Star Citizen Progress Report April 2024

Alpha 3.22.1 is experiencing some stability issues (Overdrive Initiative and other issues).

Alpha 3.23 is expected to be even less stable with community and developer fears echoing the 3.18 patch.

The playability score might drop for the next report as feature creep has caught up and there is a backlog to sort out.

Bugs and Instability

Star Citizen Alpha 3.21.1 still has the Alpha label. As such instability is expected as the game is still some time away from feature complete. Alpha 3.21.1 is paving the path for the universe to grow beyond Stanton system.

This score remains unchanged but could drop back down to 3/5 if the game becomes less stable in the next report.

4/5

This score remains unchanged. For this score to be a 3/5 player counts per shard will need to be over or near 1000. For a score of 4/5 over 10,000. A 5 out of 5 score represents the maximum universe size for seamless play (100,000s or millions).

Some server meshing tests have seen test servers hit up to 800 concurrent players in Stanton and Pyro. Should universe shards see 800 player counts this score could be raised to 3 out of 5.

2/5

There was no wipe during this reporting period. Additionally, with Salvage and other large money-making options the economy at this time is aUEC rich. Many in the community expect a wipe with Alpha 3.23 but almost certainly by 4.0 there will be one. It is even more speculative what will be wiped (ships? money? Reputation?…).

The economy score is not changing in this reporting period.

3/5

Master Modes and the new flight model was released to Arena Commander. It is expected to make its debut in Alpha 3.23 for the PU. This score remains unchanged but is likely to change in the next report scheduled for July 2024.

4/5

This rating remains unchanged in this report as Master Modes was not released to the Persistent Universe. This score is expected to drop in the next report as Master Modes appears to need a bit more work still before it is in a good place.

4/5

This reporting period saw improvements in AI both on the ground and in the air. Network and server issues appear to be holding it back from greatness. This score remains unchanged.

4/5

With the addition of Fauna and improvements to the combat AI this score should move to 4 out of 5 if it was not for the network issues and the lack of npc crew.

3/5

Scripted missions continue to be a bane in Star Citizen’s existence. The Overdrive Initiative was a perfect example to highlight this issue one more time. The problem will be broken down again for new readers.

Scripted Missions have a description (script) that details what players need to do to complete the missions.

Unscripted Missions are activities players can carry out for an objective without a script, mission giver or mission contract. There is no script.

• Overdrive Initiative
• Any mobiGlas contract
• Siege of Orison
• Medical beacons
• NPC and player bounties

• Cargo running (Licit and illicit)
• Salvaging another player’s ship
• Clearing your crimestat at Security Post Kareah
• Rescuing your friend without a medical beacon
• Collecting Halloween helmets or Red Festival envelopes

Unscripted missions are dynamic and emergent gameplay. Scripted missions are on-rails gameplay. Some scripted missions are more loose than others.

The more tasks needed to complete sequentially in a mission, the higher the chance it has of not completing. This is also true for both scripted and unscripted missions. If you buy cargo with the intention to sell it, then any bug at the terminals or during your journey will see your cargo mostly forfeit. With scripted missions this is generally far worse, any event required in the mission chain breaking will forfeit the mission. The longer the mission chain the higher the chance of one bug breaking the entire mission.

Scripted missions are not as much fun as unscripted ones (opinion). Additionally, they are more expensive to program and have a higher chance of breaking. Long chain scripted missions such as Overdrive Initiative and others we have mentioned in the past, are great examples of long chain attempts.

The advice has been and continues to be that the focus of game development be on dynamic unscripted gameplay with scripted missions taking a backseat. Squadron 42 is a single player fully scripted game. Star Citizen, however, is not. Scripted missions should take a backseat and better solutions need to be found to avoid the broken chain script problem.

When a scripted mission breaks the bug fixes are specifically for that mission and seldom apply to the rest of the game. When dynamic, unscripted activities break, fixes apply to the entire game – even unplanned or unimagined gameplay benefits.

Scripted missions come with a lot of tech debt with little to no or even negative benefits. If you need to visualize this imagine organic Jumptown (before it was an event) compared to actual recent Jumptown which was a dead event.

In the dynamic formula, all CIG would have to do to incentivize Jumptown is to massively up the reward for being there and players would not need a mission at all to wage war over the area. Instead we have dispenser and box scripts which can and do break.