Look at the last year of content. Siege of Orison is back as a pure instanced four-player FPS run. No ships. No dogfighting. Just “deploy via secure shuttle, clear the platforms, extract.” Tactical Strike Groups send you into fortified asteroid bases for a six-phase assault that ends with boarding, fighting through interiors, and extracting a hostage. Data extraction missions. VIP extraction events where 100+ players pile onto a station or surface site while the server melts. Orison Relief Support is combat, salvage, and supply runs, but the juice is in the FPS contracts and the loot. Every major “event” is now: land, shoot AI that still path like they’re on a coffee break, loot, extract before the desync or the 3 FPS slideshow kills you. It’s Escape from Tarkov with worse gunplay, worse netcode, and a $1,000+ price of admission if you actually want the cool ships that sit unused in your hangar. Meanwhile the thing people originally paid for — flight and space combat — keeps getting worse. Engineering stretched TTK into “watch paint dry while your shields regen” territory. Fighters feel floaty or brick-like depending on the week. Desync in close-range dogfights is still a meme. Capital ships turn every big fight into a lag party. CIG is on their third (or fourth?) TTK tech preview trying to walk it back because players finally noticed that space combat stopped being fun years ago. Master Modes already simplified the flight model. Now they’re still tuning around the damage of those decisions while pumping out more bunker crawls and instanced FPS loops. FPS itself is still broken in the ways that matter. Healing is an anxiety minigame. Weapons vanish. Desync is worse on foot than in ships. AI is either AFK or teleports. The “FPS Task Force” got sidelined so hard a designer had to publicly say he’s mostly been on Squadron 42 and hopes to revive it someday. After 14 years. They sold a living, breathing universe of meaningful space careers, skill-based flight, and multi-crew capital warfare. What they deliver, patch after patch, is another set of corridors, another extract loop, another gear set to chase while the actual spaceships gather dust. Performance spikes for a patch or two, then the next content drop brings the same old server meltdown the moment more than a handful of people show up. It’s not “work in progress.” It’s a deliberate pivot to the content that’s easiest to ship and easiest to monetize with armor and guns. The flight and combat experience that made people open their wallets in the first place keeps getting sacrificed on the altar of “just one more FPS event.” Star Citizen used to promise the stars. Now it promises another instanced extraction run with mediocre mechanics and the constant risk that the server will just decide you’re done playing. And bricking makes this all just that much worse.....