I’ve had this story rattling around in my head for a while now, and I wasn’t really sure what to do about it. You see, the latest livestream out of Star Citizen was… not a good look. At all. In a lot of ways. And while I haven’t played the game in a long time, it still affected me to watch. For those who don’t have nearly two hours of their lives to devote to a stream VOD, just know that the presentation of the FPS combat that was showcased did not go to plan, or if it did go to plan, it hasn’t been absorbed well by the playerbase. Someone literally made a list with timestamps of everything that went poorly. That’s how badly this went. And while I get that this game is in alpha, that was already threadbare cover beforehand, and that cover is well and truly shredded off now. Read more: Facepalm Citizen Now regular players or even followers of this long-gestating project know that Star Citizen isn’t what one would call stable, but it’s also taken some mighty, meaty swings, clearly accruing a tech debt that even the U.S. national deficit probably feels embarrassed for. And the shoddy performance that was on display in this livestream laid it all out in the worst way possible. I’m pretty confident in saying that calling this content work-in-progress would only summon grace and patience from gamers, except for the fact that this title is in multiple years and a billion dollars worth of development, and even some of the most ardent folks seem like they’re done with waiting for honest progress or something vaguely resembling a finish line. And it’s not that the gameplay was middling. But it was challenging to watch in terms of performance, in terms of bugginess, in terms of lackluster enemy AI and gunplay. It was shoddy and slapdash, a barely held together tower of matchsticks. And worst of all, the gameplay presented was done within an internal build, not online on the live servers. It seems pretty clear, at least from this layman’s point of view, that some of the things ailing Star Citizen are deeply rooted in code and not just network infrastructure. But worse than that was some of the interaction among the developers. I don’t pretend to know who this Olli person is, but he appeared pretty sweet and by the end of it all looked like he was hung out to dry. As if all of this was on his shoulders and not, you know, the people designing and building the game for this long. I genuinely feel itchy for him. I get that this is all kind of like old news. I also know that this can feel like kicking someone when they’re down. And really I’m not saying anything new or novel, I’m sure. But it is hard to process how deeply disappointing, exhausting, infuriating that this whole debacle was to witness. And I’m one of the more disconnected ones in terms of emotional link to the game; like I said, I haven’t played in a long time, and I’m past the point when I consider the money spent on the game utterly lost. But even so, I’m still a lover of sci-fi sandbox games, space games, space flight games, and MMOs. I want more of these kinds of games, but clearly this ain’t it. It sucked to witness that. To see how other players are reacting. It’s an unfortunate negative feedback loop, but it’s also hard not to feel as though it’s earned. It would be nice if this shook CIG awake to reality, but somehow that doesn’t feel feasible, which sucks even more. I don’t know that this is the catalyst for something changing, either at CIG or among the deeply invested, but something needs to be done already. This project has never felt close to complete, but this week it managed to somehow feel further away than ever before, and I worry it’s the regular developers who will pay the price.