Facepalm: It’s been more than ten years and $430 million, but to absolutely no one’s surprise, Star Citizen is still not ready for release. The space-based epic from Wing Commander creator Chris Roberts was originally scheduled to arrive in 2015. That date, and the functionality that accompanies it, have since continued to slide and kept the game in a perpetual alpha state. Now the team is blaming vocal supporters who question CIG’s delivery as the reason for cutting back visibility into the development process.
Games like Mass Effect and No Man’s Sky open the virtual universe to millions of players day after day. Star Citizen, the ambitious space sim from Cloud Imperium Games (CIG), has taken players on a different kind of voyage. Unfortunately, that voyage is down a seemingly endless rabbit hole of delays and shifting priorities. True to form, a recent blog post from the CIG team informed supporters that the roadmap used for tracking development progress would soon provide less overall visibility.
“We want to acknowledge that not all of you saw it that way; many took our new focus and our words to heart and understood exactly what we tried to convey. But there still remains a very loud contingent of Roadmap watchers who see projections as promises. And their continued noise every time we shift deliverables has become a distraction both internally at CIG and within our community, as well as to prospective Star Citizen fans watching from the sidelines at our Open Development communications.” – JakeAcappella-CIG
The roadmap provided a release view to give users a peek into upcoming changes while educating supporters on the ins and outs of game development. Some supporters reviewing the roadmap have become understandably vocal as CIG’s priorities and deliverables continuously change.
Rather than clarify the roadmap, the team decided to stop providing information on any deliverable beyond the next scheduled patch. The decision was driven by the perceived “noise” from the community when feature releases were moved, which the CIG team labeled as a “distraction.” The community pushback comes as no surprise given the project’s number of delayed or abandoned development expectations.
The fact that Roberts Space Industries (RSI) will provide less development progress will no doubt anger more supporters. For the last several years the team has faced lawsuits regarding refunds as well as increasing scrutiny around CIG’s management of the already astronomical funding goals and budget.