Let us address concerns about the development delay and the reasons behind it.
Originally we intended to release the game in 2018. It’s clear that this has not been the case.
AC is a very complex project, way more than we anticipated. We acknowledge the initial optimism we had about being able to complete the project in 2 years. Not anymore.
Yet we have been working full time and very hard, 2 years has been not enough.
We failed our initial estimation, mainly because we never faced a project this big, but also because we want to do it well and because it has grow bigger than initially planned.
To have a more clear view of the costs of indie projects of similar scope:
-“Banished” took 4 years to be developed.
-“Before” recently announced its was cancelled after 5 years.
-“The Universim” has been in development for more than 5 years
This doesn’t excuse our miscalculation, but it makes a point about people who claims that 2 years is like Duke Nuken Forever. It’s not. The 2 years we have been working doesn’t look too much when compared to these figures.
Of course we keep track about the time employed to be able to accurately predict costs of feature development. This track shows 2 main reasons for the delay:
The first one has been the decision to build an in house engine for the game:
Even worse, a state of the art engine. Literally we are working in 2 big projects at the same time.
The engine alone has taken more than half of the development time, and it still need work almost each time we want to add a new feature that includes graphics. To keep it optimised, streamlined and working with different GPUs and drivers is a very time consuming endeavour. At this point it’s reasonable to ask if the decision was the right one. We knew we were choosing the difficult route here, and we were aware it will consume lot of time. We just don’t expected it to take so much. It’s clearly impacting a lot our initial time schedule but we still think it’s a good decision for the long run, and AC is being built for the long run.
The second reason is that the project has grown “a bit” over what we initially planned.
This is related to the platform idea we have in our minds. Because we want to be able to expand the game after its release and to continue building over it we are designing and implementing it with extreme care, preparing it to be moddable and expandable. This complicates the process and leads to frequent refactoring. Yet we originally planned to be more lax code wise for the first release, we realised that could lead to grip the project in the future, forcing a complete rebuild for next expansions. Our experience in pass jobs tell us that rebuilding when a project has been deployed and content has been added is just too tough if realistic at all. So we consider it’s better to take a bit more care now to move softly later even if that pushes the release date even more.
We want to make clear that we continue to be fully committed to the project.
It will take longer but we will get there.
Our current plan is to release, or at least to reach the beta stage, at some point along this year.
We still don’t have a settled date for it and we will not announce one until we can be completely positive about it because we don’t want to be in a position where we have to push back another announced date.
We hope you all understand the reasons behind the delay and we ask for a bit of patience.
We know very well that we are working on this project thanks to you. We will keep this very well in mind in the future to compensate the delay and to make you don’t regret trusting us.
The last thing I would want is for Uncasual Games to release an unfinished game as their first title. This game is wildly important to them not only for their customers and backers, but for their future in the industry. I look forward to what may be the best indie game created in a long time. Thank you for working so hard to provide all of us the game many of us have been looking forward to for so long. I expect great things 
