I am also a Star Citizen, but having tried it in current beta access, I will not play Star Citizen till its finished... I will never play Star Citizen.

I hope a decent tutorial is job one, I'm pretty patient, but I found it reactivity impenetrable if your not reading patch notes every hour of the day.

After testing Alpha 3.0 about 30 hours it has became even more obvious to me that it was a right decision me to support the project. There is no other game like it and it is possible there ever will. Even still it is just a base for the game it has already provided lots of great gameplay moments. Things just gets better when they start to include professions, player generated missions, etc. in upcoming Alpha 3.x releases.

At least for now it feels a right decision that they didn't want to do 2^64 star systems but use procedural generation just a tool to generate a base for planets/moons and continue working by hands.

It is great to see there are still developers who are able and willing to give their games development time they requires; CIG, CDPR (Cyberpunk 2077), etc.

I'm curious, what sort of PC do you have? because for me is 100% unplayable right now, I have a i7 4790k, gtx 980 and 16 GB of RAM, even setting it to low still makes for a very bad experience, in the middle of space fighting a single effing ship and the FPS is all over the place, it's using up all my RAM, and then spilling some for pagefile (on an SSD)... I guess that's where the terribleness comes from, since both the GPU and CPU are sitting at like 40/60% use at most and still performance is complete garbage.

I guess people with SLI GTX 1080 TI plus 32 GB RAM systems will be fine....

My system is very modest: i7-3770K, 16G RAM, NVidia GTX 750 Ti

Your system is more than fine and the performance problems are elsewhere at this point. They have not started to optimize the game and many features are still lacking which will improve the performance.

Star Citizen Alpha 3.0 performance tidbits

I have been able to do testing ~15-20 FPS which is good enough to me.

@spacegg: Oh wow, I'm amazed you were able to get that with a 750 ti at all, I mean if it stayed at a constant 25-30 I wouldn't mind one bit, the problem is that when moving around a lot (like during a space battle for instance) the FPS will do dips to under 10... it's not really playable, but I do understand that at this point it's still just for testing.

I think that's mainly because of the crazy RAM usage, first game that eats up all 16GB of it, and as soon as a game is forced to use virtual memory then everything goes to shit.

@onarum: Sure, on my computer the FPS dips occasionally as well but I do try to avoid those situation while testing. At least ~15-20 FPS is still testable. I'm surprised the game launches on my GPU at all but of course not an optimal GPU of choice for this game ;). I'm going to update the computer pretty soon.

I don't want to start to play the game yet because I can't stand loosing progress etc. ;). It is better just to concentrate for testing at this point (since it is still alpha and testing is what we should do) or at least wait for beta stage.

It seems they are pushing a new patch today.

@spacegg: You know what, I went for 1920x1080 instead of 2560x1080 (I have an ultrawide monitor) and it got much better, though really, even if they did say that server load doesn't affect performance in that previous link you sent, I find that hard to believe, because of how wildly it varies

This game, even if people are mad about it for a silly reason (Hey guys remember Bannerlord? Hey its coming in 2015! Hey its now 2016! Oh what you say, its 2017 now, we release it by then! What you say 2017 almost over, well that sucks doesn't it?)

People are just looking for silly reasons to get mad at a video game. From what I've seen out from an rather objective standpoint as an bystander, Star Citizen does actually looking brilliant and is a technical marvel in all aspects, too. This game seems way more impressive than what ID Software have done with Quake in 1996. There is pioneering 3d technology and then theres pioneering a fluid background simulation inside an extremly advanced 3d environment and I think that seeing this kind of development is a truely groundbreaking step for open world games. The scale and the immersion that makes it stand out is just so amazing compared to other static open world games which is why I'm way more understandable that this game has to spend at least 3 years more cooking in the video game ovens than other bystanders would probably say. And even then, thats only about 8 years of development with the game. Tons of games are in development for 5+ years nowadays so I don't really get what the fuzz is all about (also the whole irony of people saying that NMS needed a few more years of development but saying that Star Citizen will never come out, oh boy thats just funny).

Elite: Dangerous (a game that I've actually spend around 500+ hours in) already feels way more static than gameplay videos about Star Citizen, given how that space is created by very static set pieces which then blend together into the world, this means there isn't much variety to things at all. I've stopped playing that game for the time being as I'm waiting for the next add-on to arrive. While doing the same thing over and over again is fun theres tons of other games that do the same and are worth spending your time on, too.

One question though, I have not really seen any missions in Star Citizen however, it would be nice to see what kind of missions they have. Thats something I've always enjoyed in Elite, especially Elite 2 had some very fun mission concepts that would totally work here, such as passenger transport/spacetaxi/spacebus missions. What kind of missions are there and do they even exist yet?

And besides Star Citizens technical excellence I've always felt that the scheme of wasting tons of real world money for a ship or a part of a planet sounds like a terrible idea. You should be able to get everything in this game just by playing it like you do with Elite. People say that this is only to finance the development of the game and I hope thats true, otherwise this would suck big time for obvious reasons.

@onarum: Oh, great that helped. Did you change resolution on the fly or before you joined to server? Sometimes, if you are lucky, you get in a pretty empty server when the FPS can get pretty high although it depends what other players are doing.

@spacegg: I changed before getting in the server, so yeah maybe it had nothing to do with the resolution :P

@dray2k: For sure, on a technical stand point is hard to deny how impressive it is, I mean you can literally get into a ship, fly to a different planet, get into a pretty great space dogfight in the way, seamlessly land into said planet and then engage into a fairly competent FPS game, all without a single loading screen, and you can do that already.

About the missions, at least for what I can see so far on the alpha it's pretty much basic stuff, get cargo on one place and deliver in another and other assorted "fetch quests", protecting a ship etc, there are also missions to fix comm relays; Plus if you go more to the criminal side new missions will open up, like sabotaging comm relays for instance.

But they ultimately want to go full EVE and then some, and if even half what they say comes true there will be some crazy shit players will be doing.

Also on the getting the stuff by playing the game, at least that's what they say will be the case, every single ship and all can be achieved by just playing, plus they say that once the game goes live all the buying ships and stuff with real money will end, I have my doubts thought.

@dray2k: Alpha 3.0 PU has the first iteration of their mission system included which is very basic and doesn't for example include chaining. The next system will allow players to make their own missions and hopefully there would be chained missions as well. Both of those features should be a huge change since a basic missions can change on the fly as their own complex adventures.

What I like is that missions will/should have lots of depth. For example bounty hunting mission is not necessary just dog fighting pew-pew but could be much more deep and complex. A player actually has to follow the target and find clues about their location and latest movements, like get hints in a bar where the target has visited etc. Once you have located the target you have to make a decision are you try get the dead or alive. Taking a target alive could mean that you have to board target's ship and take him down in FPS/melee fighting. Once you have captured the target you take him to jail. This is where for example Anvil Aerospace's Hawk ship should be pretty handy.

... or for example Taxi-mission could get a interesting twist because some other (pirate) player gets and hint about you are transferring a high status member and they tries to capture the customer and ask ransom for returning him alive.

Tony Zurovec is a person who knows a lot about AI, missions, etc.

Star Citizen: Around the Verse - Engineering Intelligence

All the ships (well, there are some exceptions) are available by playing the game. Buying a ship is a way to support the development but doesn't necessary make sense if it doesn't fit way you want play the game. Big ships like Idris are very expensive to maintain and keep running and I couldn't play enough to keep ship like that up and running. More expensive ship doesn't mean it is better than some basic Aurora since the ships are very different what they can do.

To me Star Citizen definitely represents as a next-gen game in pretty much all aspects. It is totally possible the project will still fail which would be a huge disappointment, not because I would "lose" $40 but because I don't think we are ever going to have a change to have this ambitious (space) game ever.

So I've bitten the bullet and bought the game and its supremely impressive in all regards. However I also fully expected this game to be an ultimately unoptimized and rough alpha and I'm not suprised that the game basically breaks if you look at it funny right now. That they're even creating pre alpha stuff for people to consume is insanely bold.

I don't have the worst PC in the world, not the best either but I can run game like The Witcher 3 without problems on Maximum details. I would be happy if Star Citizen could run at 15 fps. I've seen the roadmap and they certainly know how rough the game is themselves. Can't believe they're adressing all those dozends of major issues already.

I hope they will polish up the general experience of the game throughout this year because then oh boy this will be so much better than what Elite Dangerous is right now.

Also I've looked up stuff and you can purchase land and huge battleships (I think the shiptype in question is called Javelin) for like 3000 USD soonish which is I think kinda crazy, but people can do whatever they want with their money. I hope that you will be able to do all those things with in game money once the game comes out and that they don't decide to fully monetize everything, that game has way too much potential for that sort of thing. I also wonder what it takes in terms of crew management and AI to run these things without players. I mean you're basically required to build a working AI system for all the big ships so NPCs don't just stand there while doing nothing.

I can see why this game takes such a long time to complete and in my opinion I'd gladly wait for a few years if they're able to deliver.