Star CitizenCon had lots to show, but not much is coming soon

The big Star Citizen CitizenCon 2016 show certainly had a lot of exciting new technology to tease the player base with this year, giving them a look at new planets, mission types and enemies to combat, but none of it is coming soon. With a delay announced for the Squadron 42 single player content and much of the new features not coming until sometime in the future, Star Citizen still has a long road ahead of it.

Following a lengthy introduction of back patting and continued comments on the dreams being made reality with the creation of Star Citizen, CitizenCon dove straight into timelining past and future events. One of those future events is the Squadron 42 single player campaign. According to Cloud Imperium, although much of the core tech is in place, there is still a lot that needs to be done.

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Pathfinding, finalised animations, better combat and flight AIs, all of that needs to be completed before it's ready, so we won't be seeing Squadron 42 until at least 2017 and potentially much further. As it stands, the developer has yet to bring even one chapter to finished quality, so the final version is going to be a long time yet.

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Moving away from concrete dates, CEO at Cloud Imperium, Chris Roberts, outlined when various features would come to the main Star Citizen Game. Trading, Cargo and Piracy would all show up in the next big, Star Citizen Alpha 3.0 update, though again, it wasn't clear when it would be released. Mining and refuelling would come after that, followed by salvaging and repairs and farming and rescue in turn.

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But the big content update that will be required to get the sandworm planet into the game is not coming until Alpha 4.0, which will come after all of the above has been completed. Only then can players expect to be able to travel to more than one star system.

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KitGuru Says: As much as I love the scope of Star Citizen and really admire what the developers are trying to do, it seems like a game destined to be forever in development. The longer it goes on, the less impressive it is graphically, the more the engine becomes outdated and the more other games and experiences begin to catch up.

If ever released in its idealised, finalised guise, Star Citizen will be amazing, but if the journey there is too long, it's hard to imagine it ever being finished. 

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