Today Star Citizen developer Cloud Imperium Games published a “Letter from the Chairman” in which Chris Roberts himself spelled out the plans for the holidays and 2025.
First of all, according to the document, the live servers will split into two branches today, an Alpha 4.0 Preview that will feature the new system Pyro, contested zones, and plenty of new features, and another track that will keep Alpha 3.24.3 for those who prefer to keep playing the current live build.
This is because not all the mission types will work in Alpha 4.0 Preview, since the developers did not manage to have these running before their Holiday break, but the dedicated branch will give players the chance to enjoy most of the new content while the developers can count on the larger traffic to thoroughly test Server Meshing and the newly refactored systems that rely on it as they go through their final paces.
Progression accumulated in the Alpha 4.0 Preview track will carry over and the plan is for it to “persist without any further wipes—unless something major happens” albeit the developers don’t anticipate that.
Further progression accumulated on the Alpha 3.24.3 track will be wiped when it’s depreciated in the new year.
What’s even more interesting is that Roberts pledges that the focus for 2025 will be on playability including performance, stability, and content.
Over the years, the developers have experienced a challenge in balancing the improvement of quality of life with the introduction of new features. Testing new features has created instability, hindered performance, and impacted overall gameplay.
Now the development and testing of new features will be decoupled with content creation and general fixes. They will be tested separately on the Tech Preview Channel and then introduced into the live game (including the standard Evocati and PTU pipeline) only when they’re fully mature and greenlit.
This change has the goal of introducing more predictability and stability in the ongoing releases, letting the team focus on improving stability itself, quality of life, and performance.
Interestingly, we also hear that “each new content drop will be more focused and drive an overall narrative forward similar to the Overdrive and Save Stanton events. This content will then unlock new and powerful rewards including ships, armor, and weapons that you can play to earn.”
The ultimate goal is to give players more things to do and more often, on top of making Star Citizen “more stable, more performant, and more fun” in 2025.
Incidentally, we hear that over one million players played 32 million hours in the game in 2024.
If you’re unfamiliar with Star Citizen, it’s a crowdfunded project directed by Chris Roberts of Wing Commander fame. It’s a multiplayer sandbox space simulator that will be released exclusively for PC.
The crowdfunding total is now at almost $767 million ($766,908,139 at the moment of this writing) and the game has 5,470,931 registered users. Of course, many of them aren’t paying customers, as they register accounts to enjoy Free Fly Events like the one that ended recently.
A few weeks ago, we also got to see plenty of features and tech coming to the game, on top of the overall vision for version 1.0, which will be the full release of the game, albeit it doesn’t yet have a date.
A single-player campaign titled Squadron 42 is also in development, starring an exceptional cast of famous actors including Mark Hamill, Henry Cavill, Gary Oldman, Liam Cunningham, Gillian Anderson, and more. Recently we saw plenty of gameplay and learned that it’ll release in 2026.
Since the project has been in development for over a decade, you can also see how Squadron 42 evolved since its first reveals.
Full disclosure: the author of this article has backed Star Citizen’s crowdfunding campaign.
