Well, now we know and ironically, knowing is feeling like half the battle here because yesterday CIG finally broke silence about Squadron in a letter from CEO Chris Roberts.

After 4.8 launched, CIG issued patch 4.9 minus the originally planned core instancing tech highlight; the update positioned 4.9 as a fix for what ailed 4.8, and so 4.10 would introduce instancing. This was a good plan because it gave instancing time to cook, and would allow players to get 4.8 fixed. However, that didn’t work as planned. 4.9 was only marginally better than 4.8 and the 4.10 update was a hot mess for a good chunk of its testing cycle. As they often do when things don’t work out well for them during a patch release, CIG went radio-silent. Their video content, a bedrock of their “transparency” initiative and generally beloved by the community, was limited to one absolute disaster of a play-though of the Siege of Orison instanced content. The showcase was done on CIG’s internal servers and was so bad that the community almost self-immolated: if CIG’s own servers were in that kind of shape, the project was well and truly fucked. On top of that Community Directory Jared’s apparently flippant treatment of newly onboarded Community Manager Ollie43 at the conclusion of the live stream rubbed most people the wrong way. Nothing at this point was coming up in CIG’s favor, and with no word addressing the 4.8/4.9 debacle, no explanation of the dumpster-fire of a play-through showcase, and no word on Squadron 42’s impending release, people weren’t even sure that CIG’s Manchester office wasn’t just a smoking crater at this point.

Yesterday we got two letters from CIG. The first addresses the 4.10 patch cycle, and the second is direct from Chris Roberts.

Improving the Live Experience

The 4.10 update letter, titled “Improving the Live Experience”, is actually focused on this 4.x patch trilogy (4.8, 4.9, 4.10). It sounds a lot like the Letter From the Chairman issued at the end of 2024 which ushered in the “Year of Playability 2025”. It starts off by saying this:

4.10 is meant to be what this focus looks like in practice.

The letter then proceeds to offer a laundry list of what was done at a high level, invoking several departments and calling out the number of bug fixes and the results that these had on the features and performance in 4.10. The letter specifically mentions that of the 1,239 bug fixes in the latest patch, 479 of those addressed issues with 4.9, 4.8, or older versions.

The letter then mentions several specific tickets from the Issue Council — their issue reporting database — along with the steps that were taken to fix them. There’s also a disclaimer that while these fixes made it into the patch, none of them have elevated any of their systems to “launch ready”, but that’s OK because it’s still an improvement over what was live before 4.10. This is the “one step forward” part of our show.

This letter ends with a “What’s Next?” section that admits that they need to clean up some issues with 4.10 — no plan survives contact with the enemy and all that — and agreeing that “these systems should simply work” as if these issues aren’t a result of BAU from inside the house.

Despite the bad-mouthing and sarcasm, I don’t believe that CIG is maliciously releasing patches, but are often undre pressure from non-technical departments who place their deadlines, real or imagined, ahead of the player experience. I always thought that CIG believes that “these systems should simply work”. It’s nice that they had breathing room in their own self-imposed schedule to fix issues in between releases 4.9 and 4.10, but wanting things to work while also self-sabotaging in whatever circus is going on at CIG HQ is a cultural thing that needs to be addressed so they can truly make things work at the point where they need to work, impending sale or ship release be damned.

Letter From the Chairman

This one is from the desk of Chris Roberts himself, supposedly. His letters are usually very high-level, and in this missive he talks about the importance of 4.10 and specifically instancing in the future of Star Citizen. One line that stuck out for me is this:

The use of the word “arbitrary” is, I hope, intentional. It sounds like ther instancing tech could simply draw a box around an area of the game world (more or less; I know it would be more complicated) and make it an instanced zone. If that’s the case, that’s massive because Star Citizen has many locations such as the ASD Onyx facilities, distribution centers, caves, and outposts that could be created as instanced areas for specific and guided content, which would be a massive boon for the game. If “arbitrary” is a misappropriation or means something else entirely, well…that sucks, because I think my interpretation would kick ass for the near- and far-future of the game.

Roberts then talks a lot about what instancing means for the game, and also about how it works with their version of server meshing. It’s a nice read about a technology from a mostly non-technical perspective, but is probably only relevant to those who are invested in such things. At the end of the day, it only matters if it works, works well and reliably, and works without friction as it has to appeal to players who bounce easily, or who have yet to give the game a shot.

Interestingly, the next section addresses some “misconceptions” about Star Citizen’s technical issues, specifically how their engine choice plays into those, and how the concurrent development of Squadron 42 has affected work on Star Citizen. Both games use a heavily modified version of CryEngine 3. Amazon had a branch of the same engine they called Lumberyard and back in the mid 2010’s, CIG moved from CryEngine 3 to Lumberyard so they could leverage access to Amazon’s cloud server infrastructure that Amazon had stuffed into their branch. This was a massive speedbump for Star Citizen from what I remember, and one of the actual, measurable setbacks that have contributed to the game’s extended development cycle. Over time, Roberts claims that they’ve modified the engine so much that it’s virtually disconnected from CryEngine and Lumberyard; this product is now called StarEngine, and has been put together specifically to deal with the needs of Star Citizen. While a lot of the grief that CIG gets from the internet (including in here) is aimed at the development of the game features and introduction of content, we can’t in good faith ignore the fact that part of the ongoing delay is due to re-development of the game engine while simultaneously using that engine to build a game. It’s not an excuse; it’s just what’s happening, and of course if Roberts had aimed lower they might have saved themselves a lot of work over the past decade and a half, but here we are, so we have to come to terms with it.

On the subject of Squadron eating all of the resources, Roberts claims that the split was always 50/50 between Squadron and Star Citizen. However, at the end of 2024 when Squadron’s “release window” was announced, they shifted to a 45/55 split in favor of Squadron in order to get it “polished” and out the door. The plan was and still remains that once Squadron has been released, the bulk of resources will be dedicated to Star Citizen, but rumors of a “second chapter” for Squadron have yet to be squashed, plus there’ll be a need for a support crew to push out patches and whatnot.

This segues into the announcement that the release of Squadron 42 will be moving to Q2 of 2027. Rather than put a spin on it, Roberts outright states that it’s due to the release of GTA6.

According to the spirit of this letter, it’s not that Squadron needs more time to cook, although more time can only benefit, it’s specifically that Squadron needs industry eyeballs, and if everyone is focused on GTA6 then Squadron would have no chance of getting any…unless it’s a complete train-wreck at which point reviewers would no doubt happily devote some cycles to talking about it. Moving Squadron to 2027 was the easy bet to take, though, since there has been no marketing and no announcements from inside CIG this close to it’s originally intended release window. It sucks, and raises questions around the financial situation going forward; I’m assuming that part of the radio-silence was actually CIG working with their big-ticket investors to calm them down and allow them to move the release out to 2027, as it’s a better choice for CIG to just get out of the way of a game that more people will care about so that maybe some additional people will care about Squadron in 2027.

Roberts actually closes his letter by addressing the elephant in the room: the project crossing the $1b USD funding mark, which he had not gone on record about at the time it happened. He says that he avoided talking about it so as to avoid making it look like Star Citizen was all about the money. He says that it is not, of course, since we can see how CIG is re-investing the money through their public financial statements, and I guess that’s true. $1b USD is over the lifetime of the project, not in one year, and I guess that a lot of companies raise $1b USD over the course of a decade and a half; the difference here is that there is no finished product that justifies that kind of funding. Roberts admits that his silence was a miscalculation, because the money does matter as a showcase of support from the community, for all of those who believe in the project even when it was having some very rough times. I believe that he believes that, and it’s really hard not to considering people bought the $5000 USD Anvil Odin when it was released during the 4.8 patch cycle, the worst patch in recent Star Citizen memory. We call it belief; you may call it pathological. It is what it is.

Forward Into the Future

Now what? 4.10 has released to the live servers and people are finding issues with it. There’s a hotfix in the hotfix release channel to address audio, shader, and some technical things, so it’s nice that there are already fixes in the pipeline. Of greater concern, though, is a particularly nasty circumstance where commands are being delayed by orders of magnitude. I have this issue, where any actions I take — shooting an enemy, opening a canopy, QT travel, and many others — do not seem to register, only to fire off up to10 minutes after the fact. This is making certain activities such as combat missions impossible to undertake. The good news is that CIG is aware and has called out this investigation specifically, so I’m hoping for a rapid and definitive solution.

The roadmap for 4.11 has been updated, which is kind of interesting. Aside from the usual inclusion of new weapons and some baseline tech stuff, we appear to be planning for not just Nyx I, but II and III as well. Nyx I is important because 4.11 is set to release parts of the Genesis system focusing on planetary tech version 5, POI distribution, NPC updates, and mission updates. It’s a pretty big deal, so I’m wondering if Nyx II and III will also be getting the V5 treatment, or if they’ll be added using V4 with a future upgrade path.

Finally, a bit of copium. As you should know as a regular reader of this site that despite my snark and sarcasm and occasionally unbridled rage, I love this project, and I want this project to succeed. I think everyone should because everyone loses when projects fail. Star Citizen is ambitious and when it works, it’s amazing. It should succeed and raise the bar; if it fails, the bar remains in place or even drops, as no game developer will get too ambitious when there’s Star Citizen as a cautionary tale. That’s why I’ll take any letter from Roberts at face value as a reason to feel good about the future of the project. I know that he has a lifestyle to support and can’t not say anything other than what the community wants and needs to hear, but he also needs the projects to succeed in order to not become a warning for overly ambitious video game designers in the future. If CIG says they learned from their mistakes, then I have to take their word for it. Yes, I know better, and yes, I am willfully ignoring what I know from past behavior, but I’ll choose cautious forgiveness over self-satisfying denial any day. If the project fails, I can only be disappointed and prepare for 10 more years of extraction shooters and a pall cast over the MMO landscape. If the project succeeds, I can feel good about the future of video games as a whole, and I think we’ll all be better for it even if we’re not all playing Star Citizen.