Overall the AI seems pretty weak.. when I was dog-fighting with a pirate for instance, (the space flight engine is arcade-like similar to Freelancer) the enemy just stopped dead in space and sat there in the middle of the screen like a sitting duck!
I'd guess the publisher forced the developers to release of the demo by a certain date, ready-or-not.
But if the developers can get on top of the issues, the game does look like it has promise. The ships and station models seem well designed on first glance, although not very spacey.. (airplane-like wings and the like). But it's definitely worth a look if you reminisce for the Elite days!
The contract I'm doing is dragging on even longer than I had hoped, I hoped to be finished last week, but it looks like it'll be at least another week.
Did some more work on the game engine/editor today (I've designed the architecture, so they both use the same code-base), made progress, but there's only so much you can do working one day a week! :/
As a complete aside... I competed in most awesome race on Saturday!!
One of my favorite past-times is long distance running.
(Yeah, yeah I do game development did you not expect me to be a little mad!! :P)
...got to run with a reasonable pack of competitors and everyone was jostling for position for most of the entire 9km course! It's pretty unique situation in Hobart as the population is small and the running scene equally so. It turned out to be a lot of fun!
If you are doing console games it is another pain as the publishers now require XBox Live demos so you have to make sure it is below a certain size for download etc etc.