I know I know, this one is going to piss a lot of people off, but read the whole post. I'm right on this, because I've seen it happen before.

Atlas

I often mention Grapeshot's 2018 masterpiece "Atlas" in conversations about Star Citizen, because its the most Star Citizen like game that's ever been made.

How similar was it? Atlas had:

• Ship combat

• PVP

• Multicrew ships

• Ships (well, land vehicles really) in ships

• Turret gunners

• Multiple non-combat stations to man on ships

• NPC crew

• FPS missions

• Deep PVE content, boss battles

• Base building

• Resource collection

• A strange kind of "server meshing", where maps were stitched together, although they used brief loading screens (which wasn't a big deal) when you transitions from server to server.

So, it was very similar. Did I mention it was a ships and seas game instead of a space sim?

Anyway, I want to focus in on the parts that are most relevant for multicrew. It, had, multicrew.

It had multicrew. Using a large ship, when the game launched, required having several people perform roles cooperatively. You had a person in charge of the rudder manning a navigator's wheel. You had at least one person on each sail. You had one person on each cannon or gun turret. It was a game that featured multicrew ships.

And it sucked.

Just like Star Citizen's multicrew sucks.

Turret gunning in Atlas was no different from Turret gunning in Star Citizen. It was terrible. It was boring as hell - you had nothing to do at all - until you got into a fight. When you got into a fight, you'd be able to fire if and only if you were lucky enough to have an enemy in your field of view, which wasn't very often (its worse with Star Citizen, since its 3D instead of 2D, you really struggle to find targets.

You go on long voyages and you man these stations where you don't do shit for 99.9% of the time you're on the ship. Its the world's most boring job. Then you get a brief 5-10 minute bit of action, and then everything is boring again.

So, Atlas, when it launched, was a lot like Star Citizen is now.

But then Atlas did something that Star Citizen hasn't done yet. Atlas... released... NPC crew.

And on my god, did it change EVERYTHING.

Ships like the Brigantine, which previously required no less than 12 living breathing people to crew, all doing incredibly boring things... suddenly became operable by just one person.

So you can guess what happened next right? Everyone loves multicrew, so everyone kept running 12 men to a boat, and no one ever used NPC crew.

=D Of course that didn't happen.

The opposite happeed. No one ever fully manned a Brigantine ever again. After NPC crew dropped, and people realized they could go off and have their own adventures, and didn't have to serve their Captains in order to sail at all... they dropped "crew life" cold. Everyone ran their owns ships.

A guild which would previously all man the same Brigantine, would instead field a whole damn fleet of Brigantines (really they'd field a wide variety of ships, but that's beside the point). NPC crew changed the game in a very positive way.

And the point of this story, is that THE SAME THING WILL HAPPEN WITH STAR CITIZEN.

Multicrew was always a dumb idea. Handing people boring trivial shit to do in order to run a ship is not a fun experience. CIG knows this too, its why they fell flat so hard with the box stacking mechanics on the Reclaimer. That is a job meant for NPC crew. That's not a serious gameplay loop, its not something they expect to be interesting and engaging content that's going to keep people playing their game rather than say GTA6. They know it sucks, its not there for you to do, its there for an NPC to do.

They just haven't finished the NPCs yet.

Now some of you, many of you... hell who am I kidding, I know this reddit - Most of you will get the wrong idea about this.

You'll shake an angry fist at your screen and tell me that you love being a turret gunner and that multicrew is awesome. You'll pretend that playing with your friends in multiple ships rather than a single ship isn't playing with your friends at all. You'll act like I'm giving you bad news, like I just shot your dog.

But this is good news, because it means that if the game does survive, and CIG somehow works through the dumpsterfire of bugs, and they somehow either cut content or use AI to finish the game before UE6 makes the entire project obsolete... then the game will be a much better game than it is now.

Because if you ask any Atlas player if the game improved after they added NPC crew, they're going to tell you "FUCK YES it did".

Multicrew gameplay was always a shitty idea, and it deserves to die. NPC crew will kill it, if they ever manage to actually add it to the game.