Cyan, the studio behind iconic puzzle adventure games Myst (1993) and Riven (1997), garnered their fair share of success with their April 2019 Kickstarter campaign, which sought to bring to life their next VR-compatible title, Firmament. Now Cyan says the long-delayed game finally has a release date: May 18th.

According to a Kickstarter backer update, Firmament is now set to launch on May 18th, coming to PC VR headsets including Meta Rift and Rift S, HTC Vive, Valve Index, and Meta Quest headsets through Quest Link. A flatscreen mode is also available for play on MacOS and Windows. A previous version of this article claimed it was coming in March, however this is untrue, as the game is confirmed to release on Thursday, May 18th.

The studio says it’s also set to target PSVR 2, PS4 and PS5 at some point “down the line.”

Two months ago the studio released an extended look at some of the game’s preproduction footage, which we’ve included below:

Once targeting a July 2020 launch, Firmament has slipped again and is now targeting a Q1 2023 launch date. Here’s that statement is full; we’ve also included a 9-minute look at the work-in-progress game, embedded below this update:

“As a result of discussions with key team member and staff, Cyan is making the important decision to move the launch of Firmament to Q1 2023. The game is very closed to complete, and the development is rapidly approaching its final phase.

To our Backers, Fans, and Friends, thank you for your continuing patience and support. Your enthusiasm and excitement lifts our spirits daily. We cannot wait to share launch day news with you in (early!) 2023.”

Original Article (July 13th, 2020): Firmament’s launch window seemed a bit tight from the onset, however from an experienced studio that had previously created its latest VR-compatible puzzle adventure game Obduction to both PC VR and PSVR, it seemed not all together impossible.

The reality of creating a game however is admittedly “often quite a bit messier,” the studio says in a recent Kickstarter update.

Here’s a bit of Cyan’s reasoning behind the delay, which is said to push the game’s release date possibly to 2022.

With that in mind, Firmament’s Estimated Delivery date of July 2020 was- as it turns out- a wildly optimistic one. We know some of you had your heart’s set on playing Firmament this summer, and we’re genuinely sorry that you’re not going to be able to play it yet! We’re really bummed about that too!

Although there is no Release Date to announce today, we can tell you a couple things with some level of certainty: Firmament is not coming in 2020. And unless the stars align (which we all know happens rarely in game development), it is unlikely that Firmament will be coming in 2021.

In the studio’s own defense, Cyan says it has “always been about shipping things when they’re ready to be shipped, not picking a date and then trying to shoehorn the game into the box in an artificially limited amount of time.”

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Firmament is said to be “something bigger than a studio [of Cyan’s] size would ordinarily be able to produce,” and that it will include a “richer and more substantial story” than was previously planned.

Whatever you thought of Obduction (and its initially uneasy technical performance on both PC VR headsets and PSVR) Cyan has a good track record of delivering, leaving the only real concern to when Firmament will arrive, and not if.

Food for thought: a prospective 2022 release of Firmament is slated to happen well within the lifecycle of next-gen consoles and PC hardware—and possibly VR hardware as well—so there’s no telling what technical advances the studio will need to adopt along the way if it’s looking to significantly lengthen the development roadmap. I guess we’ll see in a few years. As it is, Firmament is targeting PC, SteamVR headsets, macOS, and PS4 & PSVR.

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Well before the first modern XR products hit the market, Scott recognized the potential of the technology and set out to understand and document its growth. He has been professionally reporting on the space for nearly a decade as Editor at Road to VR, authoring more than 4,000 articles on the topic. Scott brings that seasoned insight to his reporting from major industry events across the globe.
  • jasonmartino

    Sad. I gave them my Kickstarter money and it’s been nothing but excuses.

    • Rileogriffin

      So you would rather they use your money to make a game you could complain about than wait a bit longer and get a game that you can be proud to say you helped bring to reality? Nevermind the fact that a small indie studio had to navigate the logistics of development while a global-pandemic-sized wrench got thrown into their plans. Have you ever tried to accomplish a creative design process via Zoom or Skype? Trust me, it’s a nightmare. The fact that they are still moving forward at all is impressive.

      • jasonmartino

        They were already way behind before the pandemic started. But the pandemic is a huge pain.

    • mirak

      So what ?
      Thanks to you, me and others, we will have another Cyan game.
      I don’t see the issue.

  • DanDei

    I wonder how they finance 18+ month of additional developement time for a project that started with a barely succesfull kickstarter of just 1,4 million in funding. Sure, you can look for other investors but those aren’t so easy to come by when you are already past your initial target release window and want to ad a couple of “when it’s done” years to your project.

    • mirak

      What you say makes no sense, as they say they want the game to be bigger than what they planned initially.

    • User_Name_24601

      They have a few additional sources of funding via other products they’ve released/have in the pipeline. I wouldn’t be shocked if VR Riven launches before Firmament as it’s further along. They could then us some of the profits from that to finish this game.

      • mirak

        this Riven roler coasters would be something in VR

    • Lucidfeuer

      They’re Cyan, when you’re a legendary indie studio you can. What legendary entry have you released? Gosh loser nobodies talking out of their asses because of corporate hearsay or business schools are the worst in any kinds of project…

      • DanDei

        lol, they salty fanboy rage.
        Dude, my comment was entirely inoffensive and just wondering how they keep bankrolling such a niche title for so long. And no, legend status from the 1990s doesn’t pay you any bills today. Just ask Peter Molyneux!
        And btw, my comment is THREE years old and the game still hasn’t released, because things are going so great at Cyan

  • Reece Ingram

    I think I speak for all fans of Cyan when I say that we trust them. And they haven’t let us down before.
    They’ve been trying to bring their vision to our screens for a long time, and I think technology has finally caught up with them.

    If they need to take a few more years to make something that’s just going to make us more proud of them, then I say go for it.

    • DeenVR

      It’s cancelled dude

      • Reece Ingram

        Says someone who clearly doesn’t know the first thing about Cyan.

  • Bah! Who cares …? Most overrated studio in the business.
    No wonder publishers want nothing to do with them.

  • The real problem is how they’ll find money for other 2 years of development and how they will adapt to new VR technologies that are coming

    • mirak

      You were full of dreams at that time, there is on new VR technologies.

  • Rosko

    Good games take time, I will wait. The only thing they did wrong was the initial date was way off.

  • Eric-Alexandre Roussel

    I’m fine with this. As myamotto said: “A delayed game is eventually good, a rushed game is forever bad”

    • ViRGiN

      There is no evidence he ever said this, and if anything, that was in the 90s lol.
      A delayed game only exposes huge troubles with development. This is already nearly 3 years delayed lol. Did cyberpunk got better cause of number of delays? LOL

      • Lucidfeuer

        3 years a long for a VR game, except when you have talent then you should take all the time which CPDR did not, and that was a catastrophy.

  • ViRGiN

    I love all this toxic positivity archivized in the comments down below.

    • User_Name_24601

      As a Kickstarter backer, I’m still fine with another delay. Get it right the first time. Development takes time when a medium is still developing.

      • ViRGiN

        Cool story bro. You have no self respect.

      • ViRGiN

        You have no self respect yet I am built like an 8 yo and I respect myself.

        • You’re gonna get banned.
          The REAL Virgin knows about the prohibition of insults here.

  • Looking forward to checking this out in VR.

  • ViRGiN

    At LeAsT iTs NoT dUmBeD dOwN tO rUn On QuEsT

    • ViRGiN

      I am dumbed down so much that I can run on any Quest 1, 240fps smooth.

    • Arno van Wingerde

      Well I get that, but i am still sad it doesn’t. After all Myst looks nice on the Quest2.

  • Jeremiah Tothenations

    I am anticipating this game and they should take their time with it, but I hope its better Obduction, I ended up hating that game and that’s as someone that loves Myst and Riven and those types of games.

    It was just so obtuse (hmmm, that’s similar to Obduction…) Looking promising though, all the same. Loved the Myst remake (I had played the original), hopefully Cyan remaking that classic reminded them of what makes a great puzzle adventure game, because Obduction wasn’t it.

    • mirak

      Obduction was way more feasible than Riven or even Myst.
      I did that one without “cheating”, I can’t say the same for Riven where I couldn’t find that frog symbol, or Myst in the labyrinth, impossible in VR, and I don’t know what to do after cheating for the labyrinth solution.

      • Jeremiah Tothenations

        I found Myst way more doable than Obduction, the latter being obtuse, with constant loading back and forth (which was a real prob back when I had a HDD) and convoluted puzzles resetting themselves after a time, awful. I literally uninstalled it twice out of frustration and even rage because of how awful it was, not to mention how bland the story was compared to the greatness of the Myst series and the videos looked terrible (more of a budget issue, sure). I recently played the Myst remake actually, what an absolute joy!

        I didn’t play any of these in VR mind.

        Really happy to hear Cyan are remaking Riven though as they clearly have more success in that area.

        • mirak

          Nah they only did good games.
          Obduction is great, only Cyan can do great games like that.
          The Gallery is a joke compared to any of Cyan games.

          • Jeremiah Tothenations

            No idea what The Gallery is tbh, unless… weirdly I was dreaming about Uru music last night, specifically the gallery theme, strange?

            But anyway, I really really wanted to like Obduction, but it didn’t happen unfortunately.

          • Gonzax

            I loved The Gallery 1 and 2, especially 2. Not as good as Myst but pretty good, anyway.

          • mirak

            It’s not a quarter as good as Obduction.

        • Gonzax

          I found Obduction way more difficult than Myst, I agree. Some puzzles were very obtuse and you had to run long distances just to try some things. A little more help would have been nice.

    • Rosko

      Obduction is one of my favorite vr games once i sorted the gfx setting.

      • Jeremiah Tothenations

        Never tried it that way tbh, although I could try it anytime, but I didn’t like the game that much…

    • Gonzax

      I loved Obduction. Other than the snail-like movement in VR it was a great game, very hard sometimes, but great.

      • Jeremiah Tothenations

        Maybe with an SSD, at the time I had a HDD and it was a painful experience with the constant loading when you get to a certain part requiring a lot of telepirting back and forth!

        • Gonzax

          I was on SSD fortunately but yeah, I get you, that can totally ruin the experience especially in that section you mention which was hard enough already.

  • ray manta

    MARCH????

    I read “Firmament will release for Windows (2D & VR) and MacOS on Thursday, May 18th, 2023”

    MAY

  • Charles

    Loved Riven and a couple later sequels. But Obduction was garbage. My 2080 Ti couldn’t get a stable framerate with half-decent graphics settings – and even at max settings it was visually underwhelming. Did they have interns code it?

    • Andrew Jakobs

      Then there is something seriously wrong as I had it running with decend framerates on a RTX2060super with everything on.

      • Charles

        Hmm. Maybe it doesn’t play well with AMD CPUs? Mine was pretty high-end at the time. Do you have Intel?

        Also, did you have sufficient antialiasing and supersampling to smooth out aliasing? And was it in VR without judder and without reprojection?

        I got their later VR remake of Myst and that worked great – I recommend it.

        • Gonzax

          The game looked great on my 1080Ti and performance was also very good after the first patches.

          It’s the speed of movement in VR that I didn’t like much and the reason I’ll probably never replay it, way too slow. Myst was perfect on that front.

          • Charles

            Oh yeah, forgot about that. Movement speed was definitely way too slow.

    • mirak

      No, it is graphically awesome, what were you on, did you quit ?

      I am pretty sure it was the same engine, as it was not super smooth either.

  • Rosko

    I think you have this wrong its 18th May.

  • Cheese

    Excellent work ,keeper going strong,cheeeeers

  • Jonathan Winters III

    From the Kickstarter: “Firmament will release for Windows (2D & VR) and MacOS on Thursday, May 18th, 2023”.

    Yes, MAY not March. Don’t believe the article.

  • CORRECTION: The game is NOT releasing on March 18th. It is releasing on MAY 18th.

    I just got a backer email from them today.

  • Gonzax

    I think you got the date wrong, it’s May 18th according to Cyan on their Twitter!!

  • Foreign Devil

    Big fan of Cyan and their games. Enjoyed Obduction VR and Myst VR. Will very likely get this one too. If I lived in the area I would have applied to work as a 3D artist for Cyan.

  • Tommy

    Day One buy when it does come out, for me.