Star Citizen: Chris Roberts on player growth, Squadron 42 and progress
If you look at the comments under our (or others) News about Star Citizen From the last few years, it becomes clear: Many players have long been sure that Cloud Imperium Games will never release a finished, working game. Chris Roberts’ ambitions are too big, and nobody is holding him back – some say. Others even use terms like vaporware or scam. Even some supporters have now written off their money because Star Citizen no longer has anything to do with the game originally advertised. Disappointment seems inevitable.
Faith is strong
But there is also the other side of the coin. There are numerous SciFi fans who firmly believe that something unique, something groundbreaking will be created at CIG. The ever increasing Funding ticker serves as proof year after year and currently stands at $463 million. More than 3.8 million Star Citizens have found the sum.
And also the figures that Chris Roberts recently published Letter to the community raushaut, read remarkably. The latest updates and events have attracted numerous new players to the Star Citizen universe. So many new players that your own expectations have been smashed. Specifically, Roberts speaks of a doubling of the rate of new customers this year. Since Alpha 3.16, 2,000 new players have been pouring into the servers every day.
The number of daily active players has increased by 50 percent since the last letter from Roberts (December 2020). Since that time, 1 million new accounts have been created, and more than half a million new players have given financial support to the project. And this week, player number 2 million logged into Star Citizen. By the end of the year, they aim to have 4 million accounts, 1 million unique logins and a $500 million crowdfunding pot.
Star Citizen and Squadron 42
Roberts’ letter was not just about numbers, but also about the progress that was made at Star Citizen in the last year. The space MMO is now a completely different, vastly larger and more immersive game than it envisioned ten years ago. “The game we’re building today is a game that encompasses many things: it’s a dogfighting spacesim, it’s a first-person shooter, it’s a trading game, it’s a resource gathering game, it’s a resource management game, it’s an adventure game, it’s a survival game, and it’s a social game . Star Citizen is a space simulation.“
According to Roberts, great progress has been made in various areas over the last few updates. For example, the content of the Stanton star system could be finalized, technical milestones such as Persistent Entity Streaming (PES) implemented internally (this gives all objects in the universe actual persistence; important for Alpha 4.0 and the so-called “server meshing”, which is required to to be able to process the many star systems and the targeted number of players) or to incorporate many detail improvements, such as ship-to-ship refueling.
Squadron 42, on the other hand, was only mentioned in one sentence by Roberts. The chief developer has spent a lot of time in the UK studio in Manchester since autumn, where work is focused on the single-player release of Star Citizen. The focus there is currently on finalizing the content and providing the necessary fine-tuning. That sounds like an upcoming beta phase, right? Roberts obviously still does not want to name a date. The only thing that is clear is that now several sequels planned for Squadron 42 are.
Reference-www.buffed.de