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Call off the dogfight: Star Citizen’s Arena Commander module has been delayed

Arena Commander is just the first of a few components to Star Citizen.

Hey, Chris Roberts – the space game resurgence is happening without you! The Elite: Dangerous alpha was a proper rolling, pitching vacuum combat game months ago, and now it does station docking and hyperspace jumps like they’re nothing.

Right now, Star Citizen is stone soup: a pot of ideas to throw increasingly large amounts of crowdfunded money into. It certainly isn’t a playable game. Its Arena Commander dogfighting module was due to launch today – but in the event, bugs ensured it didn’t make it to the pad.

Roberts’ team had been working “around the clock” for two weeks to guarantee Arena Commander’s on-time release – but during an overnight meeting between Star Citizen’s production leads, it was decided that too many “blocking and critical issues” remained.

“Game developers classify bugs based on their severity: blockers, critical, major, moderate and minor,” wrote Roberts. “The most serious of these, blockers, are bugs that completely prevent the game from working and from being in a releasable state.

“Unfortunately, as of tonight, there are still two blockers and half a dozen critical issues which we would like to fix before launch.”

In the current build, a DirectX crash breaks the single player Vanduul Swarm mode backers have been given access to. Which is undesirable, to say the least.

“This is what can happen with an open development process, especially when we are sharing code and content long before one normally would in traditional development,” explained Roberts. “But I don’t think you would want it any other way! The Star Citizen team feeds off of your incredible enthusiasm and your energy for the project… and we want more than anything to see what happens when you get into space.”

Arena Commander is still imminent – Roberts and co. are taking just a “few more days” to get their ship in order. In the meantime, Roberts has ordered the production team to provide daily updates on the state of Arena Commander v0.8, including its complete buglist and progress on those blockers.

Are you happier to wait than risk watching the game burn up on entry?

Thanks, RPS.