A hot potato: The world has been through a lot of changes since 2012, but one thing remains reassuringly the same: there's still no sign of Star Citizen. Not surprisingly, people who backed the game's Kickstarter and have been handing over money in the many years since then are running out of patience, especially after Cloud Imperium Games (CIG) promised more regular updates on the Squadron 42 single-player element back in March but failed to deliver anything. Now, the developer has responded to complaints, though it's unlikely to appease fans.
Squadron 42, which features an all-star Hollywood cast, was once due to arrive in 2016. But in a development roadmap earlier this year, CIG wrote: "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."
Following fan and backer complaints that the company has given no new information on Squadron 42 since March, CIG released a statement. Rather than being an actual roadmap, the dev confirmed that it is working on a new roadmap.
As noted by Kotaku, the team has set out a four-part plan for the roadmap.
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
The good news is that the Squadron 42 beta, pushed back from the second quarter of 2020 to the third quarter of the year, might arrive soon.
Despite the seemingly eternal development cycle, Star Citizen has raised $300 million. What we've seen of it recently does look pretty good, admittedly, but that doesn't mean a finished game will get here any time soon---within the next decade would be nice, CIG.