A year or so ago, there was a Star Citizen superfan who went into an apoplectic rage at us because our little context box at the end of every Star Citizen post mentioned that Squadron 42 – a single-player title we care about here on MOP only because it is one of the albatrosses around Star Citizen’s neck – had been delayed repeatedly. It was misinformation, he insisted, because Squadron 42 in fact had a very serious launch date of 2026, and how dare we not mindlessly promote that nebulous half-promise as if it were more than words in the wind like all the launch windows before it?
Hopefully, that guy is doing better now, and in other news, Squadron 42 has been delayed yet again.The news comes via the most recent letter from Cloud Imperium’s Chris Roberts.
“At CitizenCon 2024 we announced we would ship [S42] in 2026,” he says. “Our plan was to release in Q4 around IAE. But much like the rest of the industry there is no way I want to launch my spiritual successor to Wing Commander, a game that has had twelve years of blood, sweat and tears invested into it (we started Squadron 42 development in 2014 as 2013 was opening studios, hiring people and getting the Hangar module out for Star Citizen) launching into the attention buzz saw of GTA6. While GTA6 isn’t launching on PC this November, pretty much all outlets and most content creators will be all over it, not leaving a lot of room for other coverage. We have taken a look at the release windows at the start of 2027, and decided that Q2 provides a better time for Squadron 42 to release.”
Roberts does promise to let some hardcore backers and influencers play in October, which will probably only annoy gamers more than they already seem to be on Reddit – not that this, nor the excessively long development cycle for this heavily Kickstarted and crowdfunded set of games, has ever seemed to stop you goofy goobers from pouring a billion dollars into the project against all sense and logic.
I couldn’t even begin to tell you how many total times this thing has been delayed, but to give you an idea, here’s my own article from 10 years ago talking about a Squadron 42 delay and how the game was already supposedly mostly finished back then. But yes, the 2026 window came from the 2024 CitizenCon, and it was confirmed again last year when the team didn’t even bring S42 to CitizenCon specifically because it wanted to avoid “taking time for the distraction of CitizenCon.” So much for that.
There’s actually quite a bit more in the letter that most folks will skip over because the delay is just that maddening, but Roberts also talks up how important the Star Citizen alpha 4.10 is, how special the game’s instancing is, why the studio sticks with its engine, and how many people are still working on the games.
“The second misconception I see thrown around is that Star Citizen has a skeleton crew and all the resources and money is being spent on the Squadron 42. I want to clarify here. Outside of CTG we have a further 611 staff in development across our four studios. For the last couple of years, we’ve been split approximately 50/50 between Star Citizen and Squadron 42. Before that it was more heavily weighted to Star Citizen. One of the reasons that Squadron 42 has been taking the time it has is that we were always reassigning resources onto Star Citizen to get the patches out, which pushed back Squadron. In fact, after our 2023 CitizenCon in LA where we showed off a lot of the functionality we were working on for Squadron, the majority of the gameplay engineering team spent a large part of 2024 bringing a lot of the features into Star Citizen at the expense of Squadron. Towards the end of 2024 we decided that couldn’t continue so we shifted the balance back. In these final months on Squadron 42 that split is now 55% to 45% in Squadron’s favour, to ensure we get Squadron 42 bug free, polished and optimized. Because the sooner we finish Squadron 42, the sooner the majority of the development staff can focus on bringing Star Citizen to 1.0. Having to split time and resources between two hugely ambitious projects is very difficult.”
MOP’s own Chris has already covered the rest if you’re looking for more of the nitty-gritty on Star Citizen itself.
