Star Citizen is the pretty much one of the only visionary MMOs since the mid 2000s (except for maybe Darkfall). I first read about it on Hackernews years ago -

Star Citizen is the pretty much one of the only visionary MMOs since the mid 2000s (except for maybe Darkfall). I first read about it on Hackernews years ago - and ended up doing a deep dive on starcitizen_refunds. I watched a bunch of those videos about what a big failure it was. I kept wondering why people still supported it. My fundamental takeaway was that people didn't actually want their money back. For whatever reason, I didn't realize the game was actually playable. The way people describe it makes it sound like it doesn't exist. Once I read about the vision for it, I decided to try it. I was blown away. I'm not really into space or space games, but getting into a ship and flying it into space was insane. Probably one of the most interesting things I've seen in video games in the past 20 years. I stopped playing it but decided to subscribe to the $10 per month tier to support it. The game itself is playable and fun (they need to tweak a bunch of economic parameters once they're ready to leave alpha, because right now it's too easy), the MMO part is lacking (and it's an unsolvable problem based on their current vision). There are tons of bugs. Some of the simplest things don't work at all, like the overworld map, or even the game downloader. In spite of all that, it's fascinating. You don't get worldwide meetups, videos like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRP9A8VQwIU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRP9A8VQwIU or other Beatlemania fanaticism for other games for a reason. The biggest thing is that Star Citizen is meant to be a high-fidelity simulator first and a game second. There are tons of people in the community who don't realize this and just want another pew-pew, instant-gratification space shooter game (of which there are many) with good graphics. Those are the loudest people with the least understanding of the vision. Here's what I think needs to happen: 1) Put out the single-player version. This could realistically be done in a couple years and will surpass every space game ever made 2) Get rid of "sharding" completely, add caps to number of online players. 3) Change the mechanics for the MMO in a way that makes server meshing make sense. Develop some game mechanism similar to Asheron's Call portal storm that prevents mass gatherings of more than the server max. AND/OR 3) Something crazy like create a city-based MMO. Make Star Citizen ISP in NYC, pilot the MMO there. Would solve some of the networking issues. A lot of what Raph Koster has talked about in the past 20 years is being created in Star Citizen. It's the only thing that comes close to the vision of a "world" rather than a "game", that UO was able to capture.