Star Citizen ’s latest Around The Verse suggested there were only 26 must-fix issues down from 76 the week before , but that achievement isn’t all it seems. Instead, it merely reflects a slightly lowered threshold of acceptability in preparing for the upcoming Evocati release.
To begin, let’s recap Erin Roberts’ statements in Thursday’s edition of Burndown. This quote begins around the eight-minute mark of the episode:
“The first thing I want to make sure you do is traverse the system well, and that's all this set of bugs is about: going in, taking off, ATC working, QT working, being able to go to locations, all that stuff… We do that kind of stuff, then what we have, what I think, actually is a really good start for Evocati. Then, once we get this set of 26 bugs left ... sit down with Todd and then say ‘right, what's the next feature we want to focus on?’
“We'll pick another 10 or 20 features and we say ‘right these are 17 bugs for that. That's the next release for Evocati.’ Let's get all this stuff worked on. We just basically pick a feature at a time, nail it down and that's how we're going to close this out.”
In other words, the reason the list of must-fix issues decreased to 26 is because those bugs are purely tied to planetary traversal. All other features, like missions, characters and usables, are no longer factored into the cluster. The Evocati is essentially being tackled one feature at a time.
However, that doesn’t mean the 3.0 Evocati won’t be a full showcase of everything the alpha has to offer. More aptly, it will just be a much buggier version of it. Because the team is purely focused on bugs related to traversal while all other issues will remain untouched until they’re addressed in an Evocati focused on that specific portion of the demo.
Cloud Imperium Games Community Manager Jared Huckaby explained the process in a forum post Friday afternoon:
“There is no ‘special’ or ‘separate’ build with specific features for Evocati. What we push to Evocati will be the most current build of 3.0 from our release branch that we feel is suitable for our immediate testing needs.
“What this means is that like every Evocati build before it, it will still contain many, many bugs impacting the overall Star Citizen experience we hope to achieve when Alpha 3.0 eventually launches, but that the most pressing bugs standing in the way of testing specific features we are prioritizing at that moment have been hopefully eliminated. Once this is done, we can push a build to Evocati and direct them to concentrated testing of those specific features within the overall 3.0 branch.”
As for what this shift means for Star Citizen backers, one can never be entirely sure. That being said, it would appear that alpha 3.0 will probably be coming to Evocati fairly soon, but will be in that phase for potentially quite a while before being ready for a wider audience to play. The most recent production schedule mentions delays of several weeks, so we can’t imagine a public version launching this month.
With the announced September launch window still fresh on the minds of supporters, the hope is that some version of alpha 3.0 will be ready for consumption by the time that deadline hits.
Star Citizen alphas are available now for backers on PC.
What do you think of this recent QA shift? Will alpha 3.0 release on Evocati channels this month? Tell us in the comments section!
