Keeping track of Star Citizen’s development is a little like watching the same, tired old guy in the back of a very expensive car, turning the key while the engine stalls, whispering, quietly, like a prayer: “This car will start soon. We promise.”
Originally having a planned release date for 2014, the game’s been stuck in crowdfunding limbo for over a decade—only releasing in early access back in 2017. You will observe that it is now 2026.
The latest domino to fall is this disastrous live stream, which is still miraculously up on the game’s official YouTube channel. It was broadcast at the start of August, but has only breached containment recently, and—oh man, where to start.
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The stream, intending to show off the currently-awaited Siege of Orison event (which was delayed), is a complete trainwreck. Sluggish-looking first person shooter gameplay and worrying desync issues plague the whole ordeal, despite being an internal build on a private server. At one point, a dev says: “Just close your eyes!” while their hand glitches through a lever.
Oliver Hull, a recently-added content manager for the game who joined as early as June this year, makes a valiant effort—one hour and four minutes into the stream—to drum up some community engagement, asking Twitch chat to share their own Siege of Orison completion times. Immediately, a fellow developer takes a punt at him, saying: “Oli, you’ve just fully opened up to them being like ‘oh I can’t time it, because it doesn’t work!'”
It also winds up being foreshadowing, because despite their best attempts, the devs themselves can’t make their way through the event successfully, leading to a deeply uncomfortable moment where Jared Huckaby, content director on the game, leans behind Hull and says: “We’re at time—it’s your show, wrap it up.”
You can’t help but feel for Hull, here, who—I must reiterate—only joined the team a couple of months ago. There are a several points where he looks extremely uncomfortable, the “wrap it up” moment included, but it does feel as though he was getting sniped at throughout the stream by everyone except for the enemies they were shooting at.
Take, for instance, 41:40, wherein he seems genuinely distressed, and a developer jokes that he should get them a can while he’s dead: “You being down, you being up, there’s no difference.” The vibes are horrendous.
Community response has been appropriately sullen, take, for instance, this very much appropriate “this is fine” meme in immediate response to the debacle on the game’s subreddit: “They’ve turned it into this huge deal now,” writes one player, “With its own convention and regular YouTube videos promising the world, releasing ships that cost real world fortunes and making bank, all the while the most basic of functions don’t work in the game at all.”
In another thread, another commenter writes: “In my opinion, some team members behaved extremely immaturely and unprofessionally during the livestream. If that reflects the company culture at CIG, then it’s hardly surprising that the company keeps running into such serious problems.”
I’m sure this all bodes well for a game that has over $1 billion in cumulative funding and $5,000 ships that aren’t ready to fly at the point of sale.
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