Star Citizen making dev roadmap more vague to reduce disappointment

rockpapershotgun.com:

Nine years and over $434,000,000 (£320m) after starting crowdfunding, space sim Star Citizen and its singleplayer spin-off Squadron 42 are still very far from completion. They're sustained by fans' hopes and dreams of what the games might one day become but this is a double-edged sword. The developers, Cloud Imperium Games have now decided to make their public development roadmap for future updates more vague, because some players get dead narked about delays. I can see that happening after nine years.

The devs explained in a blog post this week that they're trimming the calendar section of their public roadmap tracker doodad because the schedule was causing upset every time a feature was delayed.

That Release View had plenty of warning that only plans for the nearest update were mostly solid, and that plans got hazier beyond that, and that features might always slip until later. But every time something did slip, people noticed, and some weren't best pleased. I'd guess that's partially because they're, you know, running years late and, thanks to feature creep, still six eternities away from being done. So CIG are, uh, calling out their fans.

"It has become abundantly clear to us that despite our best efforts to communicate the fluidity of development, and how features marked as Tentative should sincerely not be relied upon, the general focus of many of our most passionate players has continued to lead them to interpret anything on the Release View as a promise," they said. "We want to acknowledge that not all of you saw it that way; many took our new focus and our words to heart and understood exactly what we tried to convey. But there still remains a very loud contingent of Roadmap watchers who see projections as