The alpha is fun as it is right now, as long as you accept that it's not a game, it's an entertaining collection of bugs that sometimes lets you do the thing you want to do. Spending more than $50 on it is kind of ridiculous, and mostly you can get enough of it by trying the Free Flight weeks they do every so often. I'm glad they do put it out there for people to try without paying, because regardless of the current coolness or future promise, no one should give money to them without getting to see just how buggy and incomplete it is first. A few of my friends and I played together in the Free Flight last month and had an absolute blast.
Two of us took a mission where we had to assassinate two space mobsters in two different parts of the solar system within a minute. We were 2 seconds too slow to get the full payout, but we got CrimeStat ratings anyway, making us criminals. We tried to land but didn't realize we should have hacked a security terminal first to remove the records of our crimes, so security scanned us and shot us down. We respawned in prison, tried to mine for a little bit to reduce our sentences, gave up on that and tried to escape, I broke my leg, my friend still made it out, and then the server crashed before we got to resume our adventures. But we popped onto a new one, took some jobs locating missing crew members from derelict or crashed spaceships, upgraded our guns, and stuck to bounty hunting until we got enough cash to get better armor, and then we rescued a hijacked spaceship Rainbow 6 style. The closest I could compare it to is Sea of Thieves in space, but that's selling both of them short.
The roadmap stuff mentioned in the OP is absolutely ridiculous, though. Elevator panels is a major roadmap feature? I mean, the elevators do suck (two of my friends got stuck in one and had to die to get out :P) but wow. They need to make the servers stop crashing, your ships get unretrievable, your account not freezing you out of logging in, plus putting in all the shit they've been talking about for years like salvaging, multicrew stuff, medical gameplay, setting up a store, exploration, player made quests (the escort and transport ones that are there aren't enough), etc.
Star Citizen, even as it is right now, gives me more of the living-in-space scifi cool first person vibe that I want than anything else I've tried, and I've tried a lot of games in the genre. If it ever becomes an actual game, I'm glad I already have a ship and stuff. And I've definitely already gotten my $35 worth just from the fun I've had in alpha. I just don't see it being an actual game for at least another 5 years at this rate, and they'll have bilked a lot more money out of a lot more people by then.
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robertsspaceindustries.com
