Star Citizen’s long and unparalleled history of development continues. The space MMO with a separate single-player campaign called Squadron 42 has now been in production for around ten years, and there is no realistic end in sight in 2022 either.
Chris Roberts, the mastermind behind Star Citizen and CEO of Cloud Imperium Games, now turned in one open letter to the millions of supporters who are significantly financing the development with their ship purchases.
The letter makes it clear that Star Citizen has made great progress in recent years despite difficult circumstances in the corona pandemic. With Squadron 42, on the other hand, the information remains vague, but at least with a possible prospect.
Star Citizen has been criticized for years because of the long development period. Expert Sascha Schulz does not see the problem in the roadmap:
Star Citizen
The problem isn’t the roadmap
Important updates since 2021
Chris Roberts outlines the key updates to Star Citizen’s persistent universe since 2021 in his open letter.
- The XenoThreat Incursion event marked an important milestone in early 2021 to test Star Citizen’s live service while giving players a preview of what the MMO sandbox could offer. According to Chris Roberts, player reactions have been positive.
- Update Alpha 3.13: Underground Infamy followed in April 2021, which expanded both the gameplay around walkable caves and included improvements in planetary technology.
- With the launch event for the destroyer Invictus, players were allowed to walk around in the new spaceship for the first time. On the occasion of the ship release, a free event is currently taking place that lets you try out all the spaceships available so far:
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Test flights in Star Citizen: Trailer for the free event “Invictus Launch Week 2292”
- With Alpha 3.14: Welcome to Orison, the developers completed the content of the first Stanton star system in August 2021 by making the gas giant and the associated Orison landing zone available.
- In November 2021, Alpha 3.15: Deadly Consequences brought new gameplay around medical supplies and inventory management. Fixing game bugs and crashes was also on the list of improvements.
- The latest update, Alpha 3.17: Fueling Fortunes, was released in April 2022 after a long dry spell and brought new ships, the ship-to-ship refueling function and the ability to sell items, among other things.
For our hardware editor Alex, Star Citizen is finally in a state worth its time:
Star Citizen
Why now is the best time to start
view in the future
In a detailed development insight, Roberts also talks about the path towards Alpha 4.0 from Star Citizen. For this milestone, the teams are working on a fundamental, complicated technique called server meshing, for which Persistent Entity Streaming (PES) is also indispensable.
Simply explained: PES allows to track the status of every object in the game. So far, these items are tied to player inventories and disappear when dropped anywhere in the game’s universe. PES should therefore provide the objects with actual persistence.
Server meshing, on the other hand, is the prerequisite for more star systems and larger numbers of players, since several servers are connected to each other interwoven
Need to become. Accordingly, server meshing requires that all related systems, such as the PES, are already working.
A timeline shows the complex development of the technology.
Players should no longer have to wait too long before they can experience the technology live. According to a published development timeline, the PES will soon be subjected to a first playtest. A first release is to follow towards the end of 2022 and will enable real persistence for the first time, while server meshing has not yet been given a fixed release date.
Increasing numbers of players and new records
Chris Roberts explained that since the end of 2021, Star Citizen has seen a strong increase in new and returning players. In 2022 alone, over a million players logged into the space MMO. In addition, Star Citizen is on the way to breaking the four million account mark. And last but not least, the threshold of 500 million US dollars in total sales is already becoming apparent.
We have MAU (Monthly Active Users) well above 2020 highs. And since then we’ve created almost a million new accounts and more than half a million new players have joined the game.
You can also see the recent history of Star Citizen in the video:
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Star Citizen – What’s coming in 2022, what was finished in 2021?
How’s Squadron 42 doing?
In Roberts’ open letter, Squadron 42 is merely a side note. The developer describes the difficulties caused by the changed working conditions during the corona pandemic and explains that he has recently spent a lot of time in the Manchester studio. The team is there Completing and polishing the content and features of an epic narrative adventure
employed.
This reads on paper after the last steps in development. However, there is still no prospect of a release date.
Finally, we give you an insight from GameStar reader and Star Citizen supporter Velios:
opinion of Velios
GameStar Community Member and Star Citizen Backer
The open letter, in which the founder and CEO of Cloud Imperium shares his thoughts with the community, gives us an exciting insight into the future of the project. But he also sheds light on less than pleasant announcements.
It is gratifying that Chris Roberts reports on technical milestones, such as the fact that Persistent Entity Streaming (PES) is already working internally, i.e. the complete and cross-server persistence of all entities. This is particularly exciting because this is one of the last building blocks on the way to server meshing, which should ideally be tested by the first players at the end of 2022. The other side of the coin is that due to the complexity of the PES, the next major patch will take significantly longer than usual to be tested by the players for several months, and will therefore be delayed. But at least there will be an interim patch with new missions, locations and gameplay.
What also makes me positive about the project and its future is the new record in player growth and donations, according to Roberts, 2,000 new players are added every day. This should also ensure further development in the future.
But what the CEO also addresses is that past releases have unfortunately been delayed, partly due to the pandemic. Six times more meetings than usual took place in the home office, and bugs could not be fixed as quickly. Even if CIG is certainly not alone in this, the waiting was sometimes frustrating.
Unfortunately, there will be no CitizenCon on site this year either, only an online event. But various official Bar Citizens are planned, which I’m really looking forward to. At these events, players come together live, drink and eat something and exchange ideas about the game with each other and with the developers.
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