Chris Roberts says Star Citizen 1.0 release 'twinkles on the horizon'

Star Citizen used to be one giant leap from release, but now, according to Roberts Space Industries boss Chris Roberts, we're seemingly one small step from the game hitting version 1.0.

In a new "Letter from the Chairman" on the official Star Citizen website, Roberts said that the commercial launch of Star Citizen "twinkles on the horizon". This is the point the developer wants to reach when the game is polished enough and ready to leave the alpha or early access stages.

Cloud Imperium Games has been spending a lot of time on getting Star Citizen to v1.0, which Rich Tyrer is leading in his new position as Senior Game Director of both Star Citizen and the single-player Squadron 42 release alongside Roberts himself. Tryer was one of the team's key members in getting Squadron 42 to feature-complete status, something CIG announced in late October 2023.

• Read more: Star Citizen creator: "I don't care about consoles"
• Read more: Chris Roberts: Star Citizen is making 'tremendous strides'
• Read more: Star Citizen becomes the most ambitious game EVER

The post reads: "With this new role, I will be coming on board to help push Star Citizen to the next stage of its development, ultimately culminating in leaving early access and releasing the 1.0 version of the game. With this aim, Chris and I have overseen the creation of a roadmap that takes us all the way up to 1.0 and outlines all the features and content we need and, just as crucially, the ones that will come post full release."

"With my role now overseeing both projects with Chris and the fact that SQ42 has hit its Feature Complete milestone, it has provided an opportunity to reshuffle the teams. This should see a large contingent of gameplay teams now coming back to focus on SC. We've also taken the opportunity to move away from heavily specialized teams like Actor Feature and Vehicle Feature to more generic gameplay teams that should allow us to be a lot more flexible and shoulder some of the heavier burdens those teams used to carry."

"While these teams will still be instrumental in shipping SQ42, they will now be focused on bringing all the existing features over to SC, as well as working on brand-new features like Base Building and Crafting to help round out the 1.0 experience."

"With every release going forward, the intention is to move ourselves closer to that end goal - so you should expect to see large updates each quarter with many changes to systems that have not been touched in a long time, like Economy, Insurance, etc., alongside a whole suite of quality-of-life improvements to things like Inventory, Missions, mobiGlas, etc., coupled with totally brand-new features and content".