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Now that medical gameplay comes with 3.15 and the beginning of Death of a Spaceman, do you think it was a good time to release while the game has so many bugs in it and chances to die due to these bugs? And how do you think this will affect players' interest in the game?

TL;DRThe speakers say new features always bring new bugs, so CIG sets aside time each quarter for bug fixing, but releasing features versus fixing bugs is a balance and bugs will persist until content complete.

Richard TyrerSquadron 42 FPS Game Director

I touched on this in one of the previous questions, in terms of these are large systems and complex systems, and we want to get them out in terms of the player experience. Obviously we want to try and fix as many bugs as possible and make it as polished an experience as we can. But obviously when you're adding to a significant code base like Star Citizen, there's always going to be new bugs or old bugs that reappear. So we do have an initiative at CIG that's been in place for probably the last two years, since I can remember, where we've been essentially making more time every quarter to fix bugs or technical debt, so we can go in and basically fix as many bugs. Previously, if you look at the graph, teams were essentially just accumulating bugs every quarter. And we were like, that's not acceptable. We need to start bringing them down. And so now we're starting to see some teams... other teams are flatlining, so they're trying to add more time so they can fix more bugs. But fundamentally, it's always a balance. It's a balance of when do we release new features versus fixing bugs. Some people were like, well, why don't you just fix all the bugs and then add new features? Like I touched on before, anytime that you add anything new, it generates new bugs. Even fixing bugs generates bugs. So there will always be fixing bugs until we get to content complete, and then we can go into more of a release cycle. But for now, like you said, we are Star Citizen Alpha, and we're still getting in some of the fundamental systems like inventory, like healing. And there'll be other big systems coming like server meshing and the hangar management app and how you manage your ship loadout. So there's lots still to come.

Star Citizen Live›All About Alpha 3.15·
Published on this date.22 Oct 2021