Star Citizen’s dogfighting module was meant to get released later this month. Well, not anymore. As Chris Roberts revealed, this module has been delayed by a couple of months, and currently there is no ETA. And although I’m all in for waiting a more polished version of that module, wasn’t the idea of getting access to pre-alpha stuff the whole point of crowd-funding a game? So can’t you… you know… release an alpha version, keep working on it and let your backers witness its evolution?

Chris Roberts claimed a while back that the great thing with crowd-funding is that gamers can have access to really early stuff. On the other hand, Chris is afraid that a pre-mature module will have a negative impact on Star Citizen as there are a lot of eyes on it.

As Chris Roberts wrote on on Star Citizen’s website:

“I feel that the Dogfighting module, especially with Star Citizen’s greatly increased profile, needs to be more polished than a typical ‘alpha’. There are a lot of eyes on the game, and more than a few people wanting us to fail. Because Dogfighting is the first module that will involve significant gameplay, it has to be good – I don’t feel that we will get a pass just because it is pre-pre alpha.”

Now I can understand that a developer wants to polish its game before releasing it to the public but this isn’t a demo. Some of its backers pledged their money in order to have access to this pre-alpha stuff. Some want to experience the evolution of this game from a WIP product to a fully completed game. Naturally, some backers have pledged in order to get a new space combat game. And some other backers pledged money because… hey… it’s Chris Roberts.

Chris Roberts continued:

“So we had two choices: either fork development and spend time building something that would involve throwing away work in order to meet the December deadline and deliver something that wouldn’t have the level of polish I’m happy with, or stay on course to build something that would lead directly into the finished game.”

Do not misunderstand my feelings towards Star Citizen. As said, I’m all in for a more polished dogfighting module. However, this excuse is pure horsesh!t. Cloud Imperium could release a pre-pre-alpha version and further polish it. That is of course if the dogfighting module is functional at all.

The way Roberts is putting this delay sounds more like “Well this whole time we were experimenting with dogfighting. The result we currently have is awful and even if we release it, we will scrap all previous development because we cannot further enhance or polish that turd.”

Which would be a more honest statement about the development of that particular module, and something that we’d defend from the get-go. Instead we got a nice PR letter. Yay.