So? In the original kickstarter, Star Citizen said that it intended to be released on time which should have been 2014 according to their original claim.
What's your point?
You're grasping at petty reasons to discredit this game.
? Where? Seriously I hate doing this to you, but the dates listed on the Star Citizen kickstart are as follows:
12 months in, we will allow the early backers to play the multiplayer space combat Alpha
Gee, that sounds like they are saying we will have combat action in ~12 months so, on/around November-December 2013, they were promising alpha combat. Wouldn't you know it, space combat was demo'ed then, and public release was delayed a couple months while they fixed several major bugs. Since end users are not typically exposed to true "Alpha" software, and the bugs that are usually associated, they delayed it until many of those major bugs were fixed and other backend netcode was written to handle all the additional people they opened the "Alpha" up to.
and then 20-22 months in they will get to play the Star Citizen Beta, adventuring around the huge open galaxy, well before the general public.
We are at 24 months right now, and guess what? There is a limited group that have been invited to access the open galaxy (they did that over a month ago).
Those are and were the only dates/timeline given for the game on the kickstarter.Go read it yourself, since you obviously haven't and just like to spout off that they are not doing what they said they were doing. If you ever read any of their mountainous released updates, interviews, etc., you would have seen their current progress towards the goals they had set, and had seen that the games release has always been 2015-2016 timeframe, with the stand-alone Squadron 42 releasing around end of 2015 and the full MMO galaxy shortly afterwards.
If you also read the kickstarter, you would see that they had also expected to get funding from some other investors/publishers if their kickstarter showed that there was interest in this kind of game. That immediate funding was going to be the seed money to get them up and running, but as the kickstarter showed more and more interest and they received more and more funding from crowdsourcing, they decided not to use the investors/publishers and go it alone, which set them back slightly on timeline (because they needed to wait as the funding came in month by month from the crowdsourcing, as opposed to having several million dollars in the bank that could be used to rent office/work space, purchase desks/chairs/furniture, purchase computers/servers, etc, so it took longer to make some of those purchases, which causes dates to be pushed back slightly, but 2-4 months isn't much of a slip).
As for grasping at straws to discredit this game. No, I'm not. I am simply stating that for me, one of the reasons I wanted this (Elite) was for having a stand-alone mode, with no dependencies on anything from any other system. Having that complete independence meant that third party MODers could come in and add content, new ships, new weapons, space stations, graphics, change the physics, etc. (think Skyrim) and no one would care, because the only person it affects is myself. It also means that I don't need to play on a system connected to the network, and can use my laptop from the beach, on a plane, on a train, in a car, etc., and still play if I wanted. Finally it means that I would be able to play this game 20 years from now if I felt like it, even if the company has gone out of business, liquidated all their assets, and the servers have long since been abandoned and shutdown.
That is why I wanted the game to work completely stand-alone like promised.
As I said, I understand why they changed their minds on being stand-alone. It is a LOT of extra work to have had the game still work like that and still be a game (you need tons of NPC content, good AI, and a feeling of fun/enjoyment doing the content that there is to do). There have been plenty of games that have developed content that might not be fun, and thus, the game might not be fun when you strip the multiplayer aspect. A good developer/game designer realizes this, and in terms of Elite Dangerous, they felt the content that they could currently provide without network connectivity was not a proper game experience, and to make it such would delay the game longer than they could afford to delay it. It is a business and vision decision that I can certainly understand, but for me, it removes all the reasons I was looking forward to the game, to the point that I will simply wait to see if support for the reasons stated in my previous paragraph can be supported in the game.