To be fair, alpha 3.9 of Star Citizen is still bringing a fair number of things to the sandbox side of the game, but when you put what is confirmed to be coming against what was originally planned, the contrast is pretty stark.

One redditor made a handy visual aid to illustrate the problem with scope that Star Citizen often has, lining up December 2019’s roadmap of features next to the feature list currently offered on April 17th, 2020. Some of the features that were removed in-between that time frame are hardly game-changing like an accounting app and improved shadows, but others like new weapons, the Cutlass Blue rework and the Drake Vulture, bounty hunter missions, improved death animations, and FPS weapon types were removed or rolled back. As one would expect, this illustration has caused no shortage of community disquiet.

What happened to most of these features? According to the latest roadmap roundup, PvP bounties were apparently added to the roadmap too early as preliminary work is being done but should be released in “a later quarter,” death animation improvements will slide to alpha 4.1 as work on dragging corpses around is on track for 4.0, and the Cutlass Blue is moved to 4.0.

On the bright side of things, what is coming to alpha 3.9 is mostly in the polishing phase, so yay for that?