Money doesn’t solve every problem
You know how Cloud Imperium Games and Robert Space Industries raised more money than a small country to make its incredibly ambitious Star Citizen? You know how it was going to have space trading, massive spaceships, dogfighting, and a first-person shooter all rolled into one game?
Well part of that isn’t happening any time soon. In a blog post on the RSI website, Chris Roberts has announced the Star Marine portion of the game – the FPS that was to be the next publicly available release of the game – is to be put on indefinite hiatus because of quality issues:
The tl;dr is that we feel the current build doesn’t feel like it lives up to the standards [we] want to achieve with Star Citizen. There are several issues that will need additional time in order to deliver the first iteration of the gameplay we want you to experience. The challenges facing the FPS launch are a mix of technical blockers and gameplay issues. The most significant technical hurdle faced today is the networking backend. After attempting to work with the legacy code, we decided that we needed to drop some of the legacy technology. That meant developing what we’re calling a Generic Instance Manager (GIM) and rewriting both the Matchmaker and (for the larger project) the game Launcher from scratch. Those efforts are all going well, but they’ve all taken additional time for our engineers.
According to Roberts, only about 15% of the team working on Star Citizen was working on the project, which equates to about 12.6 million dollars (15% of their currently raised $84,570,320.) This means the hiatus probably won’t affect the rest of the project, and Roberts has claimed the team is working on releasing a build of the game that doesn’t include Star Marine.
Roberts also makes clear the FPS will be in the game eventually, but for now when exactly is unknown.
It seems strange to put it on hold this late, seeing as we saw Star Marine looking pretty fine, albeit with cringy faux-military talk, at PAX last November:
