Ever wonder whether developers regret transparency? With Star Citizen, probably not so much when the money keeps coming anyway, even when the game’s 3.0 alpha and persistent universe continue being delayed.
In April, CIG estimated 3.0 for this summer, achieved mainly by pushing off many of its features to later in the year. Earlier this month, we found out that 3.0 would be delayed into August following a month in Evocati testing. And this week’s production schedule report suggests it’ll be even further delayed.
“This week, we entered the optimization, polish and bug fixing phase for the 3.0 feature set,” says CIG. “As there have been so many features and content implemented, we’ve encountered some stability issues that we want to address before going to a wider test audience. The ongoing work on the new Patcher system (that will save you from having to completely re-download each build) and some new bugs with CopyBuild3 (our internal version of the patcher) have also slowed us down. Because of this we have pushed back the Evocati and subsequent date ranges to reflect the additional time needed to get Star Citizen Alpha 3.0 ready for prime time.”
Redditors keeping track of changes in the production schedule have pointed out out that major systems (mission givers, inventory system, entity owner manager, the UI) received either no updates this week or delays, in some cases up to an additional three weeks, putting Evocati testing at least that far out and the actual patch even further than that. Speculation over Gamescom and CitizenCon causing further delays isn’t unwarranted.
“There isn’t a lot interesting happening,” the Redditor who monitors the schedule, KJ3Farden, notes. “All delays observed are replicates of the 3.0.0 delays, and no task has been completed this week. One thing to observe is that none of the tasks that aren’t in the 3.0.0 schedule were delayed since the start of the Global Progress Watch. This probably means that there isn’t any overview from CIG on what’s out of 3.0.0 (at least on the schedule we’re given), and tasks that are marked as completed may not actually be.”
A Reddit thread complaining about what it characterizes as an eight-month delay and accusing Chris Roberts of knowingly lying about the game’s progress has over a thousand upvotes so far. “Meltdown” wouldn’t be an unfair word, but something tells me we’ll be right back here on repeat in another two weeks.
