I would like to think that one unifying hope of everyone on spectrum is that we all want the game to be good, even if we have different definitions for "good" . I've spent 11 years following the development of the game, and many others have spent even longer. I'd like to just share what excited me about the game at various points, but the overarching theme? Novelty. Hangar module only: getting to walk around fully realized spaceships? Open doors? Sit in the seats? Even if they couldn't move, I loved inspecting every little detail. I even made a Google Cardboard VR headset to pop my phone in and walked around my hangar in VR in SC back in 2016 (albeit at 3fps :rolling_on_the_floor_laughing:) and it was incredible. I loved imagining a future where I could fly these ships and really enjoy them fully. Arena commander only: finally! I can fly the ships! I can shoot vanduul, I can test my (meager) pilot skills! The game felt new and exciting, and I loved imagining a future with even more places to go, even more to do. A18 AC Instance: holy cannoli Batman, this was incredible. This was like the joy of getting to inspect every little detail of the spaceships in the hangar module but now with an entire landing zone to explore! AND I could enjoy it with my friends?! This was amazing. I loved imagining the future where I could land here, buy some stuff, and really live in this universe that felt so preferable to real life at the time. Port Olisar and the launch of the PU: speechless. Honestly, when I loaded in for the first time I didn't get a ship. I just walked straight out onto the landing pad and when I saw Crusader enter into view and get bigger and bigger as I approached the edge I was just... Not just speechless, I was breathless. I think this was the first time I ever had a game leave me so stunned, it was just the most beautiful and amazing thing I'd seen, and the technological achievement felt huge! To then get a ship, open the door, walk in, sit down, and take off, all in one go with no loading screens? Amazing. I loved imagining a future where I could land on planets, do some trading, and really make a home for myself "in the verse" Planet surfaces! Specifically, Levski: man this felt like coming home. Levski felt relatable. It felt like an average person like myself could just go there, start working, and make an honest living. Free from oppression, just sailing the stars as you make an honest living. I loved imagining what life would be like in this place for real. . It was relatively soon after this that a lot of the novelty died down for me. Sure I played the game, usually for the first week after each update before putting it down until the next one, but I salivated over every video about the development, every behind the scenes look at a ship, every dev brief explaining their vision for the game. Did a lot of that change? Yeah! But it was so much fun to follow, even if the game itself started to lose its "breathless" moments for me. . My next "breathless" moment didn't happen until I walked into Cousin Crow's in Orison. The movement of the automated ship arms, the liveliness of the NPCs interacting with things, the atmosphere of the repair shop, it just felt so real and functional. I once again loved imagining a future where I would bring my own ship here for modifications and see if move across the service line before being turned over to me all tuned up and shiny. . Adding a little bonus one in here - the Star Engine presentation with the conductor and the longest continuous spline? Breathless. . The next, and honestly last one I've had to date was 4.0 and jump points... Opening the gate for the first time, having the music change, traversing the tunnel and dodging the pillars, it was wild. I felt like I could finally see part of the magic of where this game was going. I loved imagining a future where there were dozens of systems for me to go between, regularly making runs for the org to pick up supplies for our base from all over the galaxy. . Between all those points, what kept me hooked? It was the content I mentioned above. The M50 commercial, the Freelancer MIS commercial, heck a lot of those very early ship commercials that felt like a love letter to the future. . So what's changed? Quite simply, we're further along in development. The pros and cons to this are just so varied, I can't possibly discuss them all, instead I just want to highlight the two edges of this sword: we have more features to play with, but as a result we have less that's left to the imagination. . For 11+ years Star Citizen wasn't a game, it was a promise. It was a promise that one day you'll have the game of your dreams, the game to end all games, the game you can play for the rest of your life and be happy with it because of how impressive, unprecedented, expansive, and breathtaking it is. Sure these things weren't explicitly said by CIG, but people didn't invest millions of dollars into SC because they could look at a ship in a hangar. They invested their money because they imagined what the game would one day be to them, and they loved it. So why do things feel so bad right now? A lot of double edged swords… More missions and scripted content, especially with more special rewards might drive engagement and create a "need" to play, but it also begins to define the boundaries of what the game will actually be in the future. Instead of an open sandbox where we make our own fun by inviting players to come fight us at Kareah in global chat or just try and see how far we can take the Big Benny's machine from Gundo, we're now seeing what the game will be in much more defined terms. When many events boil down to a glorified freight elevator test it just stops feeling worthwhile. Less features means a slowly improving game experience, but it also means fewer things to get excited over. We don't have new things to do, new places to see, it's just ship sale after ship sale and the same narrow mission objectives we've always had. Content from CIG has dried up. We aren't seeing videos like we used to, we aren't getting dev briefs, we aren't seeing nearly as much of the process of game development. The benefit? The devs have more time to focus on the game instead of making content. The downside? Now not only are we getting fewer features, but there's not that juicy, fun content to hold us over between updates. Then, the majority of the content we do get feels like we're just being milked for more money, not being brought behind the scenes of any development. Game systems are more clearly defined, but the motivation is lacking. The two primary reasons to play the game are to grind aUEC or grind reputation. Are there some other things to do? Sure, but how often do you want to kill the same worms in an Onyx facility before you just look to take a break? Then what can you do? Earn aUEC or rep. That's about it. Crafting had the potential to be the start of something really fun but until I can park a Cutter Rambler with a big window on the side (think: ice cream truck) and sell guns and ammo out of it to other players in a secure storefront with a shopping UI, there's just not much reason to craft. Base building absolutely will give far more reasons to play the game, at least… I love to imagine a future where that's true… Lastly, not double edged, but - Mission/event content feels entirely disconnected from the verse. Take the Molina Mold plague in Levski. The promotional video showed people lining up at the med clinic, people coughing, stumbling around. What did we get in game? Some fungus on the walls and the same unreactive NPCs we've always had. That could have been one of the most immersive, exciting events we've ever had from a narrative standpoint. Imagine if NPCs health decreased and medics had to run around with a special drug just for the event to stabilize them and carry them to a special med bay that would basically package them up and put them in a cryo box like the ones we hauled… but no. . I don't have good solutions. I'll admit that. In a lot of ways this feels like the inevitable backlash that comes with moving a game away from being fueled by imagination and hope and towards actual game systems and rewards. There will be a large subset of people who hoped for something other than what you're delivering. As sad as I am to say it, I think there's a very real possibility I might be one of those people. I always feared the day I log in to SC, walk around for a little bit and go, "is this it?", entirely underwhelmed by what we got after all these years of "imagining a future" that never came. . I want the novelty back. I want the excitement back. I want the tiny details that have me carefully inspecting every corner of a landing zone just to see how beautiful it is. I want to love the present that we have, not my imagined picture of a future that may never come. . But in the absence of a present I enjoy in SC? Well I'm finding myself an increasingly bitter, angry man who thinks in broad generalizations. "Everything's bad, they're getting it all wrong, nothing will get better" and after being rightfully moderated for a negative comment I made I realized just how bitter and angry I'd become, and wanted to make this post to evaluate not just how SC has changed, but how my relationship with SC has shifted so dramatically since my first walk up the landing gear steps on the Freelancer MIS (iykyk). . So where do we go from here? All of the angry and bitter people like me who hate how the game has turned out? I have no idea. But I have a feeling it starts with mowing my lawn a little more gratefully this weekend, and taking a step back from everything until CIG can either make a game I'll enjoy playing, or I finally have to acknowledge they made a game that just isn't for me.