June has brought little in the way of Star Citizen news, but plenty of drama on the Star Citizen forums as backers grow increasingly frustrated with the lack of a FPS prototype originally promised to be released at the end of March.
The Pledge
Cloud Imperium Games (CIG) is doing all it can to quell the unrest, including reposting their mission statement — “The Pledge” — to the Roberts Space Industries (RSI) website for the first time in two years. In this document, the developers promise “to deliver the game you expect” and that “We, the Developer, intend to treat you with the same respect we would give a publisher.” Given that Chris Roberts’ previous title, Freelancer, was only released after three years of delays, a buyout of the company by the publisher (Microsoft), and Roberts’ subsequent departure from the project, it’s not clear if these are good intentions.
Communications Malfunction
Responding to complaints about a lack of communication and openness about the progress on the delayed FPS and planetside modules, CIG Community Manager Ben Lesnick wrote a post asserting that CIG is communicating as well as they can and that if they aren’t around answering questions, it’s because they have no new answers. Disco Lando also commented on reddit, saying “I just honestly don’t know what else there is to tell you that we aren’t already telling you […] I don’t know what the ‘actual information’ you’re looking for actually looks like.”
A long post on reddit summarizes the extent of recent communications from the developers about what is holding back the FPS release. Though the writer is trying to disprove the claim that they are uncommunicative, in the last two months, the only specific blockers for release mentioned by the developers were “game crashes when you join it” and “changes to the networking back-end to get the 32 player count on FPS […] Netcode barriers: still hitting a hard cap on the upper bandwidth limitations”, as covered in the May 29 and June 19 Reverse the ‘Verse.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mZkRxzErRk
Video of FPS gameplay recorded with the development build leaked last month, showing the Gold Horizon space station level. The servers connected to in the production of this video have since been changed to prevent the creation of further previews with the dev build.
These clashes between developers and backers show that the delays are beginning to test the faith of the Star Citizen pledge base. Most were lenient and understanding when Arena Commander, originally promised for the end of December 2013, was delayed over and over until June 2014. Now, three months after Star Marine’s first release date, we’re told that it, too, is still just out of reach. It’s possible that no amount of communication will stop the grim calculations in backers’ heads that are stretching every promised timeline now that the trend has emerged. Then again, maybe the developers’ increasingly tetchy responses, almost outright saying “what do you want from me?” show that hungry fanbase’s more demanding segments are also taking their toll.
One thing is certain: CIG is probably not going to make good on the “original schedule” for Star Citizen’s development, which projected an “Alpha of Star Citizen’s Persistent Universe towards the end of 2014, and the ‘public’ release 2015.”
This article originally appeared on TheMittani.com, written by Ramon Rakow.
