In a brand new Letter From the Chairman, CI Video games boss Chris Roberts has spoken concerning the studio’s plans for Star Citizen, and the way one of many studio’s major priorities for the sport this 12 months could be “playability”.
Within the letter, Roberts explains that it plans on letting gamers get a style of the gameplay demo from again in 2019 with Star Citizen Alpha 4.0. As a part of the discharge, Star Citizen will run two variations in parallel, with every one having its personal development. The rationale for that is that the studio desires to check not solely the brand new content material, but additionally how nicely its take a look at servers can deal with excessive participant site visitors.
Alpha 4.0, nonetheless, is not going to be 100% full in the case of the brand new content material it would function, and will probably be lacking a number of mission varieties from earlier releases. Gamers that wish to try the brand new content material can play the Alpha 4.0 Preview, whereas gamers thinking about gaining access to all earlier mission varieties can persist with enjoying Alpha 3.24.3.
For context, a key new function of Star Citizen with its 4.0 Preview would be the capability for gamers to journey backwards and forwards between the Stanton System and the Pyro System by making use of a Soar Level. The studio factors out that, within the course of of creating this journey, gamers may even be travelling by completely different server layers that make up the entire sport.
“Every planet, touchdown zone, or main station is now coated by completely different sport servers,” wrote Roberts. “Because of this know-how, server boundaries are successfully invisible, even at our excessive ranges of constancy, making certain clean, uninterrupted gameplay. Because of this server efficiency, playability, and total well being at the moment are native to every of the nodes within the server mesh.”
It’s price noting that, because of this know-how, points that have an effect on server stability will probably be localised to solely the precise space hosted on the server. Gamers elsewhere within the sport will probably be unaffected by these server points.
On the gameplay entrance, 4.0 Preview may even carry two new competing mission chains, which can enable gamers to align themselves with two distinct factions: the Headhunters or Residents of Prosperity. There may even be new Contest Zones within the Pyro system with its personal gang factions, all providing their very own rewards.
“As we bounce into the brand new 12 months, our major focus throughout our Star Citizen groups is obvious: bettering playability,” wrote Roberts, speaking concerning the studio’s major targets for 2025. “Our drive for playability surrounds three crucial areas – efficiency, stability, and content material. We perceive that the Reside setting should be way more dependable and constant, and we’re decided to ship on this.”
To assist on this purpose, the studio is splitting its improvement efforts by decoupling function improvement from improvement of recent content material and bug fixes.
“This implies new options will now not maintain up content material supply or danger destabilizing the Reside setting,” wrote Roberts. “This method will leverage the Tech Preview Channel, which was reserved for main new items of know-how, just like the Replication Layer and Server Meshing, however will now prolong to gameplay function testing too.”
For Star Citizen gamers, which means that the sport will get extra content material and have extra bug fixes with out one being held on the launch schedule of the opposite. This can in the end result in the sport being extra playable, with higher efficiency and extra content material.
Roberts closes out the publish by thanking Star Citizen gamers for his or her assist, and revealing that greater than one million gamers spent 32 million hours within the sport over the earlier 12 months.
