Star Citizen - Less is More

Wccf Tech reported the decision of RSI to present less information on the project's progress in order to avoid misinterpretation.

Star Citizen Scales Back its Roadmap to Due to Fans' "Continued Noise" Over Feature Delays

Trying to follow Star Citizen's development roadmap often feels like a game in and of itself, as it goes far beyond the usual vague list of promises, offering a sprawling, interactive system that track where features are in development and when they'll potentially be delivered. I guess the idea was that providing more information would reduce questions from fans, but of course it's only made things more contentious, and it seems developer Cloud Imperium Games is tired of playing this particular game.

In the past, Cloud Imperium offered a full year of tentative release dates for features, which players understandably saw as promises of a sort, leading a "very loud contingent" to get angry when said features were pushed back. Cloud Imperium's solution to this? Simply provide less information for players to get upset about. While the "Progress Tracker" portion of the Star Citizen roadmap will still be fully updated, the Release View section will soon only provide information about the next quarter, not the next full year. People won't complain about missed deadlines if you take away the deadlines, right?

"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.

Rather than continuing to display release projections that carry a high percentage chance of moving (those multiple quarters out), we will no longer show any deliverables in the Release View for any patches beyond the immediate one in the next quarter. Even though we always added a caveat that a card could move, we feel now that it's better to just not put a deliverable on Release View until we can truly commit to it. We're going to emphasize more strongly than ever that you should focus your attention on our Progress Tracker, which has been our continued goal."

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Maximum points for the thread title.

Indeed, that subject heading will go down in infamy!

In a very good way. Unlike Star Citizen.

How could anyone take any of their dates as a promise!?

Ship all contributors a free hankie.

I almost bought into the hype since I loved the Wing Commander games, but glad I resisted. I was tempted back in 2016 when they said if you buy it now you get Squadron 42 included. Now it is 6 years later and I think it is still years from launch.

I pledged on kickstarter. I think I might have a total of $80 in the (black) hole after an upgrade / re-pledge at some point. If any game comes out of it, great, otherwise I have plenty else to play. I did install Freelancer the other day with the Discovery mod, good stuff!

When considering potential dates for Star Citizen to be finished, keep in mind Zeno's paradox.

Originally Posted by Zloth
How could anyone take any of their dates as a promise!?

During the time since the kickstarter I've learned that Chris Roberts never managed a project well. So, yeah. Nothing they project is likely to be done on time or at all.

My prediction: Squadron 42 will be done 2026 and be mediocre. Star Citizen will be released 2030 and have 10% of the planned content. It will be good for people who really enjoy pure simulation aspects of space or flight games.

They have Roadmap? you'r joking…

Originally Posted by Dolby
They have Roadmap? you'r joking…

Yes they do: "Roberts wants to do everything" (and he wants be able to play it)

Originally Posted by Zloth
How could anyone take any of their dates as a promise!?

I think a better question is, How could anyone who's worked in game development longer than a month, or ever glanced at a games forum, possibly think posting these things a year out was a good idea?

The more fans you've got, the less you can say out loud, on any topic. I'm always amazed how a game with 96% on Steam can have 75% negative threads, authored by ~10 people.

That road-map is as extensive as route sixty-six, and looks to be roughly as ever-lasting.

No, not a compliment!

If this game is ever released (officially), and in VR, I'll have no problem dropping $1k on a "pay to win" top-tier ship. Elite Dangerous was a bit of an obsession for awhile, and showed how amazing these games can be in VR.