I feel like you’re misreading what I wrote if that’s your takeaway.

It’s both! They took all the game structure of a MOBA - the creep waves, the lanes, the towers, the upgrades - and paired that with the movement and gameplay design of a hero shooter.

In practice, I lean more on calling it the latter, because it feels a lot more like a hero shooter in how it plays, despite having so many recognizable MOBA elements.

Where it really breaks the MOBA mold is in the hero design. There aren’t really any fixed roles, and the meta has remained relatively fluid. You don’t have things like a designated jungler, tank, AD carry, any of that sort of thing. Builds are quite flexible and most characters can be built in a number of different ways.

There are so many things to actually criticize CIG for that it seems weird to come up with something like this out of nowhere. When they were last selling SQ42 as a standalone it was $40. Despite all of the entirely justified memes about expensive ships you can still buy the complete Star Citizen game for $45 and unlock all those ships in game. While CIG have zero problem shilling $5000 ship packages to overly eager whales, they’ve always kept their base asking price impressively low.

The adverts are very vanilla, but the conversations with the creators have definitely hinted at a lot more going on. I don’t want to say too much because it’s a) potential spoilers, and b) stuff that has only been hinted at, never confirmed, but their plans for the game definitely seem to be more in a Heart of Darkness kind of direction.

Obviously, wait for reviews, see what they actually end up making as opposed to what they might or might not have planned at any point, but from everything I’ve heard the writers say I don’t think the story is worth writing off just yet.

The actual setting is much more nuanced than what you’re getting from the trailers.

The UEE (the guys you’re signing up with) was, until quite recently, fully the villains of the setting. A fascist dictatorship under the rule of generations of mad emperors. We straight up invaded and genocided other species.

The present day of Star Citizen is exploring what that world looks like after the revolution that restores democracy but ultimately fails to truly address the rot that created that dictatorship in the first place. The “democratic” UEE still has serious problems with alien rights, kowtows to corporate power, and is in a constant internal push-pull over security vs freedom.

Literally one of the main reasons to join the military is to earn full citizenship, a la Starship Troopers.

Chris was forced to make the first three Wing Commander games that way. His original pitch was much darker, explored the idea that the Kilrathi had legitimate reasons to be fighting, and basically ended with you doing war crimes.

Wing Commander 4 was much closer to his original vision, and involves you going rogue against the Earth Navy after learning that the conflict you’re in was started by a false flag operation.

As I mentioned elsewhere, getting an invite is the easiest thing in the world. It’s doing absolutely nothing to filter trolls and griefers.

Hasn’t been a problem for me so far

For those who don’t know, you can play for free if you get an invite, and the Deadlock discord has an entire channel for getting invites. I got one within ten minutes of asking.

The game is superb. Great gameplay, great art direction, great writing. If you like hero shooters you need to give this one a try.

They’ve created separate casual and ranked play options now, so that problem is basically solved.

In this case the clean room is probably “We told Claude to write it and we don’t care if Claude has a bunch of leaked Adobe source code in it’s training data.”