Shocking exactly 4 people on the planet, Squadron 42 might not make it’s just-recently-confirmed-absolutely-rock-solid 2026 release date. 😂
Although I will say that at this point even laughing about it becomes difficult. It’s been so many years, every joke has been made and every laugh has been had.
I love the game’s potential, I will regularly log in just to walk around stations or planets or hang out in my ship and enjoy the aesthetic. I like to fiddle with things and see what’s new. I love the sense of scale and freedom, just knowing at any time you can get up out of your pilot’s seat and open your cargo hatch and yeet yourself out the back just makes me giddy.
All that said, I grow weary of the endless fuckery and delays and just uninstalled for the dozenth time to let the thing cook longer. The graphics, for all their beauty, require more power than my PC can put out so the frame-rates are almost unplayable in many areas. Quests and missions are still a complete dice-roll if they’re going to work or break at any moment. NPC’s in the ground missions are either dumber than rocks or clip through walls and you can never find them. The map/navigation system on your wrist computer is so janky that I dread having to use it, and that’s after several major overhauls.
Server meshing is an amazing technology, but you have to have all your servers working, so there is always at least one area of the solar system that just plain doesn’t work. Stations that don’t answer your landing hail, quest locations that don’t work, lagged out doors and ship systems.
The universe truly feels more vast than any other game, ever, because you feel like a tiny human in a huge expanse. Too bad that’s about it most of the time, there’s no sense of permanence, no bases you can build, no personalization you can do to your own apartment, no storage locker in your own room like every other game ever made, everything including accessing your personal gear has to be done through kiosks in lobbies. The lack of personal items and survival components other than eating and drinking once in a while leave a good 80% of every station or base useless.
Sure you can buy a few cheap ass toys to put in your cockpit, but since most likely your game will crash and you will have to file a claim on your ship, you will hardly want to do this more than once.
Ship interiors feel real, it’s highly convincing. It’s just too bad that they’re mostly useless. Other than moving cargo around a cargo hold, there’s very little else you can do on a ship.
And you know what… I would be okay with all of these shortcomings IF THE GAME HAD GOOD CONTROLS. Seriously, look at a game like SCUM, it’s a survival PvP MMO where the gameplay is so detailed you need to manage your protein levels to build muscle and you have to poop regularly, you can even die of a heart-attack. You can load your magazines with several types of bullets and it will fire them in order. You can adjust how deep of a crouch you’re in and you can craft a vast array of useful items to survive and fight.
And it does it all smoothly. Sure it takes getting used to, but it’s never tedious. You never fall through the floor. You never have to fiddle with a door panel, you don’t have to make sure you point your cursor to just the exact position to open a hatch, you can actually trust the line-of-sight from a hostile mech so you can avoid it.
And that’s a game that’s far, far from perfect but they make a better gameplay experience than Star Citizen which has made exponentially more money from its players.
I will still keep trying it out from time to time, but I really, really hope some new game comes along and takes all the best lessons from SC and makes a more polished game experience that keeps the scale and detail and freedom but gives you things to do.
(No, I know about No Man’s Sky, it’s like a muppet/minecraft version of a space sim and too silly and unrealistic, totally different experience.)
Things I’ve done in Elite Dangerous since Star Citizen started development:
Everything there is to do.
Star Citizen may very well be the single greatest argument for Scrum Masters on Dev teams.
Talk about infinite scope, holy shit.
Competent Scrum Masters, 95% of the Scrum project that I’ve been part of caught on fire is because of an ass PO and an incompetent SM who can’t rein in the PO.
The scam is eternal.
We are gonna get gta 8 before we get star citizen.
Meanwhile I’ve done five or six playthroughs of Freelancer while this game has been in development and had more fun than I’ll ever have with Star Citizen.
Bro running the greatest grift on earth not counting the crypto market
Store Citizen missing deadlines like that is to be expected.
Just a few more jpegs and they’ll have the money to finish it!
I do remember them spending a lot of money on Star-Trek style doors for the their HQ and now they’re moving, so I guess that was money well spent.
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After much careful reflection on this news, here is my response: HAHAHAHAHHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHA!
I think I could have written this headline 6 years ago.
Game development as a service.
Hahaha, at this point they can coin the term.
They may have been the first, but the sheer amount of failed disaster projects on Kickstarter, Paetron, wherever is staggering.
Some of them end up being “successful” failures, just stringing their patrons along on hopes and dreams and donations until the well dries up. Star Citizen is definitely the most successful venture of its sort, but only because it’s the highest profile with a bunch of known talent in the mix.
Just to give a more shit show example there’s also Yandere Sim. Theres so much to that shit show that I can’t even get into, mostly cause I’m fucked up on Tylenol. Point is there are multiple documentaries on YouTube about how that fucker just kept stringing folks along and self sabotageing for years.
damn that’s good, we should have been using it for this game particularly but also pretty much every pvp survival game as well.
My biggest problem with survival crafting games is the balance is always horrendously unfair and is just irritating as fuck, or there isn’t even anything to survive against because they didnt put any kind of antagonists in the game so the building part is completely aesthetic.
The PvP focused ones do both at once! There are no enemy NPCs, and the balance between the human players is stupid AF.
It’s been in development for 15 years. Duke Nukem whatever was only in dev hell for 14. Y’all ever gonna admit you got scammed?
You can say it’s a bad deal, they are mismanaging the project etc. but calling it a scam is just hyperbole.
Duke Nukem Whatever sounds like the better version of what we got.
I got enough enjoyment out of it for what little I spent a lifetime ago. I go see whats new every couple years, which is usually quite a lot. The game is still a disaster, but it’s a strangely interesting disaster.
When this game is released the setting is going to be ancient history.
It’s a bit fun to imagine that. People of the future playing a game that would be sci-fi to us, but really to them it’s like Oregon Trail.
Space, the we already did that frontier.
I’ve spent hardly any money on that game. I did the first 20 bucks. Then a 15 to get a tiny mining ship to help get in-game money. But I wouldn’t have even gotten it if it wasn’t for my partner REALLY liking the “game.”
I might like it too… if it actually worked and every bug I’ve ever encountered being perfect for setting all my progress to zero or even backwards. Because you have to buy supplies to do a mission.
So fuck that. I’m not playing it until I can make progress- which will be never.
You know, when they mentioned 8k textures 10 years ago, I laughed because it was so overshooting gaming standards that it was laughable. Now I’m think they will be just on track when it actually launches.
By the time they launch, they’ll have a game with 8k textures and everyone else will be releasing games for Star Trek’s holodeck.
I was this 🤏 close to buying squadron 42 years ago, as it was just about to get released. dodged that bullet.
42 years ago
I heard it’s been in development for a long time but didn’t know it’s this long.
this is why you should buy games that are released
Right. Never pre-order games. Ever.
I got no sympathy for anyone that is disappointed and continues to “pledge” to this “game”. I mean hell a few years ago they got me and I “pledged” $200 for a ship that I may or may not still have. but then afterwards I felt like a rube.
So I get it, I fell for it once, but still no sympathy for anyone that continues to do so.
I’m in a similar boat. Pledged but it’s been years since I gave them money and I’m not really following it closely anymore. Can’t say I ever felt like a rube though, backing a crowdfunded project is always a gamble to some degree, and that money was so long ago that any impact on my situation from having it or not has long since faded.
I’m a little disappointed in the date potentially being pushed back, but it’s not like I marked it on my calendar or anything. If they had said nothing and the date just slipped by I probably wouldn’t even notice if no one else brought it up.
I’ll play S42 if/when it comes out, and probably even enjoy it, but I’m not chomping at the bit.
People continuing to give them additional money now are simply deranged though.
