It’s that time again, folks: CitizenCon, the convention for everything Star Citizen.

Last year’s convention dropped a bombshell on the community as it was announced that the single-player game Squadron 42 was “feature complete” and was headed for polishing, but without a definitive release date. It was also mentioned that because of this milestone, all of the devs, designers, audio engineers and probably custodians who had been taken away from Star Citizen to work on SQ42 were being freed up to return to the multiplayer version of the game and would be bringing with them a lot of functional work that could be translated between the two. The vibe was that the persistent universe (PU) would see accelerated development as at least half a dozen new features were promised for the PU in 2024.

How many of those we actually got, I can’t enumerate, although I do believe we have seen more progress for the PU over this past year than at any point prior in the belabored production of this game. Anyone who claims that the game isn’t making progress is dealing from the bottom of the deck, although I will readily admit that CIG’s modus operandi is usually one step forward and two steps back; there are still far too many bugs for any backer to sit comfortably and any backer who claims that “this is fine” is, quite frankly, delusional. Speaking of which, the recent news that CIG forced mandatory overtime on it’s staff, which was then followed by the hit-piece that naturally focused on the negatives of the 14 year, $700 million USD project, cast a pall across the face of this years proceedings, though CIG barreled ahead without giving any of that news air to breath during the proceedings.

But conventions are all about sheltering in place within a bubble where everything is fine, so what went’ down during this year’s show? As usual, I’ll be posting this week, breaking down each of the presentations rather than giving a broad overview of the two-day event. Some of the posts will be short, and some will probably be epic in length. I’ll say that I while I was suitably impressed that the focus of this year’s show shifted significantly, I’m not going to say that it did anything to allay any concerns I have about the game; YMMV, both for and against, and I guess that’s OK. Truth be told, we’ll all have to wait and see what the future holds for Star Citizen.