantasy game that will never exist. IDK, its all sad but also funny.

deep space nein posted:

Are the underlings supposed to be real life players who don't put in enough money to be captains?

Elderbean posted:

A little late, but Star Citizen is the product of a failed society. I feel silly trying to effort post about a dumb video game, and a lot of it is hard to articulate, but so much of the marketing and community surronding the game is deeply exploitave and unique to our current hell of alienated consumerism.

Jazerus posted:

yes. and they are always ready to log on and twiddle some dials so captain whizbang can go on an adventure

Panfilo posted:

If other online game social experiments are any indication, there seems to be a strong tendency for these types to go mad with power and flame out. Plsnetside 2 had a few armchair Warlord- generals and I've heard similar stories of WoW guilds run with an iron fist.

deep space nein posted:

Wow. This makes it more insane than I thought but also explains a lot. I could never understand what the draw was to spend that much money on ships in a game, but if they imagine this will make them literal captains of industry that can lord their power over real people then I can see why they are so into this.

It's still completely delusional, but I can at least see the carrot they imagine at the end of the stick.

Jazerus posted:

yes. and they are always ready to log on and twiddle some dials so captain whizbang can go on an adventure

deep space nein posted:

Are the underlings supposed to be real life players who don't put in enough money to be captains?

Elderbean posted:

Yes, and a core philosophy of the game is that everything should be realistic so the dev's have promised menial labor and repairs as a thing players will need a crew to do. Everyone thinks they're going to be captain, with a crew of players who treat them like a real authority figure as they earn wages loading cargo into the ship.

I can't stress enough how weird some of these stories feel in a more subtle way. It's basically like watching someone roleplay by themselves.

OwlFancier posted:

Also if you want to be a space capitalist you can play the X series which gives you control of an entire space economy to manage while you fly your space ship round.

Really there are a bunch of games that offer all the parts of star citizen but without the real life lording over people aspect.

Panfilo posted:

If other online game social experiments are any indication, there seems to be a strong tendency for these types to go mad with power and flame out. Plsnetside 2 had a few armchair Warlord- generals and I've heard similar stories of WoW guilds run with an iron fist.

Elderbean posted:

Yes, and a core philosophy of the game is that everything should be realistic so the dev's have promised menial labor and repairs as a thing players will need a crew to do. Everyone thinks they're going to be captain, with a crew of players who treat them like a real authority figure as they earn wages loading cargo into the ship.

I can't stress enough how weird some of these stories feel in a more subtle way. It's basically like watching someone roleplay by themselves.

Halloween Jack posted:

There were people who wanted to run taverns and stores and stables, and have this be a complete game in its own right, so that you could spend hours pouring beers and brushing horse's manes instead of going into dungeons and killing goblins. Fantasizing about being a literal peon.

CommissarMega posted:

To be fair, IIRC this was a major pull of that one Star Wars MMORPG, in that there were a lot more things you could do than just Jedi/Smuggler/Jedi Smuggler.

Katt posted:

Then they released those cubes telling people what to do to get force powers and it was like hundreds of hours of stuff the player didn't enjoy and everyone quit the game.

Bobby Digital posted:

Bobby Digital posted:

Jazerus posted:

and then they turned the combat into WoW and made jedi a base class, and everyone who followed the wisdom of the cubes for hundreds of hours to become a jedi quit

CommissarMega posted:

Is that what happened to Galaxies? Or are you making a TOR reference?

I actually liked the Bounty Hunter storyline, but once was enough.

Caros posted:

Galaxies had a few revamps in like ~2005ish where they drastically changed the game. They altered the combat by squishing what you could equip down to character classes and narrowing the levels of things you could fight to make it generally more wowlike. Then they followed that up with the 'new game enhancement' where they cut the number of professions to nearly a quarter of what there were originally, introduced a wow talent system and other things no one was really clamouring for.

Tarezax posted:

So you're saying Goonfleet only made it big after it shifted to communism?

quote:

Unfortunately, there is no option to "Disable Government" (perhaps the makers thought this would be too easy a win), so we are forced to assume full control and to build a city from the ground up. This makes for the perfect experiment in central planning. I spent 3 hours on Skype with my friend J.P. Gonzales trying to finish a level. Even with our combined intellect, ordering and ruling masses of people proved tough.

Guavanaut posted:

Libertarian Sim City where you're not allowed to set taxes or do zoning.

Proust Malone posted:

And bears.

Caros posted:

Galaxies had a few revamps in like ~2005ish where they drastically changed the game. They altered the combat by squishing what you could equip down to character classes and narrowing the levels of things you could fight to make it generally more wowlike. Then they followed that up with the 'new game enhancement' where they cut the number of professions to nearly a quarter of what there were originally, introduced a wow talent system and other things no one was really clamouring for.