In the annual “Letter from the Chairman,” Chris Roberts, the head behind Star Citizen, reflects on the past year, only to give an outlook on the upcoming months.
What does Chris Roberts write in his letter to the community? The mind behind the ambitious sci-fi MMO first discusses the upcoming live release of Alpha 4.0, which is supposed to be an important step forward for Star Citizen.
- Although the first teaser for the journey from the Stanton to the Pyro system through a Jump Point was already presented in 2019, the implementation has taken much longer than planned.
- With the release of 4.0, the developers will run two live versions of Star Citizen for the first time, allowing players to choose which version they want to play.
- The reason for this: During the Christmas season, the team will not be fully available to quickly fix issues. If the new version causes problems, affected players can fall back to the old, functioning version.
- In the new year, version 3.24.3 will then be phased out, leaving only the 4.0 version from that point on.
- The lead developer relies on the community generating sufficient traffic to extensively test the new server meshing and the revamped systems.
The new fire system for Star Citizen is coming a bit later but is part of Alpha 4.0:
Plans for Star Citizen in 2025
What comes after Alpha 4.0? If you are among the players hoping for a final release schedule after more than 13 years of development, we unfortunately have to disappoint you. According to Chris Roberts, the focus of the developers in the coming year will be on a different, more fundamental area: improving playability.
The team aims to achieve this through three factors: performance, stability, and content. The live environment should work much more reliably, with fewer bugs, and be more consistent in the future. If successful, Roberts continues, Star Citizen would already provide “an unparalleled experience in its current form.”
Additionally, they want to learn from past mistakes and fundamentally change their working methods. The development of features should be completely decoupled from the creation of content and general bug fixing, so that new functions and systems no longer hinder the content supply or destabilize the live servers.
Specifically, new, complex features are to be tested and refined in a separate area first. Only when there is a complete approval will these then make their way to the regular test or live server. In other words: there will be an alpha version for the alpha version in the future.
Chris Roberts on the advantage of crowdfunding: Lastly, Chris Roberts explains in his letter that in his long career, he has rarely encountered managers and decision-makers who were able to see and share his visions.
Therefore, he decided many years ago to start crowdfunding instead of seeking a contract with a publisher.
Star Citizen and Squadron 42 are two games that would never have received the green light from any of the big publishers. They are both too ambitious and belong to a genre that until recently was considered a niche. They require patience and investments that hardly any publisher would be willing to provide.
Chris Roberts via robertsspaceindustries.com
Because within the community, there would be many who would share his vision and who want to play exactly the game he himself desperately wants to play (and therefore is now developing himself, as no one else is doing it). In 2024 alone, 500,000 supporters are expected to join. A million testers logged 32 million play hours this year.
And when is the release? Unclear. Chris Roberts only hints that the launch of the single-player spinoff Squadron 42 and the release of the roadmap (!) for version 1.0 of Star Citizen are clear goals for the team. As soon as there is more information on this, we will keep you updated on MeinMMO, of course. In the meantime, you can read about how well the project is doing here: Star Citizen breaks the next historical milestone because fans simply have no self-control
