See the gameplay debut of CITIZEN SLEEPER 2: STARWARD VECTOR 💫
🚀On the run with a malfunctioning body, find a ship, build a crew, and keep both running as you navigate the Starward Belt.
EARLY 2025 | PC, Xbox Game Pass, Switch + PS5 | WISHLIST NOW▶️
The more I play Cyberpunk 2077 the more I realise CDPR have pulled the heist of the generation, and they’ve done so on the back of the idea of “bugs”. 👇
I don’t see anyone tweeting about Silo here which is wild because it has gorgeous brutalist production design, a fantastic sense of place and the best “fix a massive machine” sequence I’ve seen. Recommended.
I don’t know if incompetence or greed is to blame here, but if you spend years telling everyone how revolutionary your open world game will be, amassing 8 million preorders, and then launch that game WITHOUT DRIVING AI something has gone horribly wrong.
This is a feature. This is a specifically engineered solution to a massive gap in the game’s feature set. And it turns out pedestrians behave the same way. Fire a gun in a crowded street everyone ducks. Turn 360. The game will unload every cowering pedestrian. This is insane.
Take the games traffic. No one apart from the player can drive a bike. Why? Well after a little testing it becomes obvious that drivers have no AI to speak of. They cannot navigate around an obstacle and often will freeze in the face of an obstacle. They are literally mindless.
Surely this leads to constant gridlock? Well no, because explicitly aware of this CDPR have made every stopped car disappear if you look away. Really. That way the card keep following their paths and any blockages are cleared up. This is NOT a bug.
Cyberpunk is buggy as hell, we all know that, but by expecting and acknowledging this reviewers seem to have turned a blind eye to the massive, often absurd, issues with the game’s open world.
These elements were seemingly passed off as “bugs” in reviews, as journalists rushed through to hit deadlines and, understandably, assumed such issues would be fixed. But the fix for these things is implementing an entirely new system.
And if you actively obsfucate these issues, if you keep up a pretence that they are just “bugs”, naturally occurring errors that will eventually be fixed, you are misleading people so you can make money. Tbh, I’ve never seen anything like it.
To be clear (now that this is blowing up) I’m not blaming reviewers here, I’ve reviewed games on a deadline myself. You expect bugs and you trust pr when they tell you those issues will be fixed in a day one patch. CDPR have taken advantage of this.
The solution to this wouldn’t have been to “crunch more”. It would have been to plan better, to not run an arrogant and misleading 7 year campaign, and to be honest about the studios limits. The kind of solutions we are seeing here come from 11th hour desperation and exhaustion.
As a solo developer whose game was nominated alongside Elden Ring, World of Warcraft and Xenoblade for Best RPG at the D.I.C.E Awards I promise you do not need to be intimidated by Baldur’s Gate 3, ESPECIALLY if you are making an RPG!
Citizen Sleeper has been nominated in the
🎲Role-Playing Game of the Year🎲
category at the
#DICEawards
!
It's an honour to be recognized alongside some of the biggest games of 2023 🙏
💫CITIZEN SLEEPER goes physical:
🔺Hardcover DESIGN WORKS Art Book!
🔺Cycles of the Eye Solo TTRPG!
🔺Vinyl OST!
🔺Tarot deck, Dice and more!
Our massive anniversary collaboration with
@lostincult
is live NOW -
If these issues don’t matter to you, if you are enjoying the game, that’s great, I don’t think you should feel bad about that! But I think holding AAA to account is important when its clear that there is an attempt to conceal something. Anyway I’m done. 👋
Help me out twitter, what are your favorite entering-a-derelict-spaceship-scenes from sci-fi? I love Memories: Magnetic Rose for the distinctive technical design and weird atmosphere. How about you?
There’s no way I can reply to all the responses to this, but just want to restate that the point is not “cyberpunk is a terrible game” but that it diverges noticeably from its core selling points, and falls well short of the standards set by its competitors.
So excited to introduce CITIZEN SLEEPER 2: STARWARD VECTOR to you all!
Watch our animated reveal trailer to meet the new sleeper and some of their allies and adversaries in the Starward Belt. Welcome back to the Helion system.
💫WISHLIST NOW:
Citizen Sleeper Anniversary Week Announcement 001:
| The team is back.
| Me,
@guinoir
and
@ToyxTree
are working together again on a new project.
| FULL REVEAL SOON 👀
You may all love
@simonstalenhag
for his chunky retro-future robots and chilly Nordic landscapes, but my unlimited affection for his work is all about graphic and colour-saturated dinosaurs.
I am once again thinking about Alien Squatter, and what a wonderful RPG it is. Also it's FREE now so you have no excuse not to play. Citizen Sleeper fans will find a lot to love in its trashy, fascinating, down-and-out world.
WAKE UP SLEEPER
My next game, which just debuted in the
#PCGamingShow
is...
CITIZEN SLEEPER, a slice of life sci-fi game inspired by TTRPGs
Wishlist and find out more:
✨
CITIZEN SLEEPER is finally out! 🎉
💫Inspired by the flexibility and freedom of TTRPGs build a life among the stars on PC/Mac, Xbox Game Pass and Nintendo Switch!
Steam:
Xbox:
Switch:
As someone with some experience making “new” indie games, it’s absolutely essential that, if you want to take that challenge on, you expand your idea of an audience beyond genre. There’s more to people than “plays metroidvanias” (1/9)
Wrote the first draft of the final endings for Citizen Sleeper yesterday. A lot of feelings tied up in it all. Thanks to everyone for your patience, the last episode is still coming. 🙏
The latest
@simonstalenhag
series, LABYRINTEN is killing me with it's square format and murky Anthropocene greens. It's quietly being uploaded, piece by piece, over at
Finished Indika last night—what a beguiling and beautiful game. Loved its focus on bodies: anxious, grotesque, loving, haunted while the massive machinery of religion and society churns all around.
“What remains if you deprive a dog of its body?”
@jon_NoCode
Yeah I mean I’m no stranger to the idea of culling, but for me the aggressive culling is a smoking gun—it goes way beyond performance optimisation. As I say in the thread, the reseting definitely is covering for failures in the AI and pathfinding systems.
My first ever issue of
@edgeonline
was May 2003—21 years ago.
Tomorrow, for the May 2024 issue, Citizen Sleeper 2 is plastered across the cover, with a world-exclusive preview inside.
It’s a pretty special moment 💛
This is the first art of the base hub from
@InOtherWaters
.
I've been agonizing over this painting for a while, I hope you enjoy a first glimpse at the world I'm building.
Xbox Game Pass has been fantastic for Citizen Sleeper, and I'm so happy to share that Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector will be joining the service day one too!
The original, meanwhile, will be sticking around for subscribers, so you can catch up on the series anytime 💚
Final update: it’s been pointed out to me that this thread can be read as placing the blame for this at the feet of the devs. This is not my intention at all. Devs are not trying to trick you or cheat you, typically we (because I’m a dev too!)...
...and concealing the console versions (where these issues are most widespread) from the press while being acutely aware of the issues that exist in the game. There are no “lazy” devs. Just mismanged people given impossible tasks to fulfill.
...are coming up with elaborate artifices and tricks to bring worlds to life under pressure, with limited resources and sometimes hostile workplaces. If you use this thread to harass or disparage those people you are as bad as those forcing mandatory crunch...
Looking at the maths on the Unity changes really puts into stark contrast what the effect will be on platform deals—which in my experience are what keep indie studios running/sustainable. Some notes for non devs 🧵:
Finally if I’d known this thread would have gone viral I probably would have reconsidered my use of “heist” . I’m firmly aiming that at marketing strategy here, but conflating dishonesty and game dev has unfortunate resonances I don’t intend. Anyway that’s it. Go home.
You can finally watch Scavengers Reign and if you like my work you really should!
Imagine In Other Waters fused with Citizen Sleeper and birthed a gorgeous animated show 😍
Citizen Sleeper has changed and keeps changing my life.
Thank you for all the enthusiasm and support, it makes me eager to try fun new experiments in the universe like this actual play. Looking forward to seeing what you all think!
Citizen Sleeper is 2 years old! 💫
It’s just two days until we premiere our celebratory actual play, in the Citizen Sleeper 2 setting.
We can’t wait to share it with you 🫶
Introducing the first ever OFFICIAL Citizen Sleeper t-shirt 💫
Designed by the amazing
@spacecoyotl
it features the operator sleeper and stray enjoying some eye-grown matsutake 🍄🟫
Available at
@Fangamer
Gonna post this screenshot because:
-Look what
@guinoir
has done to the OPERATOR. Incredible. He gives me life every day.
-What's that, a stress system and FitD style "PUSH", what do you mean every class gets a different one!?
-Yellow is our color now. Pink is out. Thank you.
The scale of Jusant is its obvious quality, but what is really impressing me is the intimacy, the clutter, the sense of a very human past to its world ❤️
👇A thread on
@simonstalenhag
's The Labyrinth, released via Kickstarter last year.
Simon's art is so widely shared, yet the narrative aspect of his work is often overlooked. I wanted to do a little to correct that, because Labyrinth feels so timely and worthy of discussion.
HELION DISPATCHES debuts later today!
Follow a pirate radio station broadcasting from a refugee ship as the Helion System falls into the grip of a corporate war.
This text-based narrative project bridges the gap between Citizen Sleeper 1 and 2:
Really impressed by Chants of Sennaar’s awareness of language as being about jokes, poetry and material culture as much as it is about labelling objects. A knotty little game that lures you in with simplicity before it melts your brain by making you translate poetry.
I couldn't be happier with the reception to Citizen Sleeper, thank you all for your love and support 💛
Today at the
#PCGamingShow
we revealed what is coming next for what's being called one of the best games of 2022!
More info at
Episode: PURGE is out!
The final chapter for Citizen Sleeper is also the beginning of the future for the Helion system.
Thank you all for coming on this incredible journey with me 💫
Steam:
Xbox: …
Switch:
Reminder: Citizen Sleeper is primarily made by one person, me. It has 100,000 words of content. It tries to respect your time by giving you a save to continue after an ending. Please don’t leave bad reviews because of this. Take your time and enjoy what’s there!
The
@BAFTAGames
nominations are in and Citizen Sleeper has ✨4✨ !!!!
🔺British Game
🔺Game Beyond Entertainment
🔺Original Property
🔺Narrative
We are absolutely stunned! Thank you for the incredible honor 🙏
A small clarification: I saw Citizen Sleeper 2 previews referring to the game having a "galactic map"❌
The game takes place in a single asteroid belt in a single solar system, but has a double-digit number of hub plus contracts accessed from those. It's big but intimate! 🙏
Looking for more details on ✨Citizen Sleeper 2✨?
The steam page has extra info and teases, and I had a lot of fun designing it to fit with the interfaces of the game!
Plus you can wishlist it there too 😉 -
While we were busy working away on our final episode (soon!), Citizen Sleeper streaked past a massive milestone:
🥳500,000 players!
We can't believe half a million people have built a life for themselves on Erlin's Eye. Thank you all💛
I spent my weekend playing In Other Waters, finally feeling able to re-approach it (after 3 years!). I finished it feeling proud + that there are still ideas there I'd like to explore. After years of focusing on whats wrong with it, it was nice to be able to see what works.
⑊\\⑊\\⑊ The Eye opens for us all ⑊\\⑊\\⑊
Announcing
@ProjectSidereal
, the working title for my new game with
@FellowTraveller
💫
Find out more and WISHLIST NOW on Steam:
I wanted to put Mass Effect 2 on here but it’d give the wrong impression.
I love that game but CS 2 is shaped as a kind of counter to ME 2: a game seeking to do what I felt it failed to do or overlooked. I put Disco instead because it gives a better impression of the result.