Star Citizen Dev Responds to FPS Delay Concerns, Call of Duty Comparisons

With its crowdfunding campaign every day getting closer to $100 million, Cloud Imperium Games' upcoming PC space game Star Citizen is clearly a hit. But fans raised some concerns about the project's development recently after the studio revealed that the game's FPS mode, Star Marine, had been delayed. Now, director of community engagement Ben Lesnick has responded to these concerns in a detailed forum post.

First, Lesnick took issue with the phrase "delayed indefinitely" being used to describe Star Marine.

"The phrase 'delayed indefinitely' being bandied around is incorrect," he said. "We do not have a release date to announce yet, which is not the same thing."

Star Marine has not been canceled, Lesnick stressed. An in-progress version of the mode was supposed to launch in April, but this never happened.

"The short story is that Star Marine was not ready for launch when we had hoped (and planned.), Lesnick said. "We spent several weeks expecting that resolving a then-current crop of blockers would allow a PTU publish. When this didn't happen, we conducted a full review of the module lead by our top technical folks from around the company. What they determined was what you read in [Chris Roberts'] letter two weeks ago: we need to rebuild several 'boring' backend pieces and we need to fix serious animation issues before there would be any benefit to a release."

Lesnick said it "would not be my place" to announce a new timetable for Star Marine's release. But he did say that the delay will amount to weeks and "not months/years/decades." He went on to say that Cloud Imperium Games is purposefully not announcing a new release date, or even a release window, because "we might find ourselves in exactly the same position when the current set of issues are resolved."

The other concern that Lesnick responded to was the claims some are making that "Star Marine is Call of Duty in space." It's true that Star Marine and Call of Duty are both FPS games, but that is basically the extent of the similarities between the two.

"The important thing that I want to point out here is that Star Marine isn't an aside in any way," Lesnick said. "It's an essential part of Star Citizen, something the rest of the game must have. We aren't making a giant first-person shooter, but we're making a game that needs that technology in order to work."

"Star Marine is the blood and sinew of the game, the connective tissue that plugs planetside into boarding into space combat and so on," he added. "One of the least sexy but most important aspects of game development is building the behind-the-screens modules that make up the finished form. For everything you see, there's dozens of pieces working together: audio systems, streaming managers, graphics renderers, physics layers, and so on. Star Marine is that on a macro level… it gets plugged into Star Citizen to build the whole we've dreamed of."

In other recent Star Citizen news, a new $400 passenger ship is now available to buy. What's more, the game's executive producer, who oversaw development on the entire project, recently left the team.

With close to $85 million in funding, Star Citizen is the most successful crowdfunded game in history.