A bit of bad news this weekend for Star Citizen fans, as Cloud Imperium games has announced that the beta phase for Squadron 42 is delayed for some time. The last time we covered the ambitious and cinematic singleplayer component of the online game, it was only a few months away from its next development phase. That was during the 3.3 patch phase, we’re now well into 3.6 for context.
With the ongoing work on various gameplay aspects and performance throughout 2019, CIG planned to drop the game in Q2 2020, that’s no longer the case.
So the teams behind Star Citizen have been running under Staggered Development for some time now. This is a system of consistent progress on a project which fragments overall progress on the game into smaller an more manageable chunks. This helps pace the teams as a whole, and allows for more focused development across multiple teams. This means that a slightly faster pace of development is possible, making it an achievable feat that fans see new content within Star Citizen on a regular basis, usually each quarter. Sadly it looks like development has hit a few too many snags and CIG had to push back the next release to compensate.
The game has truly been a juggernaut within both the fandom and the wider industry, raising insane sums of cash to support the work. As of writing Cloud Imperium Games has currently raised $233,488,147 from 2,363,031 backers overall.
Recently, progress on other areas of the games has been positive though, in a refreshing contrast with the current bad news for Squadron 42. If you want more SC news, why not check out the Around The Verse video series a look? Those take a deeper dive at a variety of development progress items and a bunch of future features and plans. The development team also recently revealed an update on the ongoing work on space stations in the game.
You can find more details about Star Citizen’s ongoing development, and the reasons behind the delay, here. Squadron 42 was targeting a Q2 2020 for its next testing phase, this 12 week delay pushes that into Q3 2020.