It always seems like whenever Star Citizen is in the news, it's never for anything positive. That trend is apparently continuing as developer Cloud Imperium Games has announced that patch 3.0.0 has been delayed once again, which naturally has created a rather noisy ripple through the game's community. The patch itself is a rather meaty one, which adds the ability to fly down to a planet and explore it.
On the Patch's equally meaty Schedule Report, the developer revealed that some recently encountered "stability issues," as well as "ongoing work on the new Patcher system" and various new bugs are to blame for the delay. Alpha 3.0 was expected to launch at the end of August, but will now come out sometime at the beginning of September.
The backlash from the Star Citizen community (and likely a few bandwagoners getting their 'dump on Star Citizen' time in) caused the game's director of player relations, Will Leverett, to step in and address concerns as well as what sounds like a few conspiracy theories of malicious intent.
To that end, Everett said:
"There’s certainly no malice behind it, and anyone who makes that claim is providing an uninformed opinion. Ask any project manager or developer who worked on sophisticated software or has been involved on a complex project with lots of dependencies and moving parts. They'll gladly share how challenging a task of estimates can be."
Fortunately, it doesn't seem like the wait will be a long one, and it certainly looks to be worth it.
Sources: [Roberts Space Industries, Eurogamer, Gamespot]