If you read through my backlog, you’ll find that I have a love/hate relationship with Star Citizen. As a fan of science fiction, space ships, and high-tech futures, as well as someone who grew up with the Wing Commander and Freelancer game series, my interest in this project should be obvious. As someone who has been gaming for over 40 years and who certainly isn’t getting any younger, and who pledged for Star Citizen as soon as the Kickstarter went live, I’m among the backers who are livid that the game continues to plod along in development hell. In it’s current state as a game, Star Citizen is “just OK”. It’s really good at taking one step forward and two steps back with every patch, and while I’ll never stoop to the level of those who are irrationally angry about the project (i.e. those who have absolutely no skin in the game but have chosen outrage as their brand and Star Citizen as their vehicle), my heart sinks to new lows with every patch release. Still, I would never say (outside of the heat of the moment) that CIG is malicious or incompetent; they’re more like a clumsy creature that can’t get out of its own way. I’m willing to afford them every opportunity to make things right — yes, even after almost 14 years of perpetual development — in part because I have invested time, money, and hope and at this point, why not? The above video, while long and unfortunately boring to anyone who isn’t deeply invested in the project in any way, shape, or form, is a good, single step in that right direction.

I will not nickel and dime you with each item covered because at almost three hours, there’s a lot of ground covered. The premise is simple: newly baby-faced community honcho Jared Hucakby sits down with the game’s CTO Benoit Beausejour to talk about what CIG is doing in 2025.

A More Stable Universe

In December, Chris Roberts released his “Letter from the Chairman” mea culpa to the community in which he acknowledged that the game kinda sucks right now, and has for the past decade (paraphrasing, more or less). Even if you have no interest in the game itself and know about Star Citizen mostly from this blog, your friends, or what you see online, give it a read. It’s got the usual cheer-leading about “bright futures”, but it also admits that, frankly, CIG has screwed up in how they were developing the game, and what they plan to do about it in 2025.

The key takeaway for those who would rather stay here and read my post (thank you!) is that CIG is finally going to start focusing on bugs. “Wait!” you might say. “How could they go for so long without dealing with bugs?” There’s both a simple and non-simple answer. As an application, and statistically, Star Citizen works most of the time. It works well enough that players can get stuff done. Unfortunately it often doesn’t work completely, meaning that at some point in a player’s list of steps needed to achieve a goal, something is going to break in the most obnoxious way possible. If you look at it from a technological perspective and consider what Star Citizen currently offers, the fact that it works at all is pretty impressive. That’s also what make it so terrible: it works well enough that when it stops working, the bugs are felt so much more acutely than if the thing just refused to work at all. The punchline is that some of the bugs that can stop a player cold have been in the game for years. Sometimes bugs are fixed, only to get broken again in a subsequent patch or hotfix, which of course adds to the frustration. And every patch brings with it new issues that didn’t exist before.

Both Roberts’ letter and the above video talk about CIG’s plan to focus on fixing those bugs. Some of the examples include issues with elevators that prevent players from moving around, trap them, or eject them into space; the real-time transit system which sometimes doesn’t show up or — once again — ejects players into space; ship hangars which can refuse to deliver ships, destroy ships on delivery, or prevent players from arriving to or leaving from a location; inventory woes that play Peek-a-Boo with our stuff, and make our unique lifetime grants (in-game items we get through holiday, subscriber, or even pledge packages) irretrievable when we equip and then lose them through “misadventure” (meaning actual game play situations like death). This is certainly not an exhaustive list of issues, but they are the top-tier complaint generators and as such are some of the things covered in the video.

Roberts states in his letter that “…if the current game, as it stands today, ran smoothly with fewer obstacles and bugs, it would provide an unparalleled experience.” I believe this; there’s no space sim out there that comes close to offering the same game play experience that Star Citizen does. I have played the usual name-drops like Elite Dangerous, X4, Spacebourne 2, No Man’s Sky, and others and I like them all, but I don’t write posts about them, or collect over 3000 screenshots of them, or join an organization of strangers to play with them. When Star Citizen works, I’m jazzed, and when it implodes, I’m sad and angry, and very few games I have played in my 40 years of experience have had that same impact on me.

Admitting You Have A Problem

The most prevalent — and legit — criticisms of Star Citizen that comes from outside of the house is that CIG seems more interested in selling “JPGs of space ships” than it is in producing a game. To date, about 221 ships have been released or announced, and every one of them can be had for real-world money. Several time a year, they have in-game events which are accompanied by special ship sales in which they might bring back some of the ships which are only available for a limited time, as well as discounts on starter packs (which are the lowest paid tier packages needed to have access to the alpha). On top of that are the free-fly events which are basically marketing periods where people with no game packages can create an account, log in, and fly some free ships to kick the tires of the current state of the game. Keep in mind that all of this has traditionally gone on while the game has been shakily dragging itself across the tarmac. CIG’s position during all of this has been a literal interpretation of “let them eat cake”, pushing packages, dropping new ship sales with the bombast of olde tyme snake-oil salesmen, and marketing the game as if it wasn’t a shit-show…while the game was a literal shit-show. What galls me personally the most are the free-fly events, which under other circumstances would be a great way to show people what they’re missing, but always only ever proved many people right for not having dropped money on the project.

2025, according to the calls coming from inside the house, is a repudiation of that BAU. CIG is committing to no major feature releases in 2025, which in a way kinda sucks because the features on tap per the CitizenCon 2024 presentation would have been crafting and base-building, but I’m willing to wait considering the magnitude of the tradeoff. Feature releases were some of the biggest sources of bugs because they were released in a “tier 0” state which amounts to “get it into the game and fix it up later”. Previously, those fixes never came and only accumulated tech debt; 2025 will supposedly bring long awaited fixes to many of these long-standing pain points. Teams that would have been working on new features will instead be working on cleaning house, fixing bugs, and even re-writing entire, aged systems that haven’t kept up with other technological advances under the hood. I would hope that this results in fewer free-fly events, at least early on in 2025, and while I don’t think it means fewer of the traditional in-game events and sales (Fleet Week, Invictus, etc.), I do think that this focus will cast a shadow on those events.

It’s ‘Real Game Development’ Time

Although I’m not a game developer, I am a developer, and I know that the best time to fix egregious bugs is when you’re not doing the kind of work that traditionally makes new ones. But why now? After almost 14 years of development, most of which was spent throwing out updates with massive fanfare, announcing and collecting money for new ships (some of which still haven’t been released), and leaving backers with an ever-increasing pile of bugs, why now? Everyone has their theories — including me — but part of me wants to say “too little, too late” while another part of me wants to say “just do whatever you need to to make it better”.

An even smaller part of me, the part which used to be in the majority way back when, made me sit through this entire 3 hour video that tightened my weakened grip on the lifeline that I still hold on to in the hope that someday Star Citizen might reach that 1.0 status that they committed to on stage last November. Pragmatically, I can’t abandon the project now because I’ve invested time and money; the only way out is for the project to implode which, of course, is never off the table. What I want, though, is for the project to move away from the “certain doom” end of the scale, and I think that’s what anyone wants — even those who harbor a weird resentment of the project despite never having touched it in any way. It would be a wonderful world which had a complete, working, Star Citizen in it! This video has done some good work by publicly touching the grass in a way that only CIG can do — and I say that because it’s the only way CIG could have done it if they wanted to reassure backers (and theoretically the armchair developers and pundits) that they’re finally getting their act together in a bid to reach 1.0. No other game studio could owe their community this level of honest transparency (well, maybe Ubisoft).

Cynics and even us long-suffering supporters will admit that while these sentiments are nice, the realization of intent is what matters. Parts of the video made me question how able CIG will be to keep their promises. Features will be released when they support changes under the hood, like a revamp of the ATC system, or inventory fixes. New ships are still being teased and/or released, but only with existing systems (so no engineering, no atmosphere or fire systems, and so on). We’ll certainly still have in-game events, but free-fly is hopefully still on hold. Will CIG be able to resist sliding back into old habits? They haven’t had a great track record of staying a chosen course in the past, blaming the inherent difficulties of game development and a myriad of unknowns. Chris Roberts has a reputation as an exacting and uncompromising task-master and he isn’t stepping down; how much force he actually exerts on the project — especially in this 11th hour Hail Mary that I suspect is driving this initiative — is unknown by the public, so it remains to be seen if 2025 will be the best year for Star Citizen so far, or potentially its last.

I’m at the point where I can honestly say that I’ll give CIG the benefit of the doubt that they can make good on 2025 because my alternatives are too stay angry or get angrier, and that only hurts me, or to abandon the project entirely which, in case you haven’t figured it out, I could only do if the project vanished from the face of the Earth entirely. The only solution, then, is to just take each step along with CIG and hope that each one of those steps is on the road they are paving for themselves with the Chairman’s Letter and the provided video because if we don’t always hope for better, we can’t really complain about the worst.