The problem to me is the more delays happen the more it costs, the more it costs the more delays happen, its a never ending cycle at this point and history shows when companies run into these sort of problems they usually are left with only a few options, cut their losses, sell off parts of the company like they did a year ago or whenever I cant remember the date but they sold a chunk or merge with another company like EA, Activision etc... so they can put out a lesser unfinished piece of garbage. All of these scenarios spell disaster for us the community.
At this point they cant keep up with the deadlines they themselves have created and every time one item misses a deadline its almost impossible to make the rest of your deadlines because you had to sacrifice something else to catch the other one up. So every time the shit hits the fan CIG comes up with another gimmick to sell to the community, first they stopped using the term deadlines because they rarely made their deadlines and got tired of the community calling them out for it, so then it was a roadmap with "Caveats" basically saying here are the deadlines but in fine print don't blame us if we miss a deadline...… now we have staggered development which is just another gimmick saying don't blame us for missing deadlines.
Sorry but that's exactly what it is, this game is going to be lucky if it goes live by 2024 at this rate and if does go live earlier it will be an unfinished shell of the game it was designed to be, for me SQ42 is not a priority why they sunk so much time and money into a single player campaign is beyond reasoning when the PU system is the core of what this community is after. They could have made a campaign without the 20+ celebrity cameo's which had to cost a ton of $$ to make, if their banking their success on SQ42 I think they are making a big mistake personally.