Today was Star Citizen‘s fourth anniversary, CIG held a livestream celebration in which they announced some great changes going forward.
During the event Chris Roberts also issued a ‘Letter from the Chairman’ update in which he addresses some of the criticism of the project over the past few years.
“Open Development does have its drawbacks. Not everyone understands the process or how difficult it can be.
“As you know we’ve not been keen to give hard dates on the project after the initial set of dates which we had estimated when the project was a lot smaller in scope. When I’ve talked about releases, I’ve always qualified any discussion of timing with “we’re hoping to” or “the goal is” to give a rough timeline for people, but unfortunately some people often tend to forget the qualifiers and treated my comments nonetheless as a promise.
“Because of this we have been reticent to share our internal timelines, even with caveats, as it always seems to cause trouble; one section of the community gets annoyed because things are perceived as late while another gets annoyed wondering why we shared dates at all if they aren’t solid. Of course even when we don’t give dates we have yet another part of the community getting annoyed because they feel left in the dark and have no idea when the next build will drop.”
In a change of heart, and to show backers and critics where they are on the internal development timeline, it will now be shared on a weekly basis.
“So for Star Citizen Alpha 2.6 we’re going to share our internal schedule and its breakouts on a weekly basis. These are the very same schedules we update daily and are circulated internally on our intra-studio hand-offs with a few exceptions: the individual developer names assigned to the tasks will be omitted (for obvious reasons), we’ll remove the JIRA details and we’ll modify the technical wording to make it readable for a wider audience, but otherwise, when something changes, slips or is completed, you will know.”
The schedule will be kept up to date on the RSI website moving forward and the full letter from Chris Roberts can be found here.
As part of the anniversary event there is also a load of new videos to watch including some Star Marine gameplay.
