Today Cloud Imperium Games announced that the upcoming Alpha 4.0 patch for Star Citizen will slip into Q4, 2024.
Originally slated for Q3 officially, the delay still places the update within the 2024 release window that has been floated around several times, if it doesn’t get further delayed.
According to an official post, this is because the upcoming Alpha 3.24 required additional attention due to its systemic features, which led to a longer period on the public testing server.
Work has continued on 4.0 in parallel, but the developers decided to delay the patch to ensure that its gets all the time in testing that it needs.
That being said, the following content will be added to Alpha 4.0.
New Missions – Repair, Charge, and Drain
Implementing new missions that introduce engineering gameplay into the persistent universe, first appearing in Pyro’s outposts. Players will be tasked with going to the location and fixing wind turbines, relays, moisture extractors, or solar panels. This is done by repairing pipes with your multi-tool, charging batteries with the new charge/drain feature, or replacing broken components in the networks that are broken or missing.
Alpha 4.0 is expected to be a turning point for Star Citizen, with the addition of an entirely new star system that is even larger than the current one, on top of plenty of gameplay features.
If you’re unfamiliar with Star Citizen, it’s a crowdfunded multiplayer open-universe sandbox space simulator that has been in development for a very long time. It’s directed by Chris Roberts, well known for the beloved Wing Commander series.
It has received over $717 million in crowdfunding ($717,367,868 at the moment of this writing) and counts 5,326,370 registered users, albeit many of them aren’t paying customers, as they register accounts to participate in Free Fly events like the one going on right now.
A single-player campaign named Squadron 42 is also in development (and we learned last year that it was feature-complete) and it will star an exceptional cast including Mark Hamill, Henry Cavill, Gary Oldman, Liam Cunningham, Gillian Anderson, and several more well-known actors.
If you’re interested in Star Citizen, learning how to fly certainly won’t hurt. To that end, you can enjoy our helpful guide on how to get started with flight simulators.
Full disclosure: the author of this article has backed Star Citizen’s crowdfunding campaign.
