Star Citizen, the Cloud Imperium Games-developed space sim and role-playing game, is continuing to hit massive crowd-funding milestones. Less than a year after the company touted $600 million raised via its community for the game"s ongoing development, the $700 million mark has officially been passed.
The confirmation arrives from the company"s own funding tracker, which happily displays "700,461,674" dollars raised at the time of writing. The tracker"s built-in timeline also shows a sharp uptick in funds raised during the past couple of weeks. This is also when the game kicked off its latest free-to-play event, offering non-backers access to the title"s persistent universe as well as almost any ship to fly during the trial. On May 25 alone, the title raised almost three million dollars.
The over a decade-old project has been hitting some major development milestones as well lately. In October of last year, Cloud Imperium Games announced that the Star Citizen campaign portion, Squadron 42, has finally earned "feature complete" status. The focus of the team working on this single-player campaign is now said to be on "optimizing and fine-tuning" the experience. However, a firm release window is still not attached to it.
Meanwhile, on the MMO-centric persistent universe portion of Star Citizen, the studio has pushed out numerous Alpha updates with gameplay features and engine improvements. This includes new space stations, more reworks of PVP and the flight model, derelict settlements, and fresh spaceships of both human and alien origin.
Moreover, wildlife entered the Star Citizen universe"s habitable planets with its most recent Alpha update 3.23. The creatures arrived alongside a brand-new character creator touting powerful customization options, upscaling tech like Nvidia DLSS and AMD FSR, sprawling industrial locations, and a complete UI and interactions overhaul.
The studio"s progress tracker for upcoming updates shows Star Citizen Alpha 4.0 having a tentative third quarter of 2024 launch schedule. This massive update is slated to bring a completely new solar system and explorable planets into the title, with players finally being able to jump to and explore the Pyro system. It will also bring features like engineering, fire hazard, and life support gameplay systems into ships, another type of fauna, and the initial implementation of Server Meshing.