Like everything CIG does, the introduction of instanced gameplay zones to Star Citizen has supporters and detractors, good days and bad days. Some people are apparently having performance issues with the Siege of Orison instance on the PTU, while I had no serious issues with the Recco Battaglia instance.

Instancing isn’t new to Star Citizen as we’ve had instanced hangars for quite a while now. This has allowed CIG to get more players into hangars at the same time; before instancing, players would have had to wait for a physical hangar to become “free” before they could enter. While instanced hangars have helped make the player experience better, they’re not fool proof. Players frequently experience overlap between theirs and another player’s hangar, phantom noises emanating from another instance, and landing queues as the physical landing zones only have so many doors to offer when players are approaching.

With hangars in a questionable state, introducing instancing to Star Citizen seems like a gamble, but CIG’s never been one to shy away from throwing gas on a fire. What will instancing do for Star Citizen, and what does it mean for the “tone” of the game as it drags itself towards an eventual 1.0 release?

It’s Supposedly About Control

I can’t find the specific videos, but I know that at some point during one or several Star Citizen Live shows, developers talked about how they were looking at instanced zones in order to control the narrative experience.

Although Star Citizen is a sandbox, CIG is apparently not entirely on board with everything that a sandbox game represents. Unlike theme park games, sandboxes rely on players to provide the content. From previously stated sentiment, it seemed that CIG was fine with the idea of players being the content for other players considering how strongly they pushed the “piracy” and PvP aspects into every feature release (at least that’s how I and many other people in the community felt about it).

Although the idea of instancing is that it takes players out of the main stream of a sandbox game and “keeps them safe” in a bubble of their very own, CIG has been careful not to frame it in those terms. They have said that by allowing players to enter an instance, alone or in a pre-made or even ad-hoc group, they as the developers can control all aspects and curate the experience. The current example is the Siege of Orison instance currently on the PTU. This was originally developed for the open world, but instancing the event allows for smaller, controlled group access, tuned NPC participation, and exacting milestones that can track and trigger story beats. In the future, instancing can provide other perks such as larger set-piece environments, cut-scenes, or NPCs that accompany the players for the duration.

Sandbox or Themepark?

Does this mean that Star Citizen is moving away from the sandbox model towards a more traditional theme park model? Only time will tell, of course, since the game is still 98.9% sandbox, and even when mission instances are released to the public servers, it will only move the needle another 0.1%, if that, towards a more traditional theme park-style game system. But adding instancing alone does not shift the balance.

The difference is between a sandbox game and a sandbox with instancing, not between a sandbox and theme park. Star Citizen can retain an open world for the vast majority of it’s players for the majority of it’s time. Players can trade commodities together, fight with and against one another, and see and be seen in most of the universe. On occasion, however, there may be missions that are provided for players who would rather have structure, or to serve as a vehicle for rep progression, or to provide a means for distributing rewards, among other reasons. These can also happen in the open world but for the maximum amount of narrative control, and to ensure that players are able to enjoy and complete their tasks without the interference of other players, instancing is the option.

There have been complaints within the community that what was originally (or overwhelmingly) positioned as a sandbox game has been moving more towards a theme park mentality, and instancing is one example of why people might think that way[1]. For some, the mindset is that sandbox games make all players available, all the time. Putting some players behind walls that separate them from the larger player base does not intrinsically a theme park make, but it’s also no longer a “pure” sandbox, especially when the reasoning from the developers has to do with “narrative” which is often associated with scripted, structured content that is the hallmark of a theme park experience. Sandbox purists are upset that Star Citizen seems to be moving towards more of a theme park experience, and questions have been raised as to how much instancing the game is going to get.

Depends on Who You Ask

As with any question put to a large group, the response to “is instancing a bad thing?” depends on who you ask.

Pure PvPers probably aren’t fans of it. PvP depends on players being available all the time, everywhere, and when players are sequestered behind invisible walls then that removes them from the pool of potential PvP content. PvPers might assume (rightfully) that if a sandbox starts instancing areas or missions than players who want to avoid PvP will spend as much time as possible out of reach. I’m sure that there are many PvP players who are far less rigid in their thinking; although the same caveats apply, I’ve no doubt that many PvP players would also be enjoying instanced content for the content if not for the occasional safe space it provides from 24/7 PvP gameplay.

PvE players, of course, might consider this to be a way to “meet in the middle”. Chris Roberts seems hell-bent on keeping the “risk versus reward” vibe in Star Citizen, and apparently prefers to do so via PvP. Until instancing, CIG seemed reticent to introduce any content that was free of PvP influence, but it always felt that the PvE voices were loud and persistent. CIG might be saying that instancing is a way to tell stories and control narratives, but that could also be a sidestep, as saying “this is our olive branch to PvE players” would certainly rile up the PvP crowd and could embolden the PvE crowd to push for further, more extensive concessions. We don’t know how far instancing will permeate the game. Right now it’s one mission and one NPC meet-and-greet. Later, it could be outposts, planets, or entire areas of space. I don’t think it would go as far as how Elite Dangerous handles it’s instancing (players can choose to play in open sandbox, small group, or solo instances), although as a PvE player I wouldn’t be upset if they did. PvPers would lose their minds, though.

I think CIG knows that they have to walk a tightrope with this. They’ve already staked their position by making it about curated experiences and not saying that it’s a concession for PvE players so it’s plain that they want to make both sides of the content divide happy. I think instancing can do that, but it’s not going to be simply a matter of making private mission zones and being done with it. There can be some open world missions, some instanced missions, some open world zones and some instanced zones, and everyone can have something, but CIG has also alluded to cases where players on their way to an instance might still have to contend with open world situations. I think there’s still trial and error and careful planning that needs to be done so that instancing doesn’t push one side of the community away in favor of the other.

[1] Anyone who believes that Star Citizen has always been an open world sandbox game should refer back to the original Kickstarter pitch which would have used instancing. In fact, the original pitch combined both online and offline play into a single game, which puts it more on the side of Elite Dangerous’ approach than it does in the current implementation on the public servers.