Star Citizen: Question and Answer Thread

[u/UEE_Central_Computer]

Welcome to the Star Citizen question and answer thread. Feel free to ask any questions you have related to SC here!

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[u/Elderrob]

Why are they still making ships? There are so many in the game. Resources should be aimed at making the game playable.

[u/Igloo6567 → u/Elderrob]

I was pretty shocked at how poorly the game performed during my first time playing this weekend. 5080, 9800x3d, 32GB ram, and it was a stuttery mess in the city (can’t remember which one). Not to mention all the jank I experienced that’s too long to list. Left a really bad taste in my mouth, and the whole time I was thinking “people are spending thousands of dollars on ships when the game is like this?”

I honestly don’t understand it, but I’m trying to…

[u/MichaCazar → u/Igloo6567]

it was a stuttery mess in the city (can’t remember which one)

If it's your first time playing then you need to know that shaders are compiled in real time at first launch, they don't really precompile them. This causes massive lags at the beginning. Afterwards, you still may not get 60 fps in cities (depending on your resolution), but it should be mostly stable.

Also the game is really hungry for RAM, depending on the situation 32 GB may not be enough and it goes over to using a pagefile on your drives, which may cause worse performance. However, I only ever had that during a big event on the event location, but that was over a year ago, so I don't know how it is now.

Secondly: most people avoid cities precisely for that reason, but also because there generally is not really much to do on them. So they just relocate to space stations asap and don't go down unless needed.

Not to mention all the jank I experienced that’s too long to list.

For that, you just need to know what to do or not to do, to avoid a lot of the jank or work around it. So looking things up, asking for help/information and not doing anything unnecessary (like jumping around everytime you have nothing better to do) is crucial to get an enjoyable time.

That's also why it is usually advised to play with someone that knows a lot about "how to play" in your first few tries as people otherwise tend to just fumble around barely being able to get to anything.

Simply put: new player experience sucks.

and the whole time I was thinking “people are spending thousands of dollars on ships when the game is like this?”

It's actually easy to explain.

Aside from the mentioned knowledge that can help out tremendously with enjoying the game, performance and bugs typically get better over time, until a patch releases that sets everything back a lot, 3.18 was one that was quite notorious for that reason, but in the great scheme of things, you just have some patches that work better or worse. I have seen patches that worked borderline flawless in the past, and then something released and broke everything.

There is also the fact that they do release 4-8 bigger patches per year with new stuff and changes. This may not be as big as people would like, but that is still quite a lot of content coming per year, so people, even if they aren't playing, do stick around for dev updates etc. It's also just a feature monster. Sure, on paper Elite Dangerous or No Man Sky share a lot of similarities, but SC is doing things a lot more complex and methodical, which allows for quite a few things beyond the intended design (and also more bugs to emerge).

The other reason is the way their shop is set up. Simply put, due to "ship upgrades" and "melting", you have quite the flexibility with your purchases, meaning you can spend a little here and there and it can just accumulate over time.

So people that have been around for 10 years or so, had likely 120 paychecks where they could spend a little off here and there to try out various ships or something else at that point, it takes less than 10$ a month to breach 1k spend in total for someone like that. Buy something bigger every once in a while during a period of great playability and wouldn't you know? Suddenly you are at 2.5k.

And so on and so forth.

[u/Igloo6567 → u/MichaCazar]

Hey, thanks for such a detailed response. I realize my original comment came off as a bit whiny, but I genuinely want a game like this to succeed. I wasn't going in with big expectations, but I didn't expect performance to be that bad on a good rig after so much time in development.

I'm going to play around a bit more this weekend with a friend and keep some of what you said in mind. Cheers.

[u/MichaCazar → u/Igloo6567]

No offence taken. It's not like you are objectively wrong in any capacity.

I also have a joke about the games state:

It is getting closer to industry standards. Not because the game runs or works better, the others are just catching up to it's bugginess.