My emotional ping-ponging re: Star Citizen continues. On today’s episode: positive discussion!

Despite being an O.G. backer, I have very little engagement with the content of Star Citizen that should appeal to me most, namely the narrative events. Way Back When, the first event I think we were handed was one in which we had to meet a contact — physically, in a bar — who asked us to go find a crashed ship and to retrieve the server blade contained therein. We were then asked to deliver it to a specific location which — spoiler alert almost a decade later — we get double-crossed and attacked. This was a Big Deal at the time because it was giving SC players something concrete and structured to do. I really wanted to do it, but Star Citizen is always gonna Star Citizen; the mission was globally available, and with one or maybe just a handful of possible locations involved, the chance for PvP was sky-high. Higher, in fact, as not only did this provide a structured narrative that everyone wanted to try, but it provided a veritable treasure map for PvPers who wanted to know exactly where other players would be at any given time. Naturally I noped out. But I also noped out of subsequent content such as the 890 Jump rescue mission and Siege of Orison, all the way through Align and Mine and, of course, Pyro is Burning. That covers a lot of structured content over the years, none of which I have actually done.

With the final phase of the Regen Crisis arc, though, CIG has met people like me at least 1/8th of the way. Perhaps seeing or at least understanding that there are a lot of people out there who will not engage with content that draws PvPers, they created over 100 possible locations where these final phase missions could happen. When these Onxy facilities first launched, every player who had grown tired of the previous patch’s content (which is usually everyone) gravitated towards these missions, and it seemed like CIG’s idea of letting statistical probability police the community wasn’t going to work out; despite the number of facilities, it wasn’t hard to encounter other players there when trying to complete a mission. As usual, it was one step forward, five steps back.

Now with a few more patches behind us, people have seemed to have given up on the Onyx facilities, at least at the levels we saw when they were first introduced. To wit, @CakedCrusader and I just finished the first phase of the story arc which takes place in the Onyx Facilities. That totaled seven missions ranging from “show up in the lobby” to “travel eight levels down, subject yourself to irradiation, violent NPC scavengers, mutant kopion, and one psychotic clone”, and I loved every minute of it.

Psyching Myself Up

I really wanted to tackle these missions specifically because I had never engaged with the curated content before. I had taken a chance early on that CIG’s plan of distributing players across 100+ locations would have given everyone breathing room and wouldn’t turn every attempt into a slaughterhouse, but my very first foray into the facilities got me killed by a duo who were just hanging out in the first area waiting for people to run through, so that kind of cooled my ardor.

When I was able to link up with @CakedCrusader, though, things went better in part because I now had someone with me who could avenge me should I get killed by other players, but also because it had been weeks since the Onyx facilities were available, meaning that maybe most of the players had wrung what they could from the experience and wouldn’t be returning.

I’m not a gogogo player because I’m rarely in it for the loot, so our first forays were free from guides or spoilers and as a result, we floundered a lot. I think out first visit lasted at least 30-45 minutes, and we died at least once due to misadventure and weren’t able to complete the mission step. Because of this, subsequent attempts to push the story forward left me a little reticent. I needed to have the time to do it, and had to be in the right frame of mind not just to accept defeat should it come to that, but also to succeed and reach points in the narrative that I hadn’t yet failed at.

Learning by Example

One issue we had early on was finding a way out of the facility. I went looking for information and found a great guide published by MrKraken in both infographic and video form. Before heading in for the next phase on our agenda, I consulted both, and we were able to get through the mission in about 20 minutes. This proved to be a winning formula because I checked the guides for the next step, and the next step, and the next step an…yes, I know; people consult guides all the time exactly for this reason but I had been so enamored with the notion that “experience is doing” and not “reading/watching is doing” that I eschewed guides for years. Only in my old age, when my time, energy, and number of fucks to give have all decreased have I decided that maybe a shortcut is OK.

Enjoying by Doing

Even still, @CakedCrusader and I took time in each dungeon crawl because we could. We were amazingly alone in all of our late-stage missions despite the fact that another patch had dropped in the middle of our progression which added a new area to the facility. We only encountered another player in the mission area once…and we accidentally killed them on account of expecting all moving objects to be hostile NPCs. So big sorry to whomever we killed that one time; it was not intentional.

Now here’s my editorial section. I enjoyed the hell out of this series of missions, but not as much as I could have.

First, I didn’t feel as connected to the story as I could have been or probably should have been. I can blame not having really participated in the previous story missions, but I also think that CIG’s decision to carve this segment into small chunks which had us leave and return to the facility several times caused some of my disconnect. I wasn’t fully aware of where we’d left off in the narrative before we entered each phase because it was always a few days between sorties. Also, relying on the players to initiate contact with the mission made the steps feel less urgent than they could have felt. I know that CIG is working on a solution to this latter gripe, so that makes me happy.

Second, I feel like the audio was a problem. I like that CIG pushed to have NPCs chat with us through our ship’s MFD, but I found the dialog hard to hear. Also, there are voice recorders strewn throughout the facilities. I played them whenever I found them, but again, I found them difficult to hear. Maybe it was just me; maybe I’m old or maybe my in-game voice volume is turned down, but I would have liked such features to punch through a little harder, and maybe with a transcript showing up in my MOBIGlass journal (if they don’t already).

Third and most expected were the times when the game reached “peak Star Citizen”. In one case, we had to pick up a hard drive, but it wasn’t there. Another time, @CakedCrusader had to pick up a server blade and we were told that he had done so, but it was not in his inventory. The NPCs are also kind of dumb sometimes, standing around staring at us without attacking, allowing us to just mow them down with relative ease. These are the kinds of bugs we expect from Star Citizen and knowing the backlog that CIG is working through means we can really only sigh, relog, and try again.

Now the good stuff. First, the facilities themselves are some amazingly designed set-pieces.

I know that CIG’s game-engine debacle over a decade ago has contributed to the extended development cycle, but I feel that having switched horses mid-stream wasn’t a wasted decision. Walking into the Onyx facility lobby is spooky because of lighting and audio cues that reminded me of the evacuation sequence at the end of Aliens: we shouldn’t be here, and there’s no telling how long this place is going to be stable so we better beat cheeks and do what we need to do. The amount of detail that CIG can cram into an object or a location is pretty impressive for a persistent multiplayer game.

Second, in light of these missions, I feel that CIG’s been on the back-foot when it comes to showcasing exactly what they’re capable of. Pretty much everything up until the past year or year and a half has been them pumping out ships, armor, and planetary or orbital locations when they weren’t trying to add new gameplay systems or band-aid existing ones. The Onyx facilities are what I’d consider to be the first content that goes beyond just “more of the same”, showcasing locations, atmosphere, and some additional features inherent therein. The teams who designed and implemented these locations did a phenomenal job and I mentioned to @CakedCrusader that this is probably the kind of thing we should expect in Squadron 42 when we’re not flying around in space, so it’s increased my hype meter for that game exponentially while also giving me hope for what Star Citizen could provide once SQ42 is out the door.

Still Lagging Behind

There’s another mission or set of missions to embark on, the Project Hyperion phase. I’m not sure we’ll tackle this one right now, in part because in completing the previous phase, we unlocked the ability to return to the Onyx facilities under the pretense of “keeping an eye on things”. We can essentially do all of the sequential parts of the original mission set again, but in any order, and we plan on doing so as an excuse, when we’ll really be going back in to loot all of the specialty items we didn’t focus on picking up the first time around.

I also want to give the community a chance to get Project Hyperion out of their system. While CIG announced that they’d be bringing instancing in 2026 to allow for curated mission content that can be enjoyed without the kind of PvP interference they so badly want to occur, having had the Onyx facilities to ourselves made Star Citizen feel like a completely different game. We were able to concentrate on what we needed to do, and felt that we could have technically taken as long as we needed to do it as we hadn’t been influenced by the presence of other players.

The good news is that Nyx is set to arrive next month, which should cause a massive shift in where the players are located. I suspect that because Nyx has been labeled “not too hot and not too cold” that a good number of Stantontites might choose Levski as their new home, as will a good number of Pyroites. While I don’t think this will push me any more into Pyro than I am now (read: not at all), I am hoping that eyes will drift away from what will then become “older content” in Stanton, allowing me to enjoy it in my own way.