Cloud Imperium Games announced that the planned Star Citizen Free Fly event to celebrate the Lunar New Year won’t happen while the developers focus all of their resources on improving playability.
The promotion, which was supposed to be part of the Red Festival seasonal event (Star Citizen’s in-lore version of the Lunar New Year), will not happen this year. While these free-to-play events are great for showing the game off to potential new customers on the fence about whether to support the game they certainly put a burden on both developers and existing players, as the servers become crowded.
In a post on the official Spectrum forums, Community Director Tyler Witkin made the announcement, actually going in-depth into what the developers plan to focus on to stay true to the promise made at the end of last year.
Witkin mentioned that the game needs to work well, so the developer’s focus is on hotfixes and subsequent patches to “bring the experience to a much better place.”
While update Alpha 4.01 is seen as the first important step in this process, as it included a massive list of fixes, major issues impacting player experience remain.
Among them are malfunctioning elevators, problematic hangars, long (and at times infinite) load times, issues with mission spawning, sharing, and rewards, problems with quantum travel and the starmap, and cases of lost ships, items, and credits.
Examples of further bugs are being investigated:
- Mineables taking too long to fully load in
- Invulnerable actors, which can include both AI and players
- Freight Elevators at outposts becoming stuck and impeding missions
- Collision issues where players may clip through a ship, the floor, etc.
- Power allocation issues setting ship power to 0 or off randomly
- Inability to equip some components discovered in Contested Zones
- And more…
Players are encouraged to continue reporting issues as the developers focus on solving them, while a 2-hour live stream on Thursday, February 4, starring CTO Benoit Beausejour, will shed light on what Cloud Imperium Games is doing to address the problems that hinder 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 $782 million and it’s currently at $782,632,042. The game also has 5,528,254 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.
