Sarsapillar goes back in
Star Citizen 3.5 PTU write-up, take 2:
My mission: To fly to the new planet.
Attempt 1
I log in. I've learned that this now takes ~15 minutes to do, so after hitting launch I go get a book to read. I come back some time later and the screen is still loading. Any other game I would assume had crashed, but this is Star Citizen and I can hear it thrashing my hard drive from across the room. So I go do some laundry. I come back and it's still logging in, so I read for a few minutes, and finally get in. I spawn in the wank pod, unable to move. A prompt says "Press Y to exit bed" so I press Y. Absolutely nothing happens. I press F for interactions and see "Enter" over the end of the pod, which is the opposite of what I want to do, but whatever. I click. My character teleports outside the bed, still laying down, and performs an unskippable immersion animation to crawl back in. I find myself stuck in bed again. Someone in chat says "This patch is so infuriating." You don't say, chat. You don't say. Eventually F-ing around finds me an "Exit" button and I am able to escape the loving spawn point- at this point it's been at least 30 minutes since I first hit "Launch." My hard drive is still constantly thrashing in the background as I walk downstairs to spawn a ship. The ship I spawned last time is lost with a ten minute timer, of course, so I spawn a different one. The game crashes to desktop before I have run halfway to the platform.
Attempt 2
Relaunch
For some reason loading takes ~20 seconds this time and I am offered the ability to rejoin my previous server, so that's nice. Even the loading into the server takes only a few seconds. I walk downstairs and the terminal says my ship is still on the landing pad, so I walk out to get it and find that the airlock will not open. It lets me in, and says it's cycling, but it will not let me out. I am completely stuck. Eventually the server unfucks itself and I am able to get past the door, but by that time my ship has despawned. I go back to the terminal to spawn it again. The terminal says all pads are full. I check the windows- not only are all pads not full, there is literally not one single person on any of the pads. I throw myself out an airlock and fly over to one of the other (completely empty) pads. All pads full, again. As I run out to the pads to see if I can steal someone else's ship, I get a message that mine has been delivered- uh, alright! I run over and get into it, quickly get off the pad and pick the new planet in my map. Not loving around or risking any more crashes today. I hit "GO" and get up to go check on my laundry.
Attempt 2, Pt 2
Returning from the basement I find that my ship is already halfway there- the big ships are ludicrously fast compared to the small fighters. I get out my book for the remainder of the 5 minute trip, but halfway there I am dropped back into normal flight. Oh, right- the heat thing. I give the ship a moment to "Cool down" and then attempt to re-engage quantum flight. The sound of the QT drive spooling up plays, but the HUD element for QT flight doesn't come up, and I am unable to engage it. I have to get out of my seat, get in the co-pilot's chair, turn the ship off and then on again before the QT system will respond again. I resume my flight toward the planet. On arriving, it is really apparent that they hosed up the texturing on this one- the whole planet is one gigantic city grid, but you can clearly see the mirroring- the left half of the planet is an identical, mirrored copy of the right half. Whoops! I QT down to the city- I guess they decided you can QT in atmo now, because it takes me all the way to about 60km from the waypoint instead of several hundred. My computer absolutely chugs as I zoom over the citscape. When it is not rendering in 10 FPS, it is admittedly pretty cool environmental art- the narrow lanes of animated traffic and neon ads everywhere give off a nice cyberpunk feel. Unfortunately my HUD has completely broken again, so I am forced to navigate 60km to the landing area by sight alone- I have no throttle or speed indicators, and no real indication of where I'm supposed to go except about 6 million player target indicators, half of which are completely broken. This is when I notice another improvement- the "off-limits" area warnings have been enormously toned down. In Loreville they were these huge glowing walls that made a horrifying shriek if you got within 3 miles and killed you instantly if you cross them. Here, they are easily-missable transparent grids with a low warning tone, and on crossing one I get the bloody jam-screen effect and my ship is piloted back out- okay, fair enough. I come down for a landing in the new spaceport area and that's it, mission complete.
Summary: It took two days and 4-ish attempts but I was finally able to conduct the barest minimum of interaction within Star Citizen- flying a ship from the spawn point to one of the planets, and landing. Virtually everything is broken. The parts that aren't broken, are intentionally designed to play terribly. No part of this experience was fun and the best part was landing, because I knew it meant I was going to be able to turn the game off.
