It seems like neither the players nor the developers of Star Citizen, the game that’s raised over a billion dollars in crowdfunding since it was announced way back in 2012 when dinosaurs such as democracy still roamed the earth, are having a good time right now. Apparently the game’s Siege of Orison mission has been serially delayed due to technical issues, and its current build on the Star Citizen public test server is a buggy mess as well. So, perhaps in the hopes of restoring player morale, on August 5th the developers at Cloud Imperium Games dedicated their regular livestream series, Star Citizen Live, to playing the mission on internal servers to show off how the mission is supposed to look.
“What we decided to do today is show you the intended design,” said content director Jared Huckaby at the start of the livestream. The goal was to show players “how it’s supposed to work.” Only…it did not work. Not only was the mission riddled with bugs, but it seemed like the developers straight-up were not having a good time with each other. At the very end of the stream, the room goes dead silent as the party realizes they’ve wiped after an hour and a half of playing the mission. Then Elliot, one of the developers, tells his teammate Olli, another developer, to kill himself, which inspired a rash of awkward laughter before Elliot finally appended “in game” to his comment. Yikes.
But the worst, most “shrivel up and die” moment happened at the end. Before the cohort of developers could respawn to attempt the mission again, Huckaby informs the group they’re at time. Then he walks up to Olli, who seems to be the developer behind this livestream project, and promptly murders him with an “It’s your show, wrap it up.” Olli looks around in a confused panic before trying to salvage his casual shanking by saying he had fun, with with an expression and tone that tells you he is not telling the truth. The devs say a few words and the livestream ends.
Woof.
Star Citizen was announced in 2012, and it still, all these years later, doesn’t have an official launch and only remains playable in early access. The game has earned over a billion dollars at this point, funded in part by incredibly pricey starter packs and ships that cost thousands of dollars. There are multiple videos on YouTube and threads in the Star Citizen subreddit talking about the unmitigated disaster the livestream was. One Reddit thread handily broke down the bugs the dev team members experienced during the stream. Meanwhile, another thread expressed gratitude that the stream happened at all. “You accidentally gave the community the most honest look at Star Citizen in months.”