Watching someone livetweet them going through the Elite Dangerous artbook and getting increasingly annoyed about that game and it's everything. They clearly had ideas for it, for new ships, for a diverse aesthetic, the thought was clearly there, and yet somehow a nearly decade old game fails to have acted on almost any of its potential and just keeps puttering along and honestly, getting actively worse over time.
Choices I made when I was barely 18 mean that I've already kinda got a horse in the whole Star Citizen vs Elite Dangerous race despite playing both, and all I can think about is that a game that's still an alpha, has run like ass on every computer I've ever owned, and is probably a doomed perfectionism project, still manages to out-experience and out-style ED, a game from an IP that's positively venerable, was groundbreaking at its launch, but simply never evolved, never advanced, never had any ambition to do anything with itself beyond actively rot. What snippets of Star Citizen I've gotten to play behind the technical specs have been positively brilliant, and that's just an embarrassing thing to find yourself negatively compared, experientally, to an alpha with gaming's most egregious macrotransaction machine behind it.
And that fucking sucks that these are our choices! I'm a positive fiend for spaceships and scifi, I have a massive list of almost everything that even remotely catches my eye in the space (Still waiting with bated breath and hoping Falling Frontier is good, and anticipating the campaign for Nebulous pretty intensely too, and Ixion is still my 2022 GoTY), and still, it feels like the two defining examples for the modern era with ambitions to play anything like video games in the space sim genre and not like industrial spreadsheets are... those two.
And even disregarding Bethesda's recent atrocities and getting on my boycott list for it, I genuinely do not have high hopes for Starfield. I do not think they understand the space they're trying to get into, I think they're once again promising something they are hopeless to deliver on. I don't think they have any clue what actually makes space sims work. So not much hype there, either.
God I love video games, god do I hate the video game industry.
