TL;DR:
- Star Citizen
- “Handles tens of thousands of people playing concurrently” every day.
- “Shipped more mission content and in-game events than ever before this year.”
- “Delivered 11 major patches, more than 40 live publishes, 147 PTU builds, and several tech previews.”
- “More than 64 million hours played in Star Citizen (up from 48 million in 2024).”
- “Huge improvements in server stability with 57% fewer player disconnections per 1 million player hours compared to 2024.”
- Squadron 42:
- Focus on bringing the game to content complete and closing out remaining core tasks in preparation for Beta.
- Game length: 40+ hours.
- No long marketing campaign before release.
- Future
- Further focus on stability but also feature expansion.
- Dynamic server meshing, plan to have up to 1000 players in a single instance.
- Genesis (new planet tech).
- New AI population management system.
- Significant improvements to item recovery, inventory, insurance and cross-patch persistence.
I just can’t wait for the day I can just play SC and actually accomplish something without losing hours of progress… Decided to try out 4.5, went mining for a few hours, placed the crate on the cargo lift. Poof. Gone. Cool cool.
They said they had fixed inventory loss from patches. Imagine my surprise when I log in and all my in-game-bought vehicles are gone, all my Grade A ship components are gone, and pretty much all loot from the Vanduuls missions is gone, but somehow my paid Époque armor set got duplicated.
The love/hate relationship with this fucking game is unreal.
A few hours mining for one crate? My condolences
It was hand mining lol I wanted to try out scanning for caves too
Oof the pain
Was the freight elevator in your hangar? I find when things go missing on those they magically end up in my inventory later
It was one of the mining sites on microtech. I’ll have to check my inventory though, it would be nice to know if these things aren’t actually lost completely.
Seeing confirmation that S42 STILL isn’t in beta does not inspire confidence. We had multiple announcements about the game being “feature complete”, “playable start to finish” and “almost ready” throughout the years - saying the same thing year after year is pretty meaningless at this point.
Just push it out and start working full time on SC, I beg you.
How is that unusual for a 2026 release?
For a normal company? It’s not, but it does rise an eyebrow when said by someone with CIG’s track record. Or it would, if I didn’t read monthly reports and see what they write about Squadron’s development there.
I don’t know, maybe I’m too cynical towards this announcement but I’m simply tired of the game being “almost done” for years while still blocking majority of the workforce from moving towards SC - the game I actually care about. Feel free to disregard my comment as a whining of a jaded long time backer.
I’m an OG backer too but (working in software) I feel like betas are a final touch thing you run for a week or two after internal testing has been completed, imminently before launch
Star citizen is rapidly progressing, crafting is around the corner and we’ve just had some massive updates drop
We have different understanding of the term then. I always saw beta as the whole testing and bug fixing period after reaching content complete - considering Squadron’s campaign is suppose to be over 40 hour long, there’s plenty to test there.
As for rapid progress… I guess? It’s also vastly scaled down compared to what was announced (not as an end point but the state things were going to release in) and years behind schedule so, you know, congrats on putting some of it in the game.
Again, I’m just salty about how things are going (both in terms of schedule and direction of the game). If you’re happy with the progress, more power to you - majority of the player base doesn’t seem to mind so I guess they’re doing well enough with that.
The game has also been drastically scaled up compared to what we bought into. Thousands of POIs more than the original pitch. Planets you can literally land anywhere and go anywhere on, full physics and manual flight. Original pitch was auto landing at one or several POI per planet. No ability to go literally everywhere or for content to exist everywhere. Far far larger ships, the constellation was going to be the literal largest and now we have monsters that require entire clans to run a single ship.
Scale doesn’t mean much if it’s not filled with meaningful content - CIG has yet to prove they’re capable of doing that. Same with those monster ships - what we currently have are capitals that should require a crew but can be flown solo while still being a threat and providing area denial. Until that changes, talking about clans running ships is just a fairytale. Besides, Bengal was confirmed as a playable ship in 2013, big ships happening wasn’t unexpected.
And since you brought up flight… I REALLY don’t like what Yogi and his team are doing with that so that’s not exactly a positive for me. Yes we can fly everywhere, too bad it’s becoming less and less interesting experience with every iteration. The “full physics” is something we already had in the past, only to be thrown out and replaced with more gamified versions as time went by. Was it perfect? No, of course not but it was way more interesting than what we currently have.
Don’t take me wrong, tech side is cool and I’ll be happy if anything worthwhile comes out of this increase in scale. On the actual game design (and UI, and missions and…) front however CIGs efforts leave a lot to be desired. Tech on its own won’t make the game worth playing - not long term anyway.
Wow 40 whole hours of gameplay!?!? That’s roughly three hours per year of development - astonishing! /s
Their goal is only 1000 on a single shard? Thats a far cry from a true MMO experience….
Depends on how they’re going to define “shard” going forward. I doubt it’s planned as 1000 people spread over all 5 systems (if we’re talking about 1.0 release), especially with the amount of points of interest they’re planning to plop all over each celestial body. Perhaps that’s just the next step of what we have and not what they’re aiming for with 1.0?
