To show just how darn serious they are about fixing its nearly decade-old game, Star Citizen developers plan on hosting a two-hour stream talking about the issues, which might just be them taking a break from near-endless hotfixing that they’ve been keeping us apprised on.
As a recap, last week, the team called out and acknowledged some of the game’s most dire issues of playability, promising that it’s become a priority. CIG devs have even cancelled the latest Free Fly for Lunar New Year so they can double down on making the game usable before players hop in.
In light of this pivot, they’re going to talk about bug fixing live this week.
“[N]ext Thursday, Feb 6th on a special two-hour SCL, Jared Huckaby will be joined by CTO Benoit Beausejour to go deeper into these issues covered above, what’s causing them, what’s being done, and how our feature and stability plans for 2025 will build over the year to restore the functionality and quality of life to the persistent universe that we all want,” the post describes,” the original forum post states in a blurb.
Meanwhile, also new to the Star Citizen and Cloud Imperium games is the “Hotfix Central” post and HOTFIX log channel that they’re updating almost frighteningly frequently. The last update was today (in European time, it seems), and the notes point out that a team was monitoring this over the weekend, too.
The “over the weekend” part is a little concerning given the reports of willingness to “crunch” last year, but it likely does signal that the upper-uppers are actually calling playability a critical priority to the point of stressing its team out over it. But given the layoffs and restructuring, not just in CIG but throughout the industry, maybe a little slack would be kind. I do wonder if this stream is just a relaxing break.
Of course, this all doesn’t mean playability is going to be fixed tomorrow—or even entirely very soon—as players are still on the forums upset about lost items, elevators, and the like. After all, Star Citizen is infamous for many reasons, lack of playability and optimization being one of them. Players are pointing out that amidst its increasingly bigger promises, CIG might only be tackling playability because more content creators are fed up with, well, a lack of it.
Plus, to be honest, if the game still eats up every last crumb of RAM on my computer, even after I went from 16 GB to 32 GB, it’s going to be hard to yap to my friends about the game as Discord competes for air. Hopefully that’s a 4.1.0 rework, but I don’t know how optimistic I am given how much they’ve already delayed for 4.0.0.