While the wider world has accepted that Star Citizen (and its singleplayer spin-off Squadron 42 campaign) are perhaps never coming out, those who paid for the game back in 2012—and have either paid or kept paying since—are growing increasingly unhappy at developer Cloud Imperium Games’ lack of apparent progress and communication.
The latest bout of fan unrest concerns Squadron 42, a game once due in 2016, specifically. In March, CIG released a development roadmap promising more regular updates on the game, saying “we’ve found that the format in which we’ve attempted to visualize our progress linearly does not match the approach we’re taking in the development of Squadron 42", and that “We want to be clear: progress on Squadron 42 is happening and we’re broadly happy with that progress. But we know that our roadmap is not reflecting that progress.”
It’s now nearly August, and fans haven’t seen or heard a thing, prompting Reddit posts and threads on the game’s own forums complaining about this, and asking, sometimes in less polite terms, what’s up.
In response, CIG released a new statement that says...they’re now working on a new roadmap, but it’s not ready, and “because that is still very much in development, we can’t share as much about it as [we] would like”. Hilariously, the statement winds up with:
While it’s not quite ready, it’s currently top priority on the web team’s current projects. In the immediate future, we plan to deliver the following communications:
- Give an explanation of the goals of our new Roadmap and what to expect from it
- Show a rough mockup of the proposed new Roadmap
- Share a work in progress version of the Roadmap for at least one of our core teams
- And then finally transition to this new Roadmap
Please note that last month Star Citizen’s funding drive, which began in 2012, passed the $300 million mark. And that in 2018 I wrote a post about Squadron 42 which ended with Cloud Imperium saying “we will publish the full roadmap to Squadron 42’s release in December”.