If you had told me last year to expect a major announcement of Squadron 42 being in what is essentially a fully playable state and heading off to polish, I would’ve told you there’s no way that’s on anybody’s bingo card.
For those of you who aren’t aware, Squadron 42 is the single-player counterpart to Star Citizen; essentially a new Wing Commander game. They both share universes, functional gameplay, ships and more, but Squadron 42 is offline and has the standard singleplayer story.
Here’s the announcement from CitizenCon:
Everything looks impressive, but then again, it should given the development time and the fact that this is all pre-recorded.
Still, I see a lot of Star Citizen in there.
Star Citizen’s biggest plague on it’s own development is all the new emergent tech, such as server meshing, and just in general managing such a complex game’s online state. 90% of bugs encountered are related to online play in one way or another.
Since Squadron 42 strips that out, it makes a lot more sense that it’d be so much further along.
Keep in mind that while they do note it is “feature complete”, that means there will most likely still be a fair amount of time left before release. Polish – in development – can be a not insignificant amount of time.
Still, it’s impressive to see it so far along now.