Yes, it happened – Chris Roberts, the man behind the unique gaming phenomenon called Star Citizen, has mentioned version 1.0 in his latest ‘Letter from the Chairman’ blog post.
He did so multiple times, in fact, concluding with the auspicious words that Star Citizen’s commercial launch ‘twinkles on the horizon’. According to Roberts, this will be when the game is polished enough and includes enough content that it can no longer be considered in Alpha or early access.
Cloud Imperium Games reportedly spent a lot of time recently to evaluate how to get to 1.0. The whole process is supposedly being facilitated by Rich Tyrer, who is stepping into the position of Senior Game Director of both Star Citizen and the single player campaign Squadron 42 alongside Roberts.
Tyrer was instrumental in leading Squadron 42 to the feature-complete status that CIG announced in late October. Now, he’ll have to help bring over many features and content to the persistent universe game. Roberts shared with the community a few words from the new Senior Game Director:
With this new role, I will be coming on board to help push Star Citizen to the next stage of its development, ultimately culminating in leaving early access and releasing the 1.0 version of the game. With this aim, Chris and I 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.
With my role now overseeing both projects with Chris and the fact that SQ42 has hit its Feature Complete milestone, it has provided an opportunity to reshuffle the teams. This should see a large contingent of gameplay teams now coming back to focus on SC. We’ve also taken the opportunity to move away from heavily specialized teams like Actor Feature and Vehicle Feature to more generic gameplay teams that should allow us to be a lot more flexible and shoulder some of the heavier burdens those teams used to carry.
While these teams will still be instrumental in shipping SQ42, they will now be focused on bringing all the existing features over to SC, as well as working on brand-new features like Base Building and Crafting to help round out the 1.0 experience.
With every release going forward, the intention is to move ourselves closer to that end goal – so you should expect to see large updates each quarter with many changes to systems that have not been touched in a long time, like Economy, Insurance, etc., alongside a whole suite of quality-of-life
improvements to things like Inventory, Missions, mobiGlas, etc., coupled with totally brand-new features and content.
The Star Citizen roadmap to version 1.0 will be shared publicly later this year. As a reminder, Cloud Imperium Games originally gathered $2.13 million in November 2012 via Kickstarter. That, however, was just the beginning of the neverending crowdfunding campaign for Star Citizen, which has since reached the astonishing figure of $671.35 million, according to the official website.
While the long development time has turned off some gamers, there’s still a devoted community waiting for it, especially now that the pace appears to have picked up. The next Alpha, version 3.23, is slated to add several improvements to FPS combat.
