First of all I would like to wish you all the best to the New Year 2017!
I have asked developers what is going on and I have received the information as follows:
The main issue they are dealing with is the speed of the game. They are solving some troubles connected with CPU which seems to be overloaded. They would like to move some idle animations of soldiers, trees and aliens to GPU. They want the game to be fast enought even on less powerfull computers.
They are facing tricky issues with uncovering and covering with what the player should and shouldnt see.
The walls and doors are not placed like they used to be in UFO:ET1. They are placed like they used to be in the UFO:Enemy unknown. The reason was obviuos. It will be he whole more natural because the player will be allowed to get much closer to walls and they will provide him much higher coverage.
Because of all this issues a new programmer had to be hired to help with the engine optimizations.