Today Star Citizen developer Cloud Imperium Games released an extensive video following on the intent to improve playability in 2025.
In the video, CTO Benoit Beausejour and Creative Content Lead Jared Huckaby explain how the objective is going to be achieved.
Interestingly, we hear that the game will actually have more patches this year, compared to the previous years, moving away from the elastic quarterly cadence we had before to approximately monthly patches (9-10 during the year).
The difference is that the patches will focus on providing content (including story-driven content that will let players shape the universe), quality-of-life, and many bug fixes that will eventually accumulate to bring the game where it should be in terms of stability and playability.
This means that a number of engineers and programmers will be shifted from creating new features to fixing basic functionality. This doesn’t mean that new features won’t be worked on, but their development will be slower and they will be delivered only when they are ready, after having been extensively tested on the tech preview channel.
We also get very interesting explanations of the major problems affecting the games now, like issues with elevators, hangars, inventory, missions, the prison, and more.
This will “dramatically reduce” the risk that new features will make things unstable and reduce playability.
If you’re unfamiliar with Star Citizen, it’s a crowdfunded project directed by Chris Roberts, whom you may know for the classic Wing Commander series. It’s a multiplayer sandbox space simulator that has been in development for over a decade and in alpha for several years. It will be released exclusively for PC at some point in the future.
The crowdfunding total has recently passed $783 million and it’s currently at $783,227,133. The game also has 5,531,378 registered users, albeit not all of them are paid customers. Many simply create an account to enjoy the occasional free-to-play periods like the one that has just been canceled.
Incidentally, 2024 was the second-best year ever for Star Citizen’s crowdfunding campaign, missing the record only by roughly one million.
A few months ago, Cloud Imperium Games showcased plenty of features and tech coming to Star Citizen, 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.
