Star Citizen is finally pushing towards its 1.0 release, but you'll still probably have to wait a bit longer

After more than a decade of development time, it's sounding like Star Citizen is finally nearing its 1.0 release.

Star Citizen has been playable for a long while now, but it's technically never been a finished game. Squadron 42, the single-player aspect of the game, was made into its own game, and last year was deemed feature complete, but its main persistent universe MMO (Star Citizen itself, that is) still needed some work. Now, in a recent letter from Cloud Imperium Games CEO and founder Chris Roberts, these Squadron 42 features are being brought over to Star Citizen "at an accelerated rate." More importantly, though, the developer is finally making the big push towards a 1.0 release, something fans of the game have been waiting on for a long while.

"After many hard years of work towards a goal many thought was impossible, we are on the cusp of delivering one of the final pieces of technology that will enable a connected, shared universe that thousands of people can experience together at the same time," Roberts wrote. "Star Citizen 1.0 is what we consider the features and content set to represent 'commercial' release. This means that the game is welcoming to new players, stable, and polished with enough gameplay and content to engage players continuously. In other words, it is no longer Alpha or Early Access."

Notably, Rich Tyrer is back working on the game as its senior game director, who said "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." Roberts further explained that "over the past few months, our teams have been busily planning the upcoming major milestones for the Persistent Universe, culminating in what we refer to as 'Star Citizen 1.0.'"

As you can probably see, there still isn't an exact release date for 1.0, but it seems the end of the beginning is on the way - while you wait, you could always spend £46,000 on a DLC pack that gives you a bunch of ships.