The MMO Star Citizen has now raised 605 million $ through crowdfunding. Last week, the SF epic launched into Alpha 3.20: The game is now more beautiful than ever, but suffers from many bugs. Head and video game visionary Chris Roberts comments on the status of his project.
This is what’s currently happening in Star Citizen:
- Star Citizen received a new update last Thursday, the Alpha 3.20. The patch was advertised as an update that “brings the most action so far.”
- The update mainly brought changes for the “Arena Commander” mode, the space combat part of the game, and new ships, including a controversial one for 500 $.
- The head of the game, Chris Roberts, explains current stability issues as a result of a database change six months ago, but promises improvements. Star Citizen should soon greatly benefit from the work on Squadron 42.
A trailer showcasing the update can be seen here:
Much frustration and praise in the Star Citizen community
What’s the mood like currently? The mood after the update is divided. On one hand, players are posting pictures and videos on reddit and YouTube showcasing Star Citizen in all its glory.
There are screenshots of ships in space, close-ups of improvements in physics, or praise for a new mission type (via reddit)
But there is also a lot of criticism of the current state of the game, as patch 3.20 is plagued by many bugs: bodies are grotesquely deformed.
The post sparked discussion: A player wrote a long post in the forum on Sunday about what “Quality of Life” improvements he feels are lacking in Star Citizen: things like shortcuts, keybinds, or better reporting functions.
Among other things, he is concerned that Star Citizen becomes more “readable” and makes it more pleasant for the player to operate in the universe.
The detailed post with numerous points has already received 470 upvotes and resonates with many in the community.
Chris Roberts raves about what players make of his game
This is what Roberts says: The head of the game, Chris Roberts, has also commented on the post (via rsi). He praises the constructive feedback – something like this is extremely helpful. Roberts wants everyone to know that he closely follows the feedback from the community. He also tracks various content creators about Star Citizen and listens to what they have to say about Star Citizen.
Even in Roberts’ words, the state of the game is reflected. On one hand, Roberts thinks it’s great how people play his game and says he could never have imagined 10 years ago what kind of dynamic and beautiful images Star Citizen would eventually create and what players would build in his big sandbox.
On the other hand, Roberts also admits that 2023 has been a particularly difficult year in terms of stability and comfort functions, which is due to update 3.18, which introduced persistent streaming into the game in March 2023.
Roberts explains why Star Citizen has been so unstable for 6 months
Due to the update, it was necessary to change the database in the backend: Because of 3.18 in March 2023, it was necessary to switch from an SQL Database to a “Graph Database”.
Although they switched to a technically excellent database, it has led to numerous problems such as endlessly spinning inventory windows, disappearing items, or poor game performance. This is frustrating because the software should actually run rock solid.
They are now letting the top technicians from the database company work on the problem and will resolve the issue very soon to return to the stability level of 3.17.
Roberts says literally (machine translated):
This year has been particularly challenging regarding stability and quality of life due to the introduction of Persistent Entity Streaming (PES) in 3.18. The entire manner in which we track and record the state of the universe has changed dramatically, which has also altered the way we process data in the backend in the cloud. Due to the way we record the state with PES, we had to switch to a different type of backend database, from a SQL database (relational) to a Graph database.
Unfortunately, the graph database we selected, although one of the best-rated and designed for enterprise use, has had significant issues with load, causing the database to lock up and all queries from the game servers to stall. This occurred during the launch of version 3.18, during which we struggled to stabilize it, including some technical measures on our side to reduce the load on the database.
We thought we had solved the problem, but the latest version of the database software was a regression, and we had additional locks on loading, which occurred shortly after the launch of 3.20 on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and briefly on Saturday. Last night, we reverted to an older version and disabled some of the features we suspect are contributing to instability (ironically, we believe that the replication on mirror databases for full redundancy is one reason for the database locks). This seems to have stabilized things.
When the backend database gets into a bad state, it manifests itself in various ways such as endlessly rotating inventory windows, missing items, and reduced game performance. We opted for a standard database to ensure stability and reliability since there is already a lot of new technology in Star Citizen – hence it’s frustrating that the software, which should be rock solid, is the biggest culprit making the Star Citizen experience even less reliable. We have the top engineers from the database company working on it, and we are also considering other databases we could switch to if the unreliability of the current solution persists.
Roberts promises improvement through Squadron 42
What’s next? Roberts announces that the quality of Star Citizen will improve immensely when they bring the “great technology and features” of Squadron 42 to Star Citizen. This would implement many of the desired improvements in the areas of “readability” and “comfort”.
Although Roberts does not state when the single-player game Squadron 42 will be released, he announces that he is very much looking forward to Citizen Con. It will take place on October 21 and 22, 2023.
How is this being discussed? Essentially, one reads Chris Roberts’ statement as: “We trusted a large company, relied on their product, and were disappointed.” One user states: Star Citizen already gets enough trouble and criticism for its own mistakes, it must feel terrible to now be held accountable for the mistakes of others.
However, it is argued that it is still the company’s fault for choosing the wrong product.
The promise from Roberts that players of Star Citizen will soon benefit from Squadron 42 is met with skepticism on reddit: timelines should always be taken with caution in Star Citizen.
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