The huge surge in funding has meant Cloud Imperium Games is further along in building their tech for the persistent universe, and so they want to incorporate that into Dogfighting.
To release the module now would mean putting together a system that ultimately wouldn’t be used, and so would ultimately be wasting resources, explains Chris Roberts.
”The incredible surge in funding this year has helped the long term picture. We have been able to ramp up sooner and wider than we originally thought. This means more features and content will be in the game at launch. We’re further along than originally planned in building the tech for the persistent and instancing server backend which will ultimately drive Star Citizen,” blogged Roberts. Today funding stands around $34.6 million.
”Originally when I first started this journey I didn’t dream that we would be entirely community funded so early so I thought that if I released an early dogfighting build it would help drum up interest in the project and get some good community feedback on the player versus player fun and balance. I knew this had some drawbacks, the biggest being that we would have to use the built in CryEngine netcode and not our intended persistent and massively multiplayer capable system that we are architecting to handle the large amount of players we hope to have with Star Citizen.”
He continued: ”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.”
”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.”
Roberts and his CIG teams choose the latter. ”…I am going to make the tough choice to delay the dogfighting module for a couple of months to allow us to take our time and deliver something special.”
”Our goal isn’t just to make Star Citizen good enough. Big publishers make games that are good enough; this is about creating a game that matches a vision. The beauty of crowd funding is that it allows us the creative freedom to do exactly that… and the one great downside, is that I feel your disappointment in a way I never would otherwise.”
”I don’t just want to make a great game… I want to play and live it. But even more than that, I have come to find myself a part of the Star Citizen community, in a way that I never expected.”
Check out Chris Roberts’ full Dogfighting Module ’Letter from the Chairman’ blog for more.
