Chris Roberts sallies forth to declare 'we are closer than ever to realizing a dream many have said is impossible' with Star Citizen, but I'm sure I've heard this record before
It's been 12 years since the announcement of Star Citizen, the ludicrously ambitious and equally ludicrously overfunded space MMO from developer Cloud Imperium Games and designer Chris Roberts. For some of that time there was a legitimate question of whether there was any kind of game there at all, but that spectre has long been laid to rest and the thing is currently in an alpha for version 4.0: The question now is whether, after all this time and money, it'll be any good.
The New Year has brought forth a new "Letter from the Chairman" to Star Citizen's devotees, in which Chris Roberts hits a few familiar notes before introducing 2025's big theme for the game: Playability. Stop sniggering at the back. We'll get to the actual content that CIG hopes will make a difference soon, but as Roberts acknowledges performance and stability remain sizeable issues for the game:
«The sentiment many of you have shared—and one we wholeheartedly agree with—is that if the current game, as it stands today, ran smoothly with fewer obstacles and bugs, it would provide an unparalleled experience.»
Roberts says they've tried various approaches over the years to improving things, but have struggled to balance this with introducing new features and technology to the game, and have on occasion ended up with «unintended ripple effects—creating instability, hindering performance, and impacting overall gameplay.»
So the new approach is to hive-off feature development entirely from the ongoing work of content creation and general fixes. New features that require testing will get their own experimental and isolated channel and won't be integrated with the full game until «fully greenlit.» Roberts claims, and this did rather raise an eyebrow, that the developer has in the past «frequently been held hostage by tech or feature work that has taken longer than anticipated.»
Roberts then goes on a rather unconvincing rant about big publishers which, a dozen years after he made more money than Croesus
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