This past weekend Cloud Imperium Games held a hands-on event for select folks from various corners of the Internet. We on the outside don’t have a roster of who was included, but the vibe is that they were “content creators” who have been known to talk about Star Citizen and Squadron 42, en toto or in part. Naturally, there are those who believe that these people were hand-picked from a crop of shills and only included those who have only and would only say good things about their experience, but people pick weird hills to die on so I won’t try to disabuse them of their opinions. Let’s continue.

To be honest, I don’t really know what the mathematically average sentiment is. Despite expecting that having dozens of people finally experiencing a game 14 years in the making would naturally result in these “content creators” falling over themselves to be the first ones online to get their impression in front of folks, I haven’t viewed all of the recaps. I am slowly making my way through them as time (and my intestinal fortitude for dealing with “influencers”) will allow.

Attendees were broken out into groups and each group got five hours to play the game; from what I gather it wasn’t contiguous gameplay. They got to experience the intro that we saw at a previous CitizenCon, although since they had free reign to play it their way, many people deviated from the scripted version we saw.

However, it was apparently unskippable as CR wanted people to see how it had improved over the version that had been presented at CitizenCon. After that, gameplay jumped forward to a later part of the game. It sounds like this was the norm, allowing players to experience several different areas of the game without providing the connective tissue between them all.

One ongoing point of contention among folks in the cheap seats is whether or not the players got to play the game as opposed to mainly having been treated to “walking simulator” sections or cut-scenes (apologies to Bored Gamer who became the whipping-boy for his gameplay style becoming the sound-bite of the event). Some folks emphasized — intentionally or not — that their time with FPS or flight segments was minimal, while others claim that they took whatever shortcuts they could to get past the walking and talking just so they could get to the more action-packed segments.

The consensus seems to be, though, that Squadron 42 is a “cinematic experience” which to me means less sandbox and more story-driven. This would include cut-scenes or extended “interactive lite” sequences which only allow for walking and some decision making, all in between the gameplay segments. That being said, I’d expect the gameplay segments to be the longer of the two, possibly broken up with shorter, more direct cut-scenes — CIG did pay out a lot of money for some high caliber celebrities, and they’re going to want to get their money’s worth.

Compared to Star Citizen, the feeling is that Squadron is head and shoulders above the multiplayer experience. Everything is more performative and responsive. NPCs feel like living crew members who go about their own schedules, with many of them interactive. In between action sequences we will be free to move about our assigned cap ship, chatting with the NPCs, working out (there are 4 stats that can be raised in various ways, including in the gym), upgrading our fighter, and exploring the ship. There are a lot of QoL features that we have been looking forward to in Star Citizen which were included in Squadron such as the new new flight model, on-foot pinging, enhanced multi-tools, and, as everyone was saying, Maelstrom, the geo deformation and destruction system. Overall, folks said that Squadron felt like a real AAA game. If you’ve played Star Citizen, that will mean more to you than it would to someone who would expect that of course this should be a AAA game considering the time and money that went into it.

The experience wasn’t entirely bug free, however. Some folks have mentioned they had non-zero CTDs, but not enough to consider the game to be “horribly wrecked” like I’m sure most comments will insinuate. One attendee (so far as I have heard) did have a seemingly unavoidable progression blocker where the answer was to “skip ahead” at the request of a wandering dev. Other folks have mentioned some graphical issues, but nothing that got in the way of gameplay or required players to restore from a previous save point. Developers were on hand to help out should something irreparable be encountered, all gameplay was being recorded for review, everyone managed to get in as much gameplay as they could bring themselves to complete. A lot of folks mentioned that they had some frame-rate drops, particularly during cut-scenes when there was a lot of activity or very large activity (such as ships exploding) going on, which isn’t unheard of in today’s Modern Games(tm).

Other bits.

Squadron 42 is apparently a 40-hour game (more if you’re a completionist). The rumors of this being “chapter 1” are not entirely true; this will tell a complete story with no cliff-hanger, but CIG could certainly create more stand-alone Squadron titles if the first one does well. There will be four difficulty levels (I forget the official names) with the hardest being unlocked after completing one of the other difficulties — possibly only the second and/or third difficulty.

The acting seems to be pretty good, or at least not terrible. We’re talking seasoned actors here like Gary Oldman, Gillian Anderson, Mark Strong, Henry Cavill, Rhona Mitra, and, of course, long-time CR collaborators John Rhys-Davies and Mark Hamill, so performance won’t be an issue. It will come down to the quality of the writing.

FPS is agreed to be the biggest deviation from Star Citizen, with weapons feeling tight, responsive, and solid. NPCs will assist their downed comrades if we don’t kill them outright. Taking damage will be treatable in the field, but our wounds persist until we get to a medical facility. The Maelstrom system gets a breathless mention from everyone I’ve seen so far. This allows both ships, terrain, and even armor to be destroyed in sections; players report that headshots to a helmet will incrementally crack the dome until the helmet falls away, and bits of armor can be seen flying off of enemies…and each other, which will play into the need to repair and replace arms and armor between encounters. There was also a bit of hacking gameplay, which met with mixed reviews. Some liked it, some expected more, and some didn’t really care for it. C’est la vie.

As far as space action goes, not too many people mentioned it. There was talk about the loss of the reviled “Master Modes” in favor of “quantum anywhere”, allowing us to simply jump to a forward point at will, and the introduction of the quantum boost for shorter, faster trips. Quantum travel introduces obstacles we’ll need to avoid, but I’m hoping that’s just to get going, and not for the entire duration of the trip; many people use QT for bio breaks.

Sideline Thoughts

I have a sinking feeling that no matter how Squadron launches, it’s going to get brigaded. It is already available for wish-listing on Steam — expected, but still surprising considering how close-to-the-vest CR likes to keep things — and is probably where people are going to go looking for it. Naturally, they will find overall review scores and I cannot believe that we won’t see it downvoted to Hell no matter what. If it deserves it, OK, that’s natural selection, but if it’s just trolls and those “hill to die on” people who will grind any axe in sight then it will be a shining example of why we can neither have, nor deserve, nice things.

It was mentioned that marketing would start 42 days before launch, which means we’ll ether get a launch date and then marketing, or we’ll see marketing and can either calculate or will be given the launch date at that time. I know nothing about marketing but is 42 days enough? One attendee said that he was hoping for a demo which is…kind of insane…in the public arena. I can’t imagine that this is a hard “no”, but it does seem like CIG have some lingering polish to apply to their polish before that can happen. On the other hand, since it’s been stated by CR that GTA VI was the reason they moved the launch to Q2 2027, releasing a working demo before GTA VI, and the game after GTA VI, would be a hell of a sandwich to stick Rockstar in between and could only work in CIG’s favor if the game was actually demo-worthy. Obviously, no word on price. It was mentioned somewhere (possibly Reddit) that those who have Squadron as part of their Star Citizen pledge package will get the game through CIG, not Steam. We’ll revisit that later when we have official word.

Overall, reviews have been positive. The game gets high marks for it’s cinematic and AAA feel. There are still some issues which is kind of sad considering we were told they were in “polishing mode” over two years ago and were originally set to release next month, but on the bright side, Q2 2027 gives them a lot of time to spit-shine those shoes for public inspection. As a Star Citizen player and someone who is mostly interested in Star Citizen, I’m glad to hear that Squadron is an improvement in every way because the plan is to port Squadron’s polish to Star Citizen (complicated by updates to make them multiplayer-worthy); Squadron will be a glimpse into what we’ll hopefully be getting in the online version.

I am more hyped that CIG is finally going to release a product than I am in Squadron itself, truth be told. Getting this game out the door would, in a perfect world, silence some criticism, but it’s 202X and we know that people will “hold the line” of their own hot takes rather than eat crow, so it’s only a personal attaboy I can give CIG. Plus, once Squadron is out the door then it’ll be all Star Citizen, all the time (barring the need to release patches for Squadron) and hopefully we’ll see faster, more meaningful progress.

Attendee Thoughts

• Obsidian Ant
• Citizen Spooner
• Bored Gamer
• MrKraken
• Space Tomato (4 hours of interviews with various attendees)
• Reddit megathread

Here’s a selection; I’ve only posted the content that I’ve come across and/or have perused, not for editorial content, but because I’m not in-touch with the Star Citizen/Squadron/space game content creator ecosystem and don’t know really who to look at. I’m sure if you want a wider pool you can search for “Squadron 42” on YouTube or some derivative thereof, but I don’t have the time to check each video to see if what they’re saying is related to the weekend event (desirable) or is just talking about Squadron in general (less desirable in this circumstance).