As the next big thing in Star Citizen, Pyro is supposed to be the next Star System in the game after Stanton, featuring up to five planets with a unique environment that makes it stand out from Stanton. Pyro does sound exciting as a new massive space to explore, but is it really what the game needs right now?

In development for over 10 years, Star Citizen is still far from close to its final form, but I'm not going to blame the developers for that; what exists in the game in its current state is impressive. The amount of detail in the universe and ship design is extraordinary, and the scope of what they're doing is quite possibly unrivalled. You'd think that after this many years in development, people would start getting restless, but hang around with the Star Citizen community and you will quickly see that they aren't too worried about the game's development progress. Although there are some players who blame Cloud Imperium Games for a slow-paced development, most of the community is pretty happy with the results so far.

However, with Star Citizen getting only two or three updates per year, if they don't include some meaty content soon then you have to imagine that the community will start getting frustrated.

The main problem with Cloud Imperium Games is the fact that it always seems to be expanding the game in a direction where it's already excelling. Sure, the game is supposed to have many ships and multiple Star Systems, but is that all we want from Star Citizen? This direction has already put some aspects of the game in a very basic state that makes it look extremely dated. I can start with how dated the AI system looks. The enemies still act like dummies in this game with their sudden moves. Or I can remind you of simple UI shortages and the inability to ping a random location on a planet. However, nowhere is that clearer than in terms of the missions and activities available in the game.

The Stanton Star System, for example, is already plenty big enough, with four major planets and each of those planets having three moons. The problem is that there's just not that much to do there. Pick a random planet or moon, and you can quickly count the number of things you can do on it - go mining, raid the facilities or bunkers, hunt some bounties, do deliveries, or loot the outposts. That's it. There is nothing more you can do on any of the plants or moons aside from the aforementioned activities unless there is a limited-time event like Jumptown or a player-requested rescue mission. The narrative weight is really lacking here.

So, the question is why CIG doesn't try to expand the missions and activities. When the game's world is this big and it only features a handful of activities - of which a few are bugged and rarely work, like Search and Investigation missions - why do the developers keep making it bigger instead of better? The arrival of Pyro will only make Star Citizen feel emptier.

One of the most frustrating things about Star Citizen is the grind - the fact that to get new ships you have to do a single mission or activity over and over to the point of tedium. Most of the community is currently either bounty-hunting or mining because the other activities aren't even worth trying. The game features one of the biggest worlds in the history of video games, but it still struggles to offer enough activities that fit the scale. The developer is not utilizing the potential of the planets, and that's the biggest problem here.

I don't think the community would react negatively to CIG if they heard that Pyro's development is on hold to focus more on the game's content, missions, and playable activities in Stanton. We could have a wide variety of things to do in the vast space of Stanton. The game's lack of AI progression may be preventing developers from bringing more compelling PvE missions to the game, but there is plenty of room for PvP activities.

Instead of having one-dimensional missions, CIG could allow players to choose a side and clash with each other for completing the missions. We could have the Illegal Delivery missions as a combination of Jumptown and Delivery, so whenever a player accepts an Illegal Delivery and picks up the package, the game can alert other lawful players to intervene and bring back the cargo to where it belongs. This could be integrated into other illegal activities as well. CIG could also expand illegal actions by adding missions that task players for stealing a certain type of ship or ground vehicle from other players and delivering it to a certain place.

We could have Discovery missions on planets for the current derelict reclaimers or outposts, and Bunkers are also great candidates for PvP chaos. Players could either opt to defend an outpost or bunker against some other players who decide to be criminals and attack the bunker. If attackers can't extract a certain item and deliver it to its destination in a set period of time, the game would end up in favor of the defenders.

The Kareah security outpost is getting an update (no release date for now) that will bring the game a step closer to a more dynamic PvP system. Prior to this you could only invade this security post to hack systems and clear your CrimeStat, but once this update drops you'll be able to raid the post for valuable cargos. In the future there'll be an update that triggers a PvP alarm when the outpost gets raided, which means that lawful players will be alerted and will be able to try and intercept the attackers. Frustratingly, we don't know when this is happening, but the fact that developers have confirmed it is promising, and seems like an important step forward.

Going rogue in Star Citizen is currently less rewarding than it should be too. If there was a quest-giver in the game that would reward you for making chaos in the universe such as by destroying UEE defense turrets or killing guards, then players would more willingly to take risks to gain CrimeStat. Mining itself has room for improvement. The developers could add illegal resources to the planets, mining and refining which could alert other players or add CrimeStat for you.

It's a good start, but we need to see the expansion of player activities throughout all of Stanton. Alpha 3.17.2 delivered its share of new content to the game, such as derelict outposts, lootable crashed Reclaimers, and Illegal deliveries (which are bugged), but we need more. The time-limited event Siege of Orison was ground-breaking in terms of mission scale, but why not incorporate a smaller-scale version of it after the event in random locations as a permanent raid or defense mission?

Cloud Imperium Games seems to be working on too many things at the moment, which is the main reason why we don't feel the game's progression. If instead of focusing on a whole new star system in Pyro or the single-player tie-in game Squadron 42, the developers focused on improving the PU and Stanton experience with more content and better AI, the game could actually take a step closer towards completion, rather than spreading itself even thinner.