I recently got a UWQHD (3440 x 1440) monitor, and thought to myself, "Self, I suspect this is the sort of 'cinematic' display that Chris Roberts expects you to play his tech demo with." So I decided to try Star Citizen on it.
I hadn't launched the game in well over a year, and have been aggressively ignoring all the emails, so I didn't know what to expect. After letting the thing download a 20GiB hairball overnight, I gave it a try, expecting to materialize on Olisar, EVA up to the rings, and watch the space traffic go by...
Nope.
First I'm expected to spend a ton of time customizing my appearance, using a UI that seems to have ignored the last 15 years of progress on this issue (TES4:Oblivion did this better) -- all of which is utterly pointless as no one can see you under the helmet.
Finally the game proper deigns to launch. All the jankiness is still there; the utter lack of tutorials or even hints of where to go and what to do; all the questionable UI choices; all the hammering, hammering, hammering on my HDD. But apparently the greatest problem faced by Star Citizen -- a space game -- was that it started you on a space station. In space.
Well, they fixed that, and how. I materialized in a surprisingly spacious apartment to discover myself, not in a shiny, gleaming space station, but in a dirty, planet-bound apartment building, in the middle of an industrial dystopia. Yay. It takes a full 30 seconds for all of the geometry to finally pop in, just for this small room. And this isn't like LOD or texture popping like you get in actual games, where stuff is there and gradually resolves. No. One moment, you're looking at a desk all by its lonesome on the other side of the room; the next moment, poof! a chair appears in front of it.
There are two doors in the apartment. One leads outside; the other leads to... the toilet. ...I can't properly express my bewilderment at this room. A panel on the wall shows as selectable. I select it, and out comes a toilet. (*shakes head in bewilderment*) Someone had to model this. Someone had to animate it. Someone had to wire all that up into the UI and code. WHY!???! Who the hell is asking for realistic bodily waste elimination facilities in any game?
Anyhoo, without any prompting whatsoever, I discover that my first task in this meticulously detailed space-themed game is... Figure out the subway system. By almost pure luck, I manage to find my way to Tease A Spaceport (or something like that) where I can allegedly summon my ship and, allegedly, fly to space. So naturally I didn't do that, because obviously my entry-level, uninsured Aurora was going to explode if I so much as looked at it sideways. Instead I wandered around Cal Worthington's space dealership to see what the latest JPEGs looked like. It was around this time I got disconnected from the server, but not before noticing some of the ship models were clipping through the floor.
I connected again to a different server (Stanton, I think), but quickly found myself trying to occupy the same space as my bunk, and couldn't move. "Well, if I can glitch through the bunk, maybe I can glitch through the ceiling, too, and get out of here." And glitch through the ceiling I did, escaping all geometry, and fell several thousand feet into the sub-ocean and died.
I also tried loading up one of the hangars, and got a giant empty room, with no idea of how to put a ship in it.
I messed with it for about 40 minutes before remembering that I have a life, and did something else. During that entire time, my poor HGST Ultrastar was thrashing its brains out.
There is simply no there there. And now that he makes you go through all this rigmarole just to get to SPACE -- the only appealing part of this whole thing -- even that there effectively isn't there at all.
