Welcome to the August 2024 Star Citizen Progress Report
This is the 19th progress report about Star Citizen & Squadron 42 in the series.
Information for this report comes from the SC FOCUS features completion page which has been updated again here: https://scfocus.org/star-citizen-s42-features-complete/
Stretch Goal Completion Scoring
Completion for Star Citizen & Squardon 42 is scored based on a total of 104 features that were chosen to represent major gameplay milestones for both projects. The 104 features were selected from the official Stretch Goals.
Previous Star Citizen & S42 reports:
Progress in this reporting period
During this reporting period no tracked features were added to the game. Neither Alpha 3.23 nor Alpha 3.24 added any tracked features. Normally this reports only includes Live content, however, Alpha 2.4 features already testable do not include any of the 104 tracked features. Alpha 4.0 should see the progress of these features increase again and is currently scheduled for the next report sometime in November 2024.
Jump Gates were renamed to Jump Points as the gate itself was removed (Source).
Star Citizen is still to be 63% complete as of August 2024 (Alpha 3.24).
Progress continues not to be speeding up at this point on work on these tracked features from the original stretch goal list. This does not mean no progress has been made, these are simply the features chosen to represent a subset of the full game's goals. In other words, work on the features we track for these reports has not sped up. Read on for clarifications and distinctions.
As for gameplay (actually playing the game), stability has been greatly impacted as we predicted in previous reports. This has made the game much less playable.
Star Citizen & Squadron 42 Report Summary
Star Citizen is roughly 63% complete as of August 2024 (Alpha 3.24).
*Note that Squadron 42 is feature complete. These features represent Squadron 42 features that are shared with Star Citizen and that are either currently playable in Star Citizen or not.
Playability Score
Playability Score: 2/5 - Very buggy
- Playability (2/5)
- Player Count (2/5)
- The Economy (2/5)
- Flight Model (4/5)
- Dogfighting (4/5)
- FPS Combat (3/5)
- AI (3/5)
In this reporting period as of Alpha 3.24 (PTU)
The Playability Score is lowered from last report from 4/5 to 2/5 due to bugs, radical changes, and instability.
Playability - How Playable is Star Citizen Alpha 3.23 / (Alpha 3.24 PTU)?
This score has been reduced from 4/5 to 2/5. The stability of the game has gone down and could get worse with server meshing and pyro and many of the core changes coming to things like cargo.
Alpha 3.24 and 4.0 are not expected to have improved stability.
The playability score is not expected to drop beyond the current score for the next report.
Bugs and Instability
Star Citizen Alpha 3.24 still has the Alpha label. As such instability is expected as the game is still some time away from feature complete.
This score was expected to drop from 4 to 3 but ended up dropping to 2. Exploding ships, invisible asteroids, non-functional weapons and a plethora of game-breaking bugs have decreased stability significantly this period.
2/5
Player Count
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).
Should the playable universe see 800+ player counts this score could be raised to 3 out of 5.
2/5
The Economy
This reporting period saw some strange activities with the economy:
- Duping bug
- Partial Reset (Balance, reputation and rentals but not in-game purchased ships & vehicles)
- Commodity trading
- Salvage nerf
- Ship Price Increases
- Heavy FPS weapon price increases
The economy score is being lowered to a 2 this period due to the vast changes, disruption and feeling of lower reward.
2/5
Flight Model
Master Modes turned out to have mixed reviews but generally ship combat seems more cinematic. Grouping (having wingmen and fleets) is far more powerful than before. Master Modes needs work but has been more fun than expected. The score remains unchanged.
4/5
Dogfighting
This rating remains unchanged even though Master Modes was released to the Persistent Universe. Dogfights have still been fun and engaging. Time to kill went down but so did the ability for small ships to stay on the battlefield indefinitely. Group play feels more satisfying.
4/5
FPS Combat
Issues with weapons reloading, inventory changes and glitches and weapons not firing were among some of the bugs that have cause the score to drop to 3/5 from 4/5.
3/5
AI
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
August 2024 Report Conclusion
At the start of this report we mentioned the difference between tracked features for these reports and actual Star Citizen progress on the game. Divergence continues between features with CIG confirming some of the features that will be released after Star Citizen 1.0.
Some ships and features have been mentioned to be after Star Citizen Alpha (source missing) 1.0 such as possibly:
- MISC Endeavor
- Fishing
- Pets
- More to be confirmed
In terms of playability, the game has also taken serious steps back and we expect the trend to continue with the introduction of server meshing and Pyro system. The game should remain in a rough Alpha testing state for quite some time to come. Even new features for the graphics engine such as Vulcan and Scaling solutions have added to the instabilities this reporting period.
Star Citizen remains in heavy development in late Alpha phase. Alpha 4.0 could bring the end of Alpha and the start of Beta but nearly 8 months into 2024 there is still no clear announcement in terms of what Star Citizen 1.0 consists of. The official roadmap continues to be one patch cycle ahead only. 4.0 is the next patch that could bring some tracked features to completion such as Jump Points (renamed from Jump Gates).
Progress has been described as glacial before but this seems even slower. Even though this report was a month delayed (usually July) there was still 0% progress on our tracked features list. This marks the first time two progress reports in a row had 0% progress since we started these reports.
Upcoming Features
This section was removed and is now on the release dates page
Suggestions and Issues that require attention
This report aims to provide suggestions for interested readers to current identified issues with the game. This advice is pure suggestion and might not even be applicable for the game or be something that is already solved internally. These are potential issues we have identified that might help development and the community.
Scripted Missions - Thank You For Clarification
A couple of our reports talked about the pitfalls of too much scripted mission focus. CIG has since clarified that the intention is for dynamic gameplay with scripted missions providing a way for players to discover gameplay via in game elements. So this was a non-issue that we highlighted and another example of things already being planned or worked on where outside perception differs.
There are no suggestions or recommendations for this reporting period.
Caveats
The list of 104 features used to track "progress" in this report are listed at the Star Citizen Completion Features Percentage Page. This is a highly simplified list of features out of thousands of technical, art and gameplay features that the game(s) will end up having. 104 features were chosen as a simplified average set of gameplay features that the author guesses are plausibly required in the final games to be considered "complete".
The data is gathered as objectively as possible and is non-promotional in nature. This information is purely speculative based on personal criteria. Opinion can and should vary. It is provided for free and actually costs time and money to maintain.
Disclaimer
As always, this article does not represent the official views of Star Citizen. It is provided as speculation to help SC FOCUS org plan the strategy going forward. This information is provided to readers openly and freely and each reader is free to form their own opinion.