StarCitizen– a video game first announced when Gangnam style was at the top of the charts – sometimes wrongly called vaporware. It’s usually called that by people who have never actually played it; if they did, they would know that there is a framework out there for a game that can be played, but that’s also nowhere near what anyone could call “complete”.
You need to know this because this story is about the unfinished game’s player base, many of whom paid StarCitizen when Lebron James played basketball at MiaI. Those players who routinely log into the various parts of the unfinished game and fly/walk around for a bit found that they couldn’t get into the game with the release of Alpha 3.18 last week.
The update – which introduced a lot of things, so much that they made a trailer for it– was first released last week, and this trailer seemed exciting enough that many people tried to log into the game to check it out. Too many people.
Developer Roberts Space Industries quickly found that the game couldn’t support that many people trying to log in at the same time, and so the whole thing fell down. “Due to the high volume of traffic related to the launch of Star Citizen Alpha 3.18.0, the RSI Launcher has become unresponsive,” they said on March 11, adding, “The team is already working to fix this issue as soon as possible fix possible.
Two days later, however, many players were still banned. And the, the could get in found the game riddled with crippling bugs, prompting RSI to tweet “We apologize for the super bumpy start – our team is working hard to get things running smoothly as soon as possible”.
At the time of the game’s release quiet is not back to normal; Star Citizen’s own status page is displayed that several elements of the game, including its persistent universe, are still suffering from a “partial outage”.
The fans are understandably upset, citing things like the fact that this game has been in development ever since FIFA 13 stood on the shelves, but I think that’s a half-empty glass view. For them, a broken game must be a disappointment. For everyone else, a broken game shows there’s a game to break!
