Star Citizen fans sigh deeply, rub their foreheads as developer casts doubt on Squadron 42's 2026 release: 'I don't know if we're going to make it'

At this point, I'm just looking at all this as an interesting social experiment on sunk cost fallacy

I wonder how long they can go without delivering on anything

Game development as a service.

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 very much doubt that when (if) the game releases, it will be worth the wait and live up to the hype.

When this game is released the setting is going to be ancient history.

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?

As a very early backer of S42 way back in apparently 2012: It never ceases to annoy me that The Wing Commander Guy has once again managed to do everything possible to NOT make a fucking Wing Commander. This is, what, the third big clusterfuck and the first one where there was nobody to take it away from him and just finish it themselves? But, whatever.

As a big fan of elite games: I am really glad star citizen "exists" to contrast Elite Dangerous and has led to some truly amazing games in the genre. Some of which actually ARE more Wing Commander than not (Everspace 2 is basically the Freelancer that was promised). Now we just need some studio to make a proper Freespace game.

All that said: I don't like it but I weirdly keep coming back to the thought process that Star Citizen actually IS delivering on its "promise" to the backers... of the past decade or so. Not the OGs. Fuck us.

Because they were never sold on actually playing a game. They were sold on a dream. It is the same logic by which you watch Aisha Tyler do VO for a Tom Clancy game and think that you and your friends are also going to be super sweaty tier seven operators. Or how you watch your favorite group of online youtubers read off their pre-written jokes and pretend to be shocked while playing "friendslop" games. Or... you are a non-sicko who read too many AARs of Dwarf Fortress and thought you would boatmurder too.

Its the idea of spending money to Dream. You know you'll never actually do what you saw the pretty people do. But you THINK you will and, by owning a copy of Garry's Mod that you will never boot up, you think you will too.

Obviously the star citizen heads are spending WAY more than 20 bucks a pop and some are buying multiple megaships they'll never use meaningfully. But it is hard to not see parallels to the people who buy a DCS plane because they want to pretend that one day they will learn how to fly that jet.

And... truth be told, I think I've gotten my money's worth out of the annual charity streams where Drew Scanlon (The Blinking White Guy) and Vinny Caravella attempt to play Star Citizen and spend an hour or two crashing to desktop, getting confused, and accomplishing absolutely nothing. Hell, I think there were a few years where they never even found each other in the space station?

Also, as much as Freelancer hurt, I'll never stop laughing/being annoyed that he managed to take a sci-fi movie starring Freddie Prinze Jr AND Baby Busey AND Matthew Lillard and turn it into a charisma-free void with no redeeming qualities. Like, you gotta put some fricking effort into that. Those guys could make reading the dictionary be entertaining.

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.

Star Citizen may very well be the single greatest argument for Scrum Masters on Dev teams.

Talk about infinite scope, holy shit.

Store Citizen missing deadlines like that is to be expected.

I remember them announcing that SQ404 was entering a "polishing" phase in late 2023.

At that point and to this day, they failed to finalise a flight model, develop an armour/shield system and implement engineering gameplay.

Arguably these are critical elements for a release with space sim gameplay. Although if SQ404 does release, I think it will be 30 hours of Wing Commander The Movie level cut scenes (space bulldozer) and script, with bored sounding Hollywood actors counting the seconds till they can leave Chris Roberts' mocap studio.

Inside Chris Roberts' Mocap Studio:

Roberts: Hehehe. Hey, Mark! You know how I came up with the Vanduul? Hehe.

Hamil: No, how?

Roberts: Ehehe. Vandals to Vanduul! Get it? Hehehe. Pretty smart, right? Hehehe.

Hamil: Very original.

Roberts: Did you know the Vandals were a Germanic tribal grouping that raided the Roman Empire? Bet you didn't know that! Hehehe.

Hamil: I am in awe of your creativy!

Roberts: I know, right! Hehehe.

Ok Mark, enough farting around. Pretend you are riding a space bulldozer!

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.)

Sigh deeply, rub their foreheads, and open their wallets.

I think it's high time we just ghosted any news of this scam of a game and studio.

I think the people claiming this game is a scam, don't know what scam means. I paid for this game years ago and sometimes I go online and have fun with friends or just drink beer and do cargo hauling to relax. Like any other game really. Early access or not, people are having fun.

Sunk cost fallacy? What cost am I putting in, and what am I expecting in return? This game cost me a night on the town years ago that would've been forgotten at this point, and gained me a fun space game.

I was this 🤏 close to buying squadron 42 years ago, as it was just about to get released. dodged that bullet.

It'll be released when the original backers grandchildren have kids 😂

Not to worry, I'll have GTA 15 to keep me entertained until then

We will probably be back at the moon before this is release.

I'm fine with this. They took so long already, might as well give them as much time as they need to finish the job.

I'm more interested in the PU, anyways.