First announced in 2012, developer Cloud Imperium Games’ Star Citizen promised to be a spacefaring MMO of a size and scope previously unseen in the medium of video gaming. In the vein of titles like Elite: Dangerous or No Man’s Sky, it was often touted as a playspace of infinite possibility. However, roughly a decade after a successful crowdfunding campaign set the project in motion, some fans are beginning to worry about the project’s stagnation, and, to counter negative sentiment, the developer has opted to make changes to their roadmap and to the presentation of future content in Star Citizen.
In a recent Roadmap Roundup post, the developer explained that, in 2020, the decision was made to add speculative content to the list of forthcoming updates and features, and every post on the roadmap was flagged with either a “committed” or “tentative” header. This was meant to communicate to the community that not every piece of content added to the roadmap was destined to debut in the game. However, after numerous tentative features were ultimately dropped, and, though director Chris Roberts maintained that the project wasn't a "pipe dream," backlash among Star Citizen fans grew, and Cloud Imperium Games made the decision to nix tentative content from the roadmap altogether.
Going forward, the release view of the Star Citizen roadmap will only include content to which the developer has committed to and which will be ready in the near future. In the aforementioned post, Cloud Imperium Games mentions that the “noise” from the community regarding dropped or delayed features to which the team had not committed was becoming a “distraction.” It's a blunt assertion for a studio already considered uncommunicative by fans, and the post goes on to state that, while the goal of the roadmap was to focus on progress in broader terms, many players believed that—marked tentative or otherwise—everything that appeared on the roadmap was a steadfast promise.
It has become abundantly clear to us that despite our best efforts to communicate the fluidity of development, and how features marked as Tentative should sincerely not be relied upon, the general focus of many of our most passionate players has continued to lead them to interpret anything on the Release View as a promise. 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.
The news seems to have garnered further pushback from the game’s community; with over four-hundred million dollars now invested and a decade of development time, some are frustrated with Star Citizen’s perpetually incomplete status. Plus, Squadron 42, Star Citizen’s single-player experience, has existed in some form for nearly as long as the game itself, and it still has yet to surface.
Developers creating crowdfunded games sometimes have a reputation for overpromising and under-delivering. From the disappointing Mighty Number 9 on which Mega Man developer Keiji Inafune wagered his industry status to Peter Molyneux’s disastrous Godus, it seems fair that avid crowd-sourcing advocates may feel once-bitten-twice-shy. While there’s no reason to suggest that the record-breaking crowdfunded project may suddenly go belly-up, this recent development may come across as troubling to fans who’ve spent a decade anticipating the title’s full release.
Star Citizen is in development for PC.
Source: RobertSpaceIndustries, CCN