Star Citizen and its developers at Cloud Imperium Games are aiming big for 2018. In the studio’s latest Production Update, Chris Roberts and crew detailed four major patches to coincide with the new quarterly release schedule. Here’s a brief timeline of these updates and a summary of features they’re expected to include.
- End Of March Update: Numbered at 3.1, this update will focus on providing stability and optimization for the buggy 3.0 alpha. It’ll emphasize enhancing aspects like gameplay systems, UI, ships, system traversal, economy balance and AI. During this polish phase, other teams will be working on long-term goals as well.
- End Of June Update: The first tier of content will be available for mining, salvaging, refueling and repair jobs. Players will also be able to create their own missions, and AI will be further improved.
- End Of September Update: This update is planned to bring Object Container Streaming to the PTU. This technology will allow developers to start expanding the Stanton system with greatly improved memory usage. The mechanics for land claims are also anticipated for this update as well.
- End Of December Update: This update is focused on expanding the universe and career choices introduced in earlier updates.
As with all things Star Citizen, however, this timeline comes with heavy caveats that it’s very possible many of the goals listed here won’t actually be accomplished in 2018. While this may be CIG’s current roadmap, the switch to a quarterly release schedule means updates will release regardless if key features are ready or not. In other words, we’ll probably get four big Star Citizen updates this year, but they may not be as robust as some of these descriptions suggest.
If these milestones can be met, it sounds like Star Citizen will have finally reached a state of completion akin to modern-day Early Access. Roberts had described 3.0 as the start of the Early Access as recently as September, but most folks who’ve attempted to play it likely wouldn’t agree. It contains a basic foundation for future expansion, but that foundation is unplayable at worst and very shaky at best. That outlook may change if performance improves drastically in 3.1, but there’s clearly lots of work to be done on a project that’s still very much in alpha.
Whether these ambitions get realized or not, it’s encouraging to see that CIG has a clear vision for 2018 in the many months ahead. It will certainly be interesting to return to this post in December to see how accurate it actually is. Roberts has promised quicker iteration now that the 3.0 foundation is here, but even the most diehard backers should probably temper their optimism.
Star Citizen alpha 3.0 is available now for project backers on PC.
How does this 2018 roadmap for Star Citizen look to you? Will this finally be the year CIG stabilizes production without significant delay? Tell us in the comments section!
