You can see people play this on Twitch, but it'll only be fun if you have a bunch of buddies to roleplay with in the world. Not much of a "game" yet for lack of interesting gameplay loops.
For all the vastness and detail in it, this world is still only a partialy complete single solar system and an even tinier fraction of what was originally promised (about 100 handcrafted star systems). At the same time it is empty, desolate and devoid of fun things to do. The sheer size of everything, which sounds so cool on paper, is a fundamental curse for the gameplay: PvP relies on players encountering players. PvE or anything with NPC involvement needs to be handcrafted to be fun. Generated missions always have a bland structure and get repetitive and boring fast.
The end result is that there is no really good way to actually make use of all that empty volume that the game already has. And that ratio is only going to become worse if all the other solar systems get added. And Star Citizen revels in that available playground with excessive travel times, low ship ranges, few ways to discover and intercept nearby ships, etc.
For comparison, Elite: Dangerous has an even vaster playing field, but it does three things that make it work: the vast majority of the galaxy is designed for lone explorers cruising out there and trying to survive without assistance. The rest of the gameplay is contricted to "the bubble", a tiny part of the galaxy that contains civilization. There, all the PvP and PvE gameplay is concentrated. Little tricks help focus most of the gameplay on very few spots in each solar system, forcing encounters to happen quite naturally. Arrival in a solar system is always at a specific point near its star. Likewise, trading and resupply happens at only very few places in each system. These are the places you need to reach as a miner or trader to make money. And these are the spots to stake out as a pirate or bounty hunter. Supercruise also turns the vastness of space within a system into a playing field of reasonable size that also reveals most of the traffic.
Gearbox eventually released that game, and it was complete mess of outdated gameplay and unpolished things cobbled together to fill the game time somehow.
They're on the 5th(or 6th?) iteration now, and the flight model still feels like crap. Part of that is that they have to rebalance every ship with every Iteration, and they keep making more ships...
Also, the large size of the world kind of destroys any kind of balance, given that ships need to travel at 1000+ m/s to make travel possible, but combat at those speeds is basically a dps fest where you click on a small icon in the distance, with no dodging or outflying the other pilot. They've tried to adress this in like 3 different ways at this point, and nothing has worked.
Regardless, I will never understand why they didn't just massively reduce weapon ranges and copy ED's flight model, given that it is pretty much the best in the "WW2 dogfights in space" business, and has been out for over 8 years now.
Given all the prep work HL:Alyx did, I wouldn't be surprised if there eventually was a HL3, it's just going to take another decade or so until enough people have a VR headset(or future disruptive equivalent) to make it worth it.
