Today Star Citizen developer Cloud Imperium Games shared one of its traditional "Letters from the Chairman" in which Creative Director Chris Roberts himself shared his insight on the state of the project and on what's coming.
The most relevant point in the letter published on the official website is that the developers have spent the past few months planning the upcoming major milestones for the game's online Persistent Universe, which will culminate in version 1.0, which will be the official commercial release of the game.
As that roadmap is finalized and validated, its "vision and execution plan" will be shared later this year.
We hear from Rich Tyrer, who has been promoted to Senior Game Director (previously he served as Game Director on the single-player campaign, Squadron 42, and Core Gameplay Pillar Director). In his new role, he will work side by side with Chris Roberts overseeing both the development of Star Citizen and Squadron 42.
This promises "a more rapid expansion of features and content coming from Squadron 42 to Star Citizen" itself.
Tryer mentions that the roadmap to release will outline all the features and content needed for version 1.0 and the ones that will instead come after the official launch.
Roberts himself defines what he expects for that stage of development.
Star Citizen 1.0 is what we consider the features and content set to represent “commercial” release. This means that the game is welcoming to new players, stable, and polished with enough gameplay and content to engage players continuously. In other words, it is no longer Alpha or Early Access.
That being said, he clarifies that "there is no definitive finish line in an online MMO" and as such, the developers will keep adding new features and content for "many, many years to come."
Tryer promises that every release of new quarterly updates will be large.
With every release going forward, the intention is to move ourselves closer to that end goal – so you should expect to see large updates each quarter with many changes to systems that have not been touched in a long time like Economy, Insurance, etc., alongside a whole suite of quality-of-life improvements to things like Inventory, Missions, mobiGlas, etc. coupled with totally brand-new features and content.
While he admits that the goals set for the development team are ambitious, he believes they are achievable.
The next update, Alpha 3.23, which is tentatively scheduled for April, will indeed be very large, including a brand new and impressive character creation feature, changes to FPS gameplay and space combat, and much more.
Among all the talk about the future, Roberts also takes a moment to talk about the past year. 2023 wasn't just the biggest year for the game's crowdfunding campaign (with fans pledging over $117.5 million), but also achieved record highs in daily active players, monthly active players, unique logins, and hours played.
In total, 1.1 million players logged in the online persistent universe in 2023.
We also hear that Benoit Beausejour, who worked as Chief Technical Officer of Montreal-based Turbulent (which was acquired by Cloud Imperium last year) has been promoted to CTO at Cloud Imperium, and took up leadership of the company's Core Technology Group (CTG).
Turbulent CEO Marc Beaudet becomes Senior Vice President of Studio Operations, with the responsibility of taking care of the welfare of CIG's 1,000+ employees.
Beausejeur created the Technology Preview channel, which allows testing of large tech changes before they hit the wider Persistent Universe. Recently, this achieved the first jump between star systems by a player named “MrTrash."
Another achievement achieved during these tests is 350 concurrent players in a single shard (up from the current 100). Beausejeur promised further experimentation:
In the coming weeks and months, get ready for more Technical Preview tests with various mesh configurations: multiple game servers per solar system and seamless transitions without gates.
We're talking about layouts where servers are dedicated to entire planets and moons, others focused solely on Landing Zones or other key locations, with plenty of higher player count experiments.
Before Star Citizen heads toward its 1.0 version and release, it'll pass by Alpha 4.0, which will bring travel between star systems (Stanton and the lawless Pyro). Roberts defines this as an "Inflection point" that will also allow more people to play together.
The wording appears to confirm that the release of Alpha 4.0 may come this year, which promises to be "the biggest and best year yet in the universe of Star Citizen."
To facilitate this process the company has reorganized its Star Citizen and Squadron 42 teams to be more integrated. Chris Roberts himself has moved from Los Angeles to Austin, Texas, to be closer in timezones to the main team in Manchester, UK, which counts over 600 developers.
The company has also made the "difficult decision" to ask the development team in Los Angeles to move to Manchester, Austin, and Montreal, with the office in LA now dedicated to Marketing, Finance, Legal, and HR.
Unfortunately, this led to the departure of Todd Papy, who had been Persistent Universe Live Director for a long time and worked at the company for 9 years. He moved back to the US from the UK in 2023 for family reasons and it was determined that such an important role could not be performed remotely.
Speaking of Squadron 42, it's moving from feature-complete to content-complete, ensuring that "the game has the necessary polish and feels worthy of being the spiritual successor to Wing Commander." We hear that more will be shared at CitizenCon in October.
If you're unfamiliar with Star Citizen, the game is currently in ongoing development exclusively for PC. As a crowdfunded game, it has received a mindboggling $669,437,354 in funding with 5,111,080 registered users, albeit not all of them are paying customers.
Full disclosure: the author of this post backed Star Citizen's crowdfunding campaign.
