There's plenty of similarly priced or cheaper games which have far more substance (in terms of delivered scope, not promised scope).
>but it's clearly marketed as a work in progress, with no unrealistic promises made
Star Citizen's kickstarter originally promised to release in 2014/15 [1], and they continue to push back that date with no end in sight. This behaviour is literally illegal in my jurisdiction - there are reasonable exceptions for things outside the supplier's control, but scope creep is not one of them.
>You, like several others, seem to be blaming it for not being something it does not claim nor aspire to be.
I mean, they've claimed to be able to deliver a game and have failed pretty spectacularly at that. They claimed to deliver an accurate flight model which accounts for centre of mass, individual thrusters, etc. and as I understand the current flight model is basically "noclip mode but with collisions". They've sold so many ships for various lifestyles (journalism etc.) but show no progress towards even a vague idea of how those game mechanics would work, let alone implementing them. User created content and modding tools, land claims, private servers, all have been promised and then silently dropped in favour of spruiking newer and shinier ship models. They've claimed to deliver a universe of star systems and are still manually grinding out content for the first star system.
> I haven't bought it, but I just might when it can be run well enough on Linux, with limited expectations on my part
I'd advise you hold off until they deliver something close to a finished game, or even just hit beta, but you do you.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20121019000754/http://www.kickst...
It's playable right now, has been for a long time. The fact that it's not been deemed "finished" is rather irrelevant. You can compare it to a similarly-themed game such as Elite: Dangerous, which has been released and updated through paid extensions. There doesn't seem to be that much more to do in that game, from what I can gather. (I bought it, but haven't gotten around to playing it much yet.)
Or put another way, with a typical funding method SC could have released their game a few years back as it was as "gold", and it would have been a decent game -- certainly no worse than No Man's Sky at launch.
Comparing SC to the average scam Kickstarter that doesn't deliver anything and lies to the backers is simply wrong. It's an ambitious project and their release date goals were way too optimistic -- but it's hard to get mad at them for that when you have any experience with software development.
I downloaded star citizen out of curiosity during free fly last year and there's virtually nothing to do. That's if you can even get into your ship without crashing. It took me many attempts. Core gameplay loops just aren't there. The only people having fun are those that "make their own game" by role playing.
I've played a good amount of Elite. I got bored eventually but there's a ton of solid gameplay and virtually no bugs. It's a better game than star citizen in its current state in every way I can think of.
The buggyness of star citizen is unforgivable. I've played many early access and alpha games and nothing I've touched is as unplayably buggy as SC has been for years.