Eight years and some lots of of hundreds of thousands of {dollars} in crowdfunding into improvement, and Star Citizen‘s star-studded Squadron 42 marketing campaign remains to be nowhere on our scanners. After plans for extra common updates appeared to fizzle out, Cloud Imperium at present filed the paperwork to amass planning permission to publish a completely new improvement roadmap for the revised roadmap they introduced earlier this 12 months.
The singleplayer portion of the multi-pronged Star Citizen bundle, Squadron 42 was pitched as a Wing Commander styled marketing campaign with a heavyweight forged together with Mark Hamill and Gary Oldman. Cloud Imperium initially envisioned it popping out in 2016 – however right here we’re, 4 years of launch date pushbacks later, with no signal of a launch anytime quickly.
Earlier this 12 months, Cloud Imperium posted an update assuring backers that the workforce was higher methods to maintain them replace. The then-current roadmap wasn’t figuring out, so the devs could be sharing extra correct progress updates drawn from their very own manufacturing instruments, alongside a sequence of “regular video check-ins” that’d be extra slapdash and simpler to pump out than their ordinary heavily-produced replace vids.
Of course, that was in March – and as we method August, it appears the Star Citizen boards are awash with threads asking the place their updates are. This prompted a new statement from CIG, explaining that whereas the revised roadmap remains to be very a lot within the works, monitoring its launch will itself require a complete new roadmap (thanks, Kotaku).
“In the fast future, we plan to ship the next communications:
- Give an evidence of the objectives of our new Roadmap and what to anticipate from it
- Show a tough mockup of the proposed new Roadmap
- Share a piece in progress model of the Roadmap for at the very least one in every of our core groups
- And then lastly transition to this new Roadmap”
The publish additionally explains what occurred to these “video check-ins”, which seem to have suffered from a bloat endemic to so many components of Star Citizen. Pitched as a semi-regular, lower-budget, simpler to provide various to their ordinary replace vids, the primary run of “The Briefing Room” was reportedly considerably underwhelming. Pushing up the standard meant creating new artwork belongings, which then meant asking the workforce to seize new B-roll footage after regular, after which the manufacturing was pushed again additional by key team-members falling unwell and taking break day.
That first Briefing Room is probably going nonetheless coming in a number of weeks – although not as “scrappy” as as soon as deliberate – together with a group of different updates. Stage one in every of that four-step plan must also come into impact “pretty soon”. But it’s exhausting to not see the manufacturing points round dev updates and a quickfire video as reflective of the issues with Squadron 42 (and Star Citizen) as a complete.
Last August, Eurogamer reported that Squadron 42’s launch date had been pushed again to Q3 2020. The manner issues stand, I wouldn’t maintain my breath on that holding out.
