Another long-standing multiplayer space sim just delayed its promising new mode at the last minute, and it's far from the first time

Turns out Star Citizen isn’t the only multiplayer space adventure struggling to ship a first-person shooter mode. Elite Dangerous – the space game that erroneously convinced me that we’d all be gaming in VR every day nearly a decade ago – just delayed its new Operations mode. Again. And if the last gameplay sneak peek was any indication of the experience we almost had this month, I’m shocked the announcement wasn’t made earlier.

According to a particularly livid fan on the Elite Dangerous subreddit two months ago, the game’s new Operations co-op mode was originally slated to launch in Late 2025. That date shifted to “Early 2026” before the team clarified presumably around the release of the February 16 dev log (the details are spotty) that it meant April. Now, that’s about as late to early as you can get before slipping into the middle of the year, and that kind of buffer is rarely a good sign.

Well, now we know the reason. Or, at least, part of the reason. Just yesterday – a mere week before players could have proclaimed a missed launch window – the Elite Dangerous team announced that the release of Operations would be nudged back to June. Now, two months isn’t a huge knockback, but it is when it’s announced so close to the wire. If you thought, “Well, it has to release this week!” Wrong. Try eight weeks from now. Maybe.

And that’s the kicker. Given this is far from the first time Operations has been thrown further down the schedule, this sort of carrot-on-a-stick tactic doesn’t do anyone any favors. Development woes happen, but maybe don’t announce a window you’re not wholly certain you can stick to.

For Elite Dangerous fans, it’s a tough last-minute rug pull. The delay before this had one player on Reddit calling the 2026 roadmap a “disappointing” content calendar with “less ‘this is going to be so cool’ energy” and more “‘give me more money’ energy”. Still, given a timestamp comment calling attention to the absolutely abysmal performance of the mode in the February dev log (at 12:39 if you watch that clip below), you have to wonder why Frontier attempted to pass it off as a near-complete project in the first place.

Grinding for unique modules and a new currency with your pals sounds like a good time, but come on: you can practically count the frames. At a time when some fairly rudimentary games are running terribly on quite expensive hardware, I was sure my jet plane-imitating GPU fans were about to kick up a fuss from the video alone.

Any kind of multiplayer space simulator tends to tick all the right boxes for me, so seeing Elite Dangerous stumble in its latest attempt is a bitter pill to swallow. Setting off on an interstellar warehouse raid with a few friends after a day of solo star mining will never not sound like a blast. Maybe just keep this one under wraps until it’s ready to go. Oh, they’re already showing off more in the delay announcement? A free Lynx Highliner? Alrighty then.