While Star Citizen's long development cycle has become a bit of a meme, it's doubtless that the game has continued to make steady progress throughout its history.
Today developer Cloud Imperium Games released a new trailer showing off all the progress achieved in 2023 and all the features and content introduced to the game.
This year saw the release of alpha 3.18, 3.19, 3.20, 3.21, and 3.22, marking a big acceleration compared to 2022, which only saw the release of 3.17.
Among the features launched, we see Persistent Entity Streaming, the Gen 12 Graphic Renderer, Personal Cargo Containers, soft death for ships, 12 new race tracks, mining enhancements, upgrades to Lorville city, and experimental modes for Arena Commander.
Salvage gameplay was one of the big gameplay loops added to the game, and we also saw the full refactor of the cargo system, vehicle tractor beams, new player hair, plenty of new locations, and much more.
Of course, many new ships and videos also became flyable/drivable.
We also take a look at the community aspect of Star Citizen, with CitizenCon and the many local Bar Citizen events.
You can check out the trailer below.
Star Citizen is a crowdfunded game, and its crowdfunding campaign continues, having reached nearly $656 million. Specifically, it's at $655,880,866 at the moment of this writing.
2023 is already a record year in terms of funding for the game, but we still have a few days to see by how much last year's record has been beaten.
The game also has almost 5 million registered users (4,983,703) albeit we don't precisely know how many of them are actual paid customers.
At the recent CitizenCon event, the developers also showcased an impressive demo demonstrating the capabilities of the game's engine and revealed that the single-player campaign Squadron 42 is feature-complete.
Of course, this doesn't mean that it's ready for release, as the polishing phase will take some time, but there appears to be light at the end of the tunnel.
Full disclosure: the author of this post backed Star Citizen's crowdfunding campaign.
