I mentioned recently that the multiplayer murder-mystery The Ship: Remasted would be entering Early Access on February 15th but unfortunately it seems that the launch will be delayed for a week. The reason for the delay is the large amount of negative feedback over the fact that The Ship: Remasted was set to initially release with only LAN multiplayer support.

After seeing so many community members express their dislike towards this the developers have opted to delay the launch for a whole week in order to ensure that at least basic online functionality is present. Here's the announcement message:

"Hi everyone,

We listened to what you've been saying and have put off launching for a week.

Today, we'll release relay server functionality to closed testing players. This service is isn't entirely functional right now as there are bandwidth limitations (with Unity Cloud Services) meaning that games are capped at 4 players (otherwise they would just time out quickly). We're discussing this with Unity just now and hope to have this cap increased soon. However, it will mean that our test group can play online matches without the need for 3rd party services and we're also hoping to get some good feedback on this.

Work on dedicated servers is also continuing and as originally planned, we would expect these to become available within a few weeks.

Thanks to everyone for their comments and also for voicing your concerns. Launching a game like this is a delicate process and we were also concerned about the impact of negative reviews will have on the future of the game. We did feel that on balance there were more benefits to launching today than later, but given the feedback from the community, we've moved to a more suitable solution."

The short version is that the initial release of The Ship: Remasted will only have relay-server support which due to issues with its implementation will only be able to support small numbers of players. The actual dedicated servers on the other hand will be arriving in a couple of weeks so if you were looking at a good time to get in to The Ship that would be my suggestion.

Overall this delay is a very reasonable decision, at least from my point of view, because without online multiplayer support I have a feeling The Ship: Remasted would end up under a barrage of negative reviews from people who skimped over that paragraph in the rather large introduction message.

The new release date is set for February 22nd and if you're interested in what exactly The Ship: Remasted will be docking in to Steam with you can check out the Developer Roadmap & a short description of the current state of the game.