Last week, one of the developers of Star Citizen made what looked like a passing few references to “SC 1.0” that seemed to suggest that Cloud Imperium Games was moving from alpha to launch. Those plans have now been confirmed by Chris Roberts, who actively talks about the space sandbox heading to release in the latest Letter from the Chairman.
“[O]ver the past few months, our teams have been busily planning the upcoming major milestones for the Persistent Universe, culminating in what we refer to as ‘Star Citizen 1.0.’ As that roadmap comes together and becomes validated, we look forward to sharing with you both its vision and executional plan later this year.”
Part of this push to release begins with Rich Tyrer being moved to senior game director; he confirms in his own written portion that he and Roberts have “overseen the creation of a roadmap that takes us all the way up to 1.0 and outlines all the features and content we need, and just as crucially, the ones that will come post full release.” Tyrer also confirms that specialized teams are being reorganized into more “generic” teams to iterate on features faster, and he states that future quarterly updates to SC will be larger and more focused on refining existing features and adding quality-of-life while also bringing new content.
Roberts does point out that there are still milestones to meet before the push to 1.0. He once again references moving to alpha 4.0 and releasing Pyro, but he also talked about a weekend test of the server meshing and replication layer technology that saw the first jump gate from Stanton to Pyro work and brought 350 players into one shard. To that point, chief technology officer Benoit Beausejour writes in the address that the replication layer tech will arrive in alpha 3.23, while multi-server meshing is scheduled to come with alpha 4.0.
It’s important to point out that there are no timetables for 4.0 or 1.0 release, while alpha 3.23 is still being projected to go live sometime in the second quarter of this year.
Finally, Roberts references the recent restructuring and relocation at CIG, specifically calling out the departure of Todd Papy. Roberts also confirmed that the Los Angeles office was effectively being shrunk as it moved from active development to business support, which involved developers being told to move to Austin, Montreal, and Manchester as part of the shift. Roberts obviously doesn’t give numbers here, but followers of the project found multiple lead devs were affected by these marching orders.
