Squadron 42, the single player campaign of Star Citizen, was recently the cause of a rather vehement backlash of fans against Cloud Imperium Games. That’s because the developers had promised a video update on the development progress, but that never materialized.
Eventually, Cloud Imperium Games released an official statement yesterday. You can find some of the highlights below.
With all Squadron 42 updates, our goal has been to find balance in sharing SQ42 content while minimally impacting the development team so they can focus on what matters most: finishing the game.
The recent Squadron 42 video update, which is a brand-new show we were debuting called “The Briefing Room,” was a lower-effort video that we embarked on with the goal of sharing more information with you but in a scrappy and fast manner, so as to minimize the disruption to the dev team and yet still give you new information. We planned for this to be a semi-regular show, with its cadence depending on how well the content was received and how disruptive (or not) this first episode would be to our dev team. This first episode was meant to focus specifically on (spoiler alert) updates on our conversation interrupt tech and level design in Squadron 42. What we discovered after the whole piece was finished and getting ready for publish was that our approach resulted in an underwhelming show. Not only did the episode have major audio issues due to WFH recording, but it lacked visuals to support the talking, and we truly prefer to show rather than tell. Ultimately, we decided that it wasn’t good enough to show, even for a “scrappy” video that was not meant to be a marketing sizzle trailer. However, before that “stop ship” message could permeate our entire marketing org, we had moved forward with a public publish date.
[…] Something that’s often not seen externally is the actual amount of time and effort it takes to put together the video content we regularly release. Delivering the updates to the standards we want takes time, and despite those saying they would be fine with a rough cut of talking heads, we get endless complaints when that’s what we deliver, example being that the Monthly Reports or linked examples above are quickly dismissed or forgotten. The Squadron 42 video is still coming (probably in the next few weeks), along with an assortment of other updates, including an overhaul to our Public Roadmap.
Squadron 42 doesn’t have a release date, much like Star Citizen itself, but hopefully we’ll get more concrete information on its development status in the next few weeks. Featuring actors of the caliber of Gary Oldman, Mark Hamill, Mark Strong, John Rhys-Davies, Ben Mendelsohn, Liam Cunningham, Andy Serkis, Gillian Anderson and Rhona Mitra, it aims to deliver a highly cinematic introductory experience to the world of Star Citizen.
