Choose My Adventure: Star Citizen’s missions and their bugs

Before I begin, a bit of a program note for this edition of CMA: I kind of had to break from the voting selections this round. As the title suggests, I still ran plenty of missions in Star Citizen as per your request. I wasn’t, however, able to do them behind the controls of a Prospector. My benefactor friend Ichi apparently had surprise visitors during the weekend for the holidays and so we weren’t able to touch base, which is completely understandable all things considered.

Even so, there were lots of missions and even more weird bugs for me to ram face first in to.

Before I could head to the mobiGlas section that showed me missions up for grabs, I had an update to install. Patch 3.4.1 arrived the week prior, which ended up being a bit of a boon by virtue of the fact that all of my finances reset. This meant that I could get myself some equipment again in a bid to be prepared for whatever dangers I faced. Turns out the dangers I would run into were more of the technical variety than anything.

I was warned on more than a few occasions that the missions in Star Citizen were pretty buggy, so I went to my task as mentally readied as I could be for whatever randomness arrived. Indeed, more than a few mission types seemed to just be absolutely busted. ECN missions, where I had to head to a location to investigate a ship’s distress call, ended up automatically failing the second I was near the mission marker. Bounty hunting missions didn’t have any clear indicators of where the person I was hunting was located. There was, at one point, a mission that I couldn’t bring up and track on my nav computer simply because hitting the button to engage the mobiGlas UI just would not show anything.

There were a couple of other bugs that seem to be brand-spanking new with patch 3.4.1. Certain missions sounded more tuned for my Avenger Titan, which would randomly fling its cockpit hatch open and shut simply because it wanted to. Sometimes I’d open the back door of my Freelancer only to find the cargo hold didn’t actually spawn until I closed and opened the door again. At one point, I tried to summon a ship to a landing pad and was told it couldn’t spawn, but I found out that it had indeed spawned and was being forced into storage for taking up space on an active landing zone, which also had the fun little benefit of hitting me with a criminal infraction.

Other times, however, were simply boneheaded moments of user error. My inability to navigate to a station to take out hostile targets saw me fail the mission as, apparently, someone else arrived and killed the enemies. The other time I was able to head to this same mission, I had forgotten to equip my extra gun magazines, so I managed to take out one target and was left standing there like a dope as I had no more ammo for my gun. Finally, my last mission saw me once more land my ship in what I’ll call “stunt style” instead of “halfway hanging off of the landing pad,” as pictured below.

However, when missions worked like they were supposed to, they were quite a bit of fun and the closest thing to feeling like a full game that Star Citizen has yet, even if they were pretty simplistic.

One mission had me track down a stolen package, blow up the thief, retrieve the cargo, and haul it back to its rightful owner. This actually marked the first time I had brought my Titan into ship-to-ship combat and it performed great. I also liked how I had to enter space to manually pick up the package and put it into my hold. After games like EVE or STO where I simply just looted a floating interactable, it was pretty cool to have to actually interact with the item.

Most of the missions I ran were deliveries, which saw Herbert the Freelancer actually see use as an honest space truck…even if the loads he was bearing weren’t exactly truck-sized. There’s something enjoyable in the simplicity of picking up a parcel and running it to its destination like a high-tech mail delivery person. Additionally, these ended up being pretty lucrative overall.

It would have been nice for me to see more of what Star Citizen’s missions have to offer, but it’ll take some time for me to do so, I suspect. Time for both the developers to actually iron out some significantly deep wrinkles and time for me to actually remember to do simple things like navigate to the right spot or equip gun clips. Overall, I don’t hate my time with the missions of this game, but I definitely would have liked them more if they worked consistently.

With that, I believe my time in Star Citizen for CMA is at an end. Before I do that, however, it’s time for me to see just what my next adventure will be like…and that, as ever, is where you all come in. Here’s what I’m thinking:

• Elite Dangerous: This choice seems pretty obvious to me; it’s the natural progression after spending so much time in Star Citizen and it would certainly be good to see where there are similarities and differences. Also, y’know, it’s a fully finished game, so there’s that.
• RIFT: Consider this me picking up where the lovely and brilliant Eliot Lefebvre left off. This was the choice that won the vote in July, so it just seems fitting to include the option once more just in case folks would like to see where it goes.
• Project Gorgon: I know this was already covered — and in January of this year, no less — but I’m adding this one as a sort of personal curiosity selection than any sort of attempt to repeat what Eliot already experienced. I haven’t played this one in a very long time and I’d like to see where it leads.

Those are our options. Where to, friends?

Polls will once again close on Friday, December 28th at their usual 1:00 p.m. EST time. Next week, I’ll summarize my entire experience in the ‘verse and provide new polls for the game you decide I’ll be heading in to next. Until then, thanks again to everyone for their participation, and avoid bounties and ECN alerts for now.