Star Marine Is Canceled Again

Star Citizen is a game that still kindly asks you for your money for some reason unbeknownst to anyone. Chris Roberts himself at this point likely is included in that list, although we’re past half a billion in funding now and Star Marine still is dead. I wrote in early 2016 that Star Marine was canceled which was, looking at the last decade, quite right. It languishes today not as a separate FPS game but a broken buggy module within Star Citizen with three maps and no players and soon to disappear altogether as a separate mode.

Much like someone who is trying to convince you that their AI product, coded by ChatGPT is going to be the one, Star Citizen continues to languish as a cult around a product made of dreams and sunk cost fallacy. At this point even just removing Star Marine would probably be good for the game to reduce the file size and just give up on any notion. They long checked whatever box and made whatever retcons needed.

Oh, wait they kind of are. In 3.9 Star Marine becomes “Arena Commander” and “Arena Commander” becomes the mode for all of the lobby based / custom games. That means the Star Marine button will disappear and the Star Marine branding is now gone.

If you notice, it’s a new FPS map for Arena Commander. It’s not Star Marine anymore. Which means to me that Star Marine is still canceled and the idea of it is being slowly dissolved away since it’s not really an outlet for sales and never has been. Ships and cosmetics always have been.

Makes sense considering CIG is basically the proto-NFT makers. Everything in this half a billion over a decade journey has been released as a means to continue to promise more to sell more. Star Citizen revolves around itself like an ouroboros without a romantic definition, just a literal snake eating itself that somehow keeps never getting full. Though, to be fair the community did get bored of buying direct from the source and have started their own secondary market, with many items going for a considerable markup like the Javelin, which we’ll also touch on since that’s still not released either.

Let’s take a trip down memory lane and look at what Star Marine failed to be, what it currently is and why the $2,500 ($3,000 now) ship of dreams still isn’t real either, marking a long list of things that generations of games have been born, blossomed and faded away while these things languish in an over scoped and underfunded (???) game.

Star Marine – A Brief History

During the original crowdfunding campaign there was a multitude of promises made around a separate FPS experience known as Star Marine. This was going to be a completely seperate game than the persistant universe and include multiple modes, no-gravity combat and an array of features all on its own. The comedy of those early days was that CIG had less clue than they had now and so they were scrambling to put something together to keep the cash flowing.

They tasked Star Marine off to IllFonic in 2013. They operated as a standalone studio and were for all intents and purposes at the time making a standalone game. CIG was scrambling trying to figure out what to do and the money kept pouring in. By 2016 they had made more promises than they could keep up with, had retconned everything and were obsessed with this “modular” development principle where many parts would come together to form the actual real thing.

The relationship ended in 2016 and CIG took the development of the “FPS module” in-house, aka tried to shoehorn what IllFonic had developed so far as fast and rapidly as they could into their game to allow for folks to do the next evolution of the NFT: move from simply looking at JPGs to walking around in them to walking around them with very awkward FPS mechanics (in my opinion).

Launching later in 2016, Star Marine launched with two maps and two modes. It received a total of four major updates so far, only one of them specific to Star Marine which was a new map in 2019. The rest were consequences of overhauls to the FPS gameplay in 2017 and 2018 and then customization updates in 2019.

For all intents and purposes, Star Marine could be qualified as a dead game. There’s barely anyone playing it, it’s buggy, the spawn glitches out and complaints about the game mode exist still in 2023. What was IllFonic’s cool FPS game never came about and Star Marine has all but died on the vine.

Remember CryEngine

This was all of course back in the CryEngine days before they moved to Lumberyard. There was a lot of development turmoil and to help cut future development and operational costs they ditched CryEngine (kinda, I mean, wew that’s another story) and moved to Amazon’s Lumberyard. I believe this was done to access a larger and cheaper labor pool since CryEngine is a specialized tool and they had to bring in CryEngine developers to help them versus something like Lumberyard which you can easily outsource.

The consequence is that it definitely isn’t nowhere as good as those early demos were over a decade ago. Crysis really does stand well up against the sands of time while Star Citizen kind of doesn’t. The weapon offset is just kind of funky, the hands don’t match anything they’re grabbing onto, the NPCs kind of don’t do much and the missions mostly involve clicking consoles and hanging around.

There’s still also this UX which I mean I hope the AI tools come and at least polish for those poor souls who subject themselves to this:

Star Marine became a check the box of over ambitious promises and the FPS combat just isn’t great.

When Will It Stop?

Never. This is Mr. Bone’s Wild Ride of nightmarish development hell and a company that loves gaslighting a community it has exploited, consensually, for pretty much a decade now. Star Marine going from really cool single player FPS game to a low-quality FPS PvP insert was amazing for Star Citizen. Then it being turned into Star Marine is actually a test bed for the FPS gameplay in the persistent universe and was never intended to be anything else and it essentially not being further developed is awe-inspiring and wonderful. None of that makes any sense.

Star Citizen currently looks like a default shader / lighting environment Unreal Engine which is apropos for the genre. In 2014 I wrote about the $2,500 ship of dreams, the Javelin which was limited to 200 ships. It has since been sold several times more, now for $3,000 and won’t be in the game until Squadron 42 is released (no release date currently).

The ship has gone on sale several times since then and sells out instantly. It won’t be in the game until an unspecified amount of time in a game that’s nearing a full decade since the original Kickstarter. The Javelin started as a NFT before NFTs were a thing, a simple JPG on a website to something akin to a game made with the modern Unreal Engine and store assets. There’s a promotional render you can explore in the game, but that ship isn’t coming until whenever.

Makes sense to me, they need to focus on what keeps generating the revenue as fatigue has to be setting in by now on the community. It is best to merge these things together into an easy-to-use minigame mode so that folks who buy their cosmetics and other things have something to fiddle with while waiting for the next pre-orders to pop in. Anything, at all, about the past is just literally omg seriously come on that’s not what it is, actually it’s you know this. This is better so why even like care about the other stuff come on… sigh. They can delete ships and it’s good for Star Citizen.

The Future Ahead

Star Marine is a broken abandoned game module that was obviously just a test ground for a persistent universe that’s buggy and with the weirdest animations. Not to mention how it just looks like a default Unreal Engine game which doesn’t help. The game’s past a half billion USD. I just want to call the secondary market out as probably where CIG will go next, assuming it just doesn’t cruise to a billion for a game that the community complains about more than the trolls do.

As always if you enjoy Star Citizen, please by all means continue. At this point, if a decade has gone by and the release date of 2014 long past and you’re well behind it then by all means continue. For everyone else may I suggest today’s latest thread on the top tips on leveraging ChatGPT to truly engage in synergy, a thread 🧵. That’s sarcasm, no you’re free thank you for stopping by and see you in the next generation after Starfield comes out and No Man’s Sky continues to provide FPS combat without shaky screens or broken spawns or no queues.