Alright, Star Citizen has a LOT more going on than Sea of Thieves, so obviously SoT isn't going to scratch your fighter combat and ship collecting and space escapism itches, so there's no comparison there. But the main reason I am excited about Star Citizen is cooperatively operating a big ship with friends and spending an evening hanging out and exploring and building emergent stories through interactions with other people, so this is a question that I've been personally struggling with.

Sea of Thieves does this effortlessly, the whole game is streamlined to optimize for this style of play: you start together with your friends already in a ship, all you have to do is set sail, and everyone has to work together for ship movement and combat. When you die, you wait a bit, then respawn on the ship with your friends. Your ship sinks, you all respawn with a new ship. It's not realistic, but it's fun as hell.

For Star Citizen, near as I can tell from current gameplay and future plans, you start wherever you ended last, so if you were with the same friends you want to play with and nobody left, great! Otherwise you have to fly over a potentially massive galaxy to meet with them. Once you've done that, assuming you survive the trip and haven't fallen victim to bugs or ambushes or poor piloting skills, you can spend time with friends until someone dies or accidentally does a crime and is caught, in which case that friend spends the next chunk of time in a hospital ship or spending time mining rocks in jail. And if your ship blows up, you have a timer to respawn it and if nobody has extra fighters or there's only one multicrew ship between you, that's pretty much it for the night. My experience so far in the persistent universe hasn't done anything to allay my fears. Is Star Citizen's focus on realism going to make screwing around in space with friends incredibly difficult and frustrating?

Not trolling, I genuinely want this game to succeed. Just worried at this point that it can't be fun in the ways I was hoping for in light of current and planned features.