The MMORPG Star Citizen released a new patch “Alpha 3.18” on Friday, which was supposed to bring joy to the backers over the weekend, but everything went wrong. Fans were stuck in the launcher and mockery of the developers poured in again: Players had to wait so long for the patch, and then there were “Major Outtakes,” “major outages.”
What was special about this patch? The Alpha 3.18 was announced as the “largest update to date” of Star Citizen.
The most important feature was the introduction of “Persistent Entity Streaming”: Now, when items are dropped somewhere in the universe, they stay there.
This is a milestone for Star Citizen that has been talked about for years. It was actually supposed to be the big feature that would define 2022, but like many things, it got delayed.
Additionally, the patch included more features:
- Salvaging and dismantling shipwrecks
- Ships are not completely destroyed but leave wrecks that can be repaired or used
- The first version of the Gen12 graphics renderer is coming
- Some fresh ships were also released
Players waited 11 months for “new update” – It was supposed to be great
What was special about this patch? People waited forever for the patch. The last major update for Star Citizen “3.17” was released in April 2022 – 11 months ago.
The release of the “next milestone” had been significantly delayed throughout 2022, making it a huge deal that 3.18 was finally about to be released.
Especially since the patch was announced as the “largest update to date”.
Star Citizen speaks of “super-rough” launch
How did it actually go? Catastrophic. The patch was released on Friday, and players immediately noticed numerous errors, even during login: There were login errors, long queues, and those who got into the game encountered gameplay bugs.
The players’ frustration was exacerbated by the developers keeping quiet. Only on Sunday did a tweet come: Yes, they were aware that many players were having trouble contacting Alpha 3.18.
They then spoke of a “super-rough launch” and said they had “everyone on the team on deck” to fix the issues.
Ultimately, Star Citizen even raised the emergency flag, referring to “Major Outtakes”.
Meanwhile, 5 days after the patch, the alarm level has been lowered to “Partial Outage”. This morning, the servers were unreachable for several hours. The infrastructure of the persistence system had to be adjusted.
How are the fans reacting? There is a lot of mockery and scorn on reddit. People are frustrated because this important patch came so late. Now it puts Star Citizen’s Alpha into a state that makes playing impossible until further patches ensure stability.
That’s why now we hear remarks like “I can’t wait to play 3.18.3 – in January 2024.”
Others say: “Play? I’d be happy just to start the launcher!”
The reddit for Star Citizen is once again full of memes making fun of the “Star Citizen experience”.
What’s behind this: Star Citizen has a special status because the game has raised an insane amount of money through crowdfunding – currently at 554 million $. The sci-fi game promotes great visions and ideas to get players’ money. In theory, it all sounds fantastic.
In practice, however, such a mammoth project is prone to understandable and banal problems like bugs, launcher crashes, and error codes. This happens with large, complex games, even with many other titles that are conventionally developed; nevertheless, these problems are incredibly frustrating when you’ve set aside a weekend to play your favorite game and then nothing works.
But strange things also happen with Star Citizen. No established online game patches on a Friday unless it can be avoided somehow. Because the developers know: If something goes wrong, the forum will be on fire all weekend.
And Star Citizen releases a patch that players have been waiting for months, exactly on a Friday. They could have waited until Monday.
This combination of expectation, dimension, and reality leads to absurd situations:
