The last week of March, everyone was super excited because patch day for Star Citizen had finally arrived. The 3.5 alpha, with its playable female toons, retooled flight model, and new planets, was finally rolling out, not just to elite testers but to normal backers. Then Cloud Imperium was going to take a break from social publishing for three weeks while the studio organized itself around the next quarterly update, alpha 3.6.

Except that’s not quite what happened, is it. More than two weeks later, regular backers still have incomplete access to 3.5, or more specifically, it’s playable only on the PTU, which many gamers are reluctant to download, knowing it’ll be wiped and ask players to re-download dozens of gigs of files frequently. According to multiple backers, CIG has been dispatching regular emails throughout the period promising that the real launch is imminent, that the final push is on the PTU and will hit the “live” test servers any minute now. Here’s one from Friday:

Of course, the delay has also meant the delay of the monthly report (the last one was delayed too) and confusion over why CIG hasn’t clearly communicated it needs more time to iron out all the bugs reportedly plaguing this version of the game.