During a recent livestream (31:55), Cloud Imperium Games (CIG) Jared said that they don’t want Star Citizen to be a PvE game or be a PvP game. They want it to be an everything game.
Think about that for a second.
In the Star Citizen universe, there’s no such thing as a ship that does everything. A ship optimized for hauling can’t fight. A fighter can’t mine. A dedicated explorer sacrifices combat capability. CIG understands this because they’ve built an entire economy around specialization. An “everything ship” would be overpowered and patched out of existence.
So why would a game be any different?
When a video game tries to be everything for everyone it becomes exceptional for no one. It’s not a bold vision, it’s an inability to make a decision. And the people who suffer most are the players. They backed a specific promise, and what they’re getting instead is a compromise that fully satisfies nobody.
A New Mission Tells the Whole Story
In 4.7 PTU, CIG introduced a new mission with two variants. The contested version drops you into shared space where other players might show up. There’s tension, risk, the possibility of player conflict. Sounds like the game they’re selling, right?
Then there’s the second variant. The safe one that’s PvE only, with the option to play with your friends.
It costs nearly eight times as much.
CIG has put a price tag on avoiding PvP. They have, unintentionally or not, told you exactly what the game’s playerbase wants and it isn’t getting shot by strangers. The premium isn’t for better loot or harder gameplay. It’s for the privilege of avoiding PvP.
This isn’t a one-off design quirk. It’s a pattern. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
Pyro: The Ghost Town
Pyro was supposed to be the answer. It had a lawless system with no security or safe zones. It promised pure frontier chaos, which is what PvP players had been asking for since backers first opened their wallets a decade ago.
It launched but it’s… quiet.
Community videos, forum posts, player reports all say the same thing. Pyro has the right setting for PvP but not the population. Why? Because the people who want to avoid conflict simply don’t go there. And the people who crave PvP go to where the players are. Which isn’t Pyro. It’s Stanton and other populated areas. It’s wherever the PvE crowd has gathered, mining asteroids or hauling cargo.
Pyro fails because of what it is. PvE players avoid it by design. So the dedicated PvP space sits largely empty, which makes it even less appealing, driving even fewer players there.
Then They Added VR. Yes, VR.
CIG recently added native VR support (there isn’t a dedicated dev team for it yet). That would be nice for exploration and immersion. Imagine sitting in a cockpit and watching a planet rise. It sounds incredible.
But there’s one problem: VR introduces real disadvantages in combat. Limited field of view, tracking latency. Don’t forget about physical fatigue. A VR player in a firefight against a player (PvP) on a monitor with a high-refresh display is not playing the same game.
To make sure we are on the same page: imagine me sitting in my comfortable chair, with my high-refresh monitor. Drink and snacks ready, mouse and keyboard finely tuned. I’m being nice and not saying joysticks. Now imagine the VR player, wearing their expensive VR equipment (cause it’s an investment), trying to respond to me with physical actions.
At 29:45 Elliott says: “there’s always going to be a risk of being attacked by another player or an AI.”
Adding VR is practically an invitation for griefing. Skilled PvP players will identify and farm VR users because they’re easier kills. That’s how competitive player communities behave when they spot a feature that can be exploited. Every PvP game has taught us this.
So CIG added a feature that is genuinely exciting for a certain type of player. The explorer, the immersion-seeker, the person who backed this game because they wanted to live in a spaceship. That player is almost certainly not a PvP hunter. And yet they’ve been dropped into the same universe with inferior protection from people who will want to harass them.
Another problem is that Star Citizen uses Easy Anti-Cheat (EAC) in user-mode. Not a kernel-level driver like Riot’s Vanguard. This was a deliberate choice that keeps Linux support viable as a future goal.
The tradeoff is that EAC has a limited view of the system, which is part of why cheating tactics like speed hacks, aimbots, invisibility exploits has become a documented problem. Particularly in PvP-focused content. CIG has tightened EAC after abuse spiked, but it remains a reactive cycle rather than a solved problem.
How Can You “Play Your Way” in Star Citizen?
The official “What Is Star Citizen” video paints a vision of the game that’s misleading. It works very hard to make the viewer think Star Citizen really is an “everything” game where you can “play your way.”
Does that accurately represent the game they’ve built? No, it doesn’t. The universe you see in the video looks polished and complete. The opposite of a game that’s been in pre-alpha for over a decade.
It doesn’t look like a game where a PvE player can be attacked without warning by another player. Or a VR explorer can be farmed by someone in a high-refresh flatscreen setup where the only “safe” option costs eight times the baseline.
“Play Your Way” implies there’s freedom of choice. What Star Citizen actually offers is closer to: play our way, and we’ll sell you an expensive opt-out if you complain loudly enough. That’s a very different proposition.
Current marketing masks PvP. When does PvP come up? In developer talks. Older design docs. CitizenCon talks. Not on the front page because it would slow sales.
Some will argue this is CIG doing business. Star Citizen’s funding comes disproportionately from players who want a sprawling single-player-ish space sim with optional multiplayer. Catering to that majority is necessary to survive. CIG would be foolish to alienate the people who keep the lights on.
If CIG is pivoting toward PvE because that’s where their audience is, then the “dangerous universe” marketing is now a lie. A useful one, maybe. But it’s still a lie that shapes player expectations, drives purchases. Then delivers something different from what was originally advertised.
It does not make sense ethically and UX‑wise to not be explicit about the trade‑offs, technically, for people using VR.
You can build for your audience or you can market to a fantasy. CIG is trying to do both and hoping nobody calls them out.
The Thing Nobody Wants to Say Out Loud
As someone who does PvP, when I’m in the mood for it, I genuinely enjoy a good fight.
But I don’t enjoy picking on people who don’t want to fight.
A significant portion of players who demand open, unrestricted PvP aren’t looking for a worthy opponent. They’re looking for a victim. They want to hunt players who are focused on mining, hauling, or exploring. They target the players who didn’t log in for combat, aren’t equipped for it, and don’t have the experience to counter it. That’s not a battle. That’s a mugging.
The mindset of “the universe is dangerous, deal with it” is, at its core, a rationalization for predatory behavior. The game enables it. The marketing hides it. And CIG never quite confronts it, because doing so would be admitting that a portion of their “PvP players” aren’t really interested in PvP at all. They’re interested in power over others.
The solution isn’t to eliminate PvP. It’s to redirect it. Encourage PvP players to fight each other. Create incentives for consensual, matched conflict. Bounty systems, faction warfare, arena modes, contested objectives where both sides opted in. That’s how you build a PvP community worth having.
If there is a strong PvP community, there shouldn’t be a problem for players opting in for PvP except in Pyro and Nyx, right? PvP players would flag themselves up like they do in WoW and have a great time, right? VR players can explore the world in peace since they have a real technological disadvantage, RIGHT? Because, if no one flags for PvP, that proves the point players don’t want to PvP, does it not? Of course, they wouldn’t want to force someone to PvP, RIGHT?
I couldn’t type that with a straight face because a large portion of PvP players don’t want to engage with other PvP players. They want PvE players. VICTIMS.
Times have changed since Star Citizen went into development. A lot. Talking to developers on the regular, I can honestly say most have given up on trying to make a PvE and PvP game. They learned, the hard way, the psychologies behind the two play styles don’t work well together. The reasons why they want to play the game are different. It’s like oil and water. It’s better, for their dev’s mental health, to make a game all the players will enjoy. Focus on complementary niches.
The tragedy isn’t that Star Citizen leans PvE. Plenty of great games do. It’s the refusal to be honest about it that’s causing a lot of issues. This leaves PvP players forever waiting for a game that isn’t coming, and PvE players having to justify wanting the game that actually exists.
Being the victim is not fun. It shouldn’t be portrayed as fun. And it shouldn’t be the default setting of a game that promises “Play Your Way.”
