Hey there, Descenters,

We want to thank you for coming along with us on this journey and for all of your playtesting feedback in early access. We very much appreciate your support and your trust as we finish the storyline campaign for our upcoming official release. In order to make that release happen sooner, we are taking the game off of GOG during early access to focus on implementing single-player, tech trees, and the other cool features we’ve talked about.

This was a tough decision and the deciding factor was our commitment to you. We’ve found that for a small team, early access requires a tremendous time investment that slows down the development cycle. We want to speed the game-making process back up, which requires dedicating our time to creating new content rather than supporting a work-in-progress as if it were a finished game. This means we aren’t planning to update our Production environment until around the time of our official release. However, if you’ve already bought the game, you’ll still be able to play the current build while we work to finish the game.

You can continue to follow along with us on BrightLocker.com, where we are posting regular updates. As we mentioned this summer, we are focusing most of our communications on BrightLocker to save time for development. We understand that stepping back from early access is unusual. However, we wouldn’t take this step unless it were the best and most efficient way for us to deliver the gaming experience we are all dreaming of.

Thank you for your continued support,
-The Team

Well that was money wasted.

Gotta tell you, this is just a little unusual, and more than a little worrying.

This is what inspired me to wish-list this, as it's the best selling point of all! I detest EA/InDev for the very reason that it cripples small developers from actually finishing and releasing a game! You guys made an amazing decision!

Agreed, 100%.

"Early Access" is a generally bad idea, as far as I'm concerned. They should call it exactly what it is... "Beta Testing" (or even "Alpha Testing.")

People should not be led to believe that what they're seeing is even going to be playable at that point. If people really, really want to play "early," sure, let them... and let their experiences help the developer... but don't let anyone believe, for a moment, that what they're doing is anything beyond that.

I'm not sure when "Early Access" became... "a thing." But I think it's a very, very BAD thing, for the most part.

Instead... Developers, RELEASE A FINISHED, COMPLETE, AND WORKING GAME... as the saying goes... "WHEN IT'S READY."

Just don't make us wait... "forever." (Duke reference here)

It would be so much better if you have a game that's 80% developed (Particularly the engine and graphic/mechanics itself) specific release schedule/goal and stick to it rather than having a bare-bones engine and only 30-50% of the game complated as most small unfocused first time developers end up doing, so they end up with the pressure of developing the engine/game while keeping the progress fresh for the people that already paid for and expect results!

It's a trap that both developers and early adopters seem to fall into and end up burning out before the engine is even complete! Perfect example are the "developers" of both nowhere and black mesa which is more of a mod than anything else...But I think instead they need to go the crowd-funding route as not every developer can pull off EA/InDev like master developers such as Larian studios!

We Happy Few did the same but they kept the game listed and provided a final patch with a note saying that they are moving focus to singleplayer and will no longer be updating until release, with that they increased to full retail price.

These are 2 methods (yours and WHF) to the same goal, and both I fully support. Seeing the commitment to singleplayer, I will have no problems clicking "add to cart" once you go live. Can't wait to see what this will become ^_^

It's dead, Jim.

It would be good for you to update on whats going on before you completely kill any goodwill youse have.

Radio silence for 4 months and now your website and gameserver is down.

At an absolute minimum you owe Kickstarter backers an update, but really everyone who has pre-ordered / bought early access on here and Steam.

The game is dead. Another Star Citizen. This is crazy. I invested my hard earned money.

Well not quite, SC continues to limp on ... poorly performing pipe dream that it is. Thankfully I had only backed Descent Underground for 25$, but still. (Star Citizen for closer to 90$ *sigh*)

On the steam forums, I saw the other day that a dev commented that they were in a legal dispute with Little Orbit and that they could say nothing more. They were implying that something things had gotten really ugly and they said that we really didn't want to know what was going on behind the scenes. When people started pushing for info they said that they were looking forward to the legal matters being resolved so that they could be free to talk again. I look again today and can't find the thread... Maybe they had said too much and had to remove it?