Star Citizen hasn’t launched yet, but it’s experiencing server failures

We are now firmly trapped in the second decade of the Star CitizenCrowdfunding driven development. And while backers can currently run a simple functional alpha release (still Missing many promised features), there’s still no indication of a fully playable beta on the horizon.

Don’t worry, though, this mode didn’t stop developer Roberts Space Industries (RSI) from finding new and interesting ways for the game to crack.

Star CitizenThe current issues revolve around this week’s rollout Alpha Update 3.18 “Last Legacies”which is the relative strength index RSI Selling as “Star Citizen’s biggest update yet.”. “

In addition to graphics and physics updates, new ship-saving gameplay, and a handful of new combat missions, the update also introduces the game’s long-promised “persistent entity broadcast” technology, which allows items to stay where you put them even after leaving the server part.

Unfortunately, the Star Citizen The servers weren’t quite as interested in updating as many 4.4 million supporters who have funded the game so far. A few hours after the update was released last Friday, the RSI mentioned That’s because of the high volume of traffic related to the launch Star Citizen Alpha 3.18.0, RSI trigger can become unresponsive. “

After some initial work to “mitigate the problem”, RSI mentioned on Sunday that the game was still in a “sluggish/unresponsive state,” warning that “players will experience periods of extreme difficulty getting into the game.” [persistent universe]By Monday, the RSI team upgraded the issue from “minor outage” to “significant outage” before reporting “increased error rates” later that day.

Zoom in / for an unreleased game, Star Citizen She still has some very nice ships…

This closed the game a few hours to “live service maintenance” Tuesday “while the team makes a series of adjustments to the PES infrastructure to help mitigate the issues encountered over the weekend.” As of Thursday, the RSI says “new infrastructure is heading in the right direction” despite “cyclical waves of instability”.

“A huge amount of changes have been made to the way the game handles certain things and that’s part of the growing pains as all of our players come to see the new things added in patch 3.18,” Books updated in the knowledge base. “At the moment, this seems to be caused by server overload, so it may take a while for things to clear up.”

“We are sorry for the very difficult start,” RSI said tweeted on Sunday. “Our team is practically on deck to get things running smoothly as quickly as possible. We’ll keep you posted!”

We are still waiting

These kinds of server load issues are not uncommon in the gaming world of course. The interest in server fusion in this latest update can be seen as a positive sign that many game backers are still interested in the game.

Zoom in / This image is from Star Citizen Trailer is now over a decade old!

RSI

Still, it’s surprising to see these kinds of growing pains after more than a full decade of active development on the ambitious space sim. We also have to wonder how many Star Citizen‘s $555 million in crowdfunding to date– including tens of millions of dollars in the last six months – will go to buying and maintaining those servers that have been overloaded lately.

These server issues reflect our 2012 Game Finance report, which noted that “initial interest in [Star Citizen] It was so loud that it overwhelmed Roberts’ servers and shut down the site’s crowdfunding solution for a few days.”

Problems aside, does this latest update actually bring us closer to the actual release date of Star Citizen? Well, after rolling out a new development roadmap in 2020 (no, that’s not a typo), RSI trimmed the feature’s release date targets back in the past year. At the time, RSI said the details of the schedule were a “distraction” that led some players to treat “expectations as promises.”

“Star Citizen Not the enemy. It’s not even a marathon in 2015, said RSI founder Chris Roberts, while denying accusations that “feature creep” was slowing the game’s trajectory toward final release. Traditional retail game. Star Citizen It is a way of life as long as the community participates in it.”

Listing image by RSI