Star Citizen Developer Publishes a Roadmap…for a Roadmap


Let’s get two things out of the way upfront: I love space combat sims, and I love Chris Roberts’ work, specifically. The original Wing Commander games are some of my all-time favorites. With that said, development on Star Citizen’s Squadron 42 — that’s the single-player component of the title — is, to all appearances, a train wreck.
Fans and backers of the game have been requesting an update on where Squadron 42 stood for months. Cloud Imperium Games, the developer behind Star Citizen, publishes regular monthly diaries that offer some insight into the single-player game’s development, but offer virtually nothing in terms of an over-arching roadmap.
Cloud Imperium wants its users to know that it has heard their issues loud and clear. That’s why the company is promising to publish a roadmap for its roadmap.
No, really. That’s what they’ve promised. CIG intends to deliver the following:
1. Give an explanation of the goals of our new Roadmap and what to expect from it 2. Show a rough mockup of the proposed new Roadmap 3. Share a work in progress version of the Roadmap for at least one of our core teams 4. Transition to this new Roadmap
This entire issue arose in March, when CIG admitted in a forum post that its existing roadmap doesn’t properly show the progress it has made on its own game. As a result, it wants to overhaul how it communicates its progress to players. Nothing wrong with additional transparency — provided, of course, that it’s eventually delivered. So far, all that’s been released is a literal roadmap for the development of a roadmap. The four bullet points above apparently took five months to write.
While the various monthly updates contain a fair amount of information, the information isn’t presented in a context that allows the reader to draw conclusions about how much work is left to do in the game or when the title might actually ship.
Is Doing Everything the Best Idea?
Whenever we discuss Star Citizen’s delays and development time, certain fans are quick to leap to its defense with the argument that no game has ever done anything like it and therefore the entire situation is reasonable and fine. In reality, it’s been a decade since Star Citizen began development, eight years since its Kickstarter, and five years since Squadron 42’s original release date. It’s not unfair to be asking if Chris Roberts can ever deliver the project he promised.
Star Citizen famously wants to be a game with unparalleled depth and scale, but at a certain point, it’s worth asking if smaller, more targeted projects would yield better results. One of the biggest reasons for Duke Nukem Forever’s endless delays was a combination of feature creep and aging engines. As the delays stretched out, 3D Realms had to port the game to new engines more than once, delaying the product even more.
Many of the milestones listed in the CIG development diaries suggest core...

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