It's almost a guarantee these days that there will be a delay for some Star Citizen based release. This time, it's a delay for the Arena Commander V0.8. Chris Roberts, the face of Roberts Space Industries, gave the bad news to irate fans and backers of the nearly non-existent game.
Today at 4:00 PM PST, I sat down with Star Citizen’s production leads for a ‘go/no-go’ meeting. We went around the virtual table, like a ground control team preparing to launch a rocket, and the decision was that we are not able to release Arena Commander tomorrow as there are too many blocking and critical issues outstanding.

Below you will find a list of the current bugs being tracked by the team. Game developers classify bugs based on their severity: blockers, critical, major, moderate and minor. 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.) Our biggest issue today is a newly developed DirectX crash which breaks the single player Vanduul Swarm mode every backer will be given access to.

It would be foolish to release an unstable build, even if pre-alpha for the sake of meeting an internal deadline. This is the power of the crowdfunding that made Star Citizen possible: a publisher would make us ship tomorrow regardless of the current build quality… but as you are all focused on quality rather than a financial return for shareholders we are able to take a few more days to deliver something that is stable.

I know that’s not the news you wanted to hear tonight. No-one would like to see the community get their hands on Arena Commander more than I would.

So, what are those issues stopping the release of this update?
Blockers
- Vanduul Swarm – Display drivers can crash when Vanduul spawn or blow up
- Lag in feedback and update of essential game events resulting in increasingly divergent multiplayer sync

Critical
- Battle Royale (Crash) – While Flying (Shader)
- Camera – After respawn character is stuck looking up
- Vanduul Swarm (Crash) – Shortly after missile lock
- All Maps – Occasionally, when first spawning into the maps lasers and ballistic fire is invisible but can be heard when firing – they eventually appear
- Crash on exit after returning from DFM match
- Character is unable to exit DFM Aurora bed if helmet is on
- Gforce animations are not playing on the pilot in any of the ships
- Character and parts of cockpit interior vanish while accelerating

Many backers are, understandably, quite upset.