Bad news if you were hoping to play Cyan World’s Firmament at its projected release date on its Kickstarter campaign (in other words: this month); the game probably won’t be out for another two years.
This might come as a surprise if you’ve only been keeping a passing interest in the VR-compatible game. Cyan raised $1,433,161 for its ambitious new adventure game in April 2019, and the developer estimated delivery for July 2020. But as those that have been following backer updates will know, that goal has slowly slipped back over the course of the past 15 months.
“Although there is no Release Date to announce today,” the developer explains, “we can tell you a couple things with some level of certainty: Firmament is not coming in 2020. And unless the stars align (which we all know happens rarely in game development), it is unlikely that Firmament will be coming in 2021.”
But this isn’t just a simple delay because the game’s taking longer than expected. Cyan has actually expanded the project since it completed its crowd-funding campaign.
“In late summer of 2019, the team made the tough call to take another pass at the overarching story and gameplay,” the post reads. “You can read more about why we did this in Eric’s update, Update #23, but the gist of it is that we wanted to build out a richer world, new kinds of gameplay, and a bigger story arc.”
Much of the game’s aesthetic is still in place, but the developer is now promising a much deeper game. The only issue is that this new vision for Firmament is only in the very early development stages.
“We understand how frustrating a (non)answer like this may be for some of you, but we are standing firm in the idea that it is better to not commit to a hard ship date until we can be reasonably certain we will be able to hit the date, while also completing a game we can be proud of,” Cyan wrote.
It’ll probably be a long while before we hear from Firmament again, then. But, on the bright side, at least this probably means we’ll have the chance to play it on better VR headsets. For now the game is intended for PC VR devices and PSVR on PS4. Any bets on that latter target slipping to PSVR 2?
