Star Citizen Arena Commander v0.9 is being delayed

Cloud Imperium need more time to resolve Star Citizen Arena Commander issues.

The Star Citizen community won’t be surprised to hear that the v0.9 update for Arena Commanders has been pushed back. The v0.9 update  includes the new Murray Cup racing mode impressed the crowds at Gamescom last month along with the Vanduul Swarm Coop game mode, the M50 and 350R, leaderboards, and improved control customisation. There’s a lots of new features crammed into this update.

By adding new features, the development team has also created new bugs which is holding up the release. Chris Roberts explained exactly what’s going on,

“These features in particular have required that we concurrently add a number of new features to our nascent backend infrastructure to support their introduction. By introducing features we have not rolled out before, we are seeing new bugs with our backend for the first time as well. These issues include problems like being unable to join a private match, frequent issues connecting to servers with the new game modes and map, and some new gameplay crashes.

These are all major issues we want (and expect) to resolve shortly. The most major “blocker” bug, as discussed in the Gamescom presentation, is the introduction of the new Leaderboard system to this build. The leaderboards are going to be for all modes in Arena Commander, including the recently added Vanduul Swarm Co-Op and Murray Cup Racing (racing without placement scores isn’t much fun!) From a technical standpoint, Leaderboards are a big deal. They’re the first time the game will be consistently passing significant amounts of data between the client (what you download and play) and the platform (the web side of things.).

What we’re hooking up today is also going to allow features like the Galactapedia, Interactive Star Map and the Star Citizen mobile app to communicate with the game. Our goal with Star Citizen is to build a universe with a highly connected community at its core and Leaderboards, along with the stat tracking and backend infrastructure that allow for leaderboards, are a significant step in building that experience. Allowing backers to get the first taste of a larger persistence in the ‘Verse is something we feel is very important.”

The delay is disappointing but when it comes to Star Citizen it’s probably best to just ignore any scheduled releases now. It’s going a complex ambitious game and constant delays are to be expected. It’s worth the wait just for the control customisation alone.