Chris Roberts, the founder and CEO of Cloud Imperium Games (CIG) published a lengthy letter for the fans who have eagerly been waiting for the launch of Star Citizen and its single-player spin-off, Squadron 42.

In the letter, Roberts claimed that Star Citizen had a successful year, but the coronavirus made them work from home, causing some setbacks in the process. Still, CIG released four Star Citizen updates (Alpha 3.9 to Alpha 3.12), each introducing plenty of new content and features. 200 unique countries and territories had players (more than 740 thousand unique players!) from 56340 unique cities, and they spent a total of 26576364 hours in the MMO.

There’s a new roadmap as well, but it doesn’t have an estimate for Squadron 42’s release date. Here’s Roberts explaining why this is the case: „The new Roadmap is not meant to give people an early estimate on when Squadron 42 will be completed. We made a conscious decision to only show the Squadron 42 work concurrently with the Star Citizen work over the Roadmap’s four-quarter window. This is because it is too early to discuss release or finish dates on Squadron 42.

As I said earlier this year, Squadron 42 will be done when it is done, and will not be released just to make a date, but instead only when all the technology and content is finished, the game is polished, and it plays great. I am not willing to compromise the development of a game I believe in with all my heart and soul, and I feel it would be a huge disservice to all the team members that have poured so much love and hard work into Squadron 42 if we rushed it out or cut corners to put it in the hands of everyone who is clamouring for it. Over the past few years, I’ve seen more than a few eagerly awaited titles release before they were bug-free and fully polished. This holiday season is no exception. This is just another reminder to me of why I am so lucky to have such a supportive community, as well as a development model that is funded by people that care about the best game possible, and not about making their quarterly numbers or the big holiday shopping season.

[…] Because of this I have decided that it is best to not show Squadron 42 gameplay publicly, nor discuss any release date until we are closer to the home stretch and have high confidence in the remaining time needed to finish the game to the quality we want. […] This does not mean we will stop communicating our progress on Squadron 42. We will continue with our monthly reports for Squadron 42, and we will also share our current development progress in our New Roadmap,” Roberts wrote.

It better not become another Duke Nukem Forever.

Source: WCCFTech