Star Citizen Fans Are Starting to Wonder Why The Game Isn’t Being Updated

Star Citizen fans are beginning to suspect that something’s not quite right as they’ve started asking developer Cloud Imperium Games for more updates regarding the controversial game’s progress.

This particular round of “We need to talk about Star Citizen” was prompted by the release of a Star Citizen development roadmap in March. Hilariously (depending on how much money you’ve spent on the game so far), the roadmap largely consisted of this statement which explained why there would be no traditional roadmap:

“When we first embarked on this Roadmap journey two years ago, our goal was to make communication more transparent, specific, and insightful for all of you who help make Star Citizen and Squadron 42 possible. While this goal remains unchanged, 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.”

To say that Star Citizen‘s progress cannot be tracked linearly certainly qualifies as a gross understatement, but this particular “update” from the Star Citizen team bothered fans for a few reasons.

First off, Squadron 42 (the single-player campaign for Star Citizen) was originally scheduled to be released in 2016. That clearly didn’t happen. Following a couple of years worth of delays, the Star Citizen team started making promises to deliver a roadmap for Squadron 42‘s ongoing development. As you can see, said roadmap basically argued that roadmaps are more of a philosophical idea than a way to ensure crowdfunding participants are getting the content they were promised. However, that roadmap statement did also indicate that Star Citizen fans would receive some kind of updates in the near future. Sadly, (and you may start to spot a pattern here) that did not happen.

That’s about where we’re at now, and even the most understanding Star Citizen fans are not too happy with the state of things. In response to fan complaints, the Star Citizen team released another statement which (and we really hope you’re sitting down for this one) doesn’t contain any substantial updates on the progress of the Squadron 42 campaign.

What that statement does feature, though, are more promises. Specifically, it promises an incoming “explanation of the goals of our new Roadmap” as well as a “rough mockup of the proposed new Roadmap.” If you’re not tired of the word “roadmap” yet, we’re also happy to share that Cloud Imperium Games vaguely promises the reveal of a “work in progress version of the Roadmap for at least one of our core teams” followed by a “transition to this new Roadmap.”

In the interest of objectivity, we would of course never use the words scam, swindle, fraud, flimflam, hustle, or even the phrase “glorified digital crowdfunded timeshare” to describe the Star Citizen situation thus far. What we will say is that the game’s complicated legacy includes record-breaking crowdfunding numbers, an ambitious attempt to create the largest sci-fi game ever imagined, and a series of delays, lawsuits, and questionable practices which have thus far yielded only small segments of a playable experience billing itself as Star Citizen.