With the annual in-universe Invictus Launch Week festivities underway, director of Star Citizen Chris Roberts shared an extended ‘Letter from the Chairman’ developer letter via the game’s official website. If you are curious about the current state of the game’s longer than originally planned development, the state of the development studios and where time/resources are being spent in the near future, definitely give it a read.
One of the main features of this developer letter is the section titled Road to 4.0, which outlines their plans to bring the next major Alpha phase of Star Citizen to audiences in the early parts of 2023 – and what key features should be part of the build. You should definitely read the full letter (HERE), but below are some key quotes from Chris Roberts about the next stage of Star Citizen:
With 4.0, we will get our second star system, Pyro, and we begin the process of adding more and more content, gameplay, and polish, to get us to Beta. For all of us at CIG, Server Meshing and 4.0 represent taking that next big leap to populating the ‘verse with the promise of content and gameplay that will turn Star Citizen into the rich, living universe that exceeds the promise we set before us those many years ago.
Our current goal is to introduce Server Meshing and 4.0 as an early technical preview to Evocati testers in PTU at the end of Q4 this year, allowing our most ardent players to help us start testing Server Meshing so we can refine and polish it for release. But this is heavily conditioned on how well / easy the Persistent Entity Streaming roll out goes, so be warned this has a high chance of slipping into Q1 next year. Once Server Meshing starts to see real-world testing with thousands of players in PTU, we will get a better idea of how much time it will need to cook in PTU before it can make its way to LIVE. We are aiming for the end of Q1 2023, but again, we really will not know with confidence until it hits testing.
Chris Roberts
Here’s hoping they can stick to their timelines as best as possible, and that Star Citizen has the core technology essential to delivering the vision presented to fans in Early 2023.
