Well, that's the answer given by Chris Roberts in a new interview over at Eurogamer when asked about the state of the game in terms of beta releases. Which is news of a sort considering that Star Citizen is still one of the most ambitious sci-fi games we've ever seen, and that it has managed to crowd-source funding of over $159 million USD to date.

3.0 represents the latest in a long of updates to the game, promising a slew of new features and improvements to bring it one step closer to that goal of the becoming the everything sci-fi experience it's promised.

In talking to Eurogamer, Chris Roberts outlined some of the big changes.

3.0 is the first time you'll have some of the basic game loops and mechanics. It's the first one which has proper persistence for your character, ship and items in terms of what their state is, their location is. When you log off and your ship is damaged, when you come back it'll still be damaged. There are a lot of jobs and options. The AI is still fairly basic - there's a lot more coming, but the AI... the previous 2.63 update was done the old scripted way. Now it's a scalable, modular mission system which designers can build from different blocks. We have procedural missions so there's a lot of 'go deliver something to this place', 'go identify a dead body on a spaceship', 'go after this particular pirate'. It's all templated up. There's a basic buying and selling mechanic, hauling cargo, the ability to earn and spend money on clothes, weapons, ship items or ship weapons.

Whilst also noting that calling this next update akin to Early Access being nothing more than a mere title, but as a significant update it's warranted. It;s a fascinating interview, so be sure to check it out if you're like us an still mildly obsessed with each new Star Citizen revelation.