Cloud Imperium Games" annual CitizenCon convention kicked off today in Manchester, once again giving all focus to its in-development sci-fi game Star Citizen. Day one of the live presentation ended with a long look at the single-player campaign portion of Star Citizen, Squadron 42. At the end of it, the studio revealed a 2026 launch window for the campaign.
Roberts also confirmed that the campaign can take from anywhere between 30 to 40 hours to complete. He then went on to hand over the stage to Richard Tyra, the Senior Game Director for Star Citizen and Squadron 42, to have a live playthrough of the lengthy prolgue section of the game, saying simply showing a gameplay video is "not our style". The live demo did experience a crash and visual glitches as the mission went on, but the level of detail and scale were quite impressive to see.
As seen above from the seven hour thirty minute mark, the segment is from the start of the game, taking the player through a short intro sequence of selecting a character and getting gear as he joins a massive human fleet of space fairing ships. Soon, a Vanduul alien formation is encountered and all hell breaks loose between the two groups. Following a long cinematic segment, control is given back to the player with first-person gameplay, showing off gunplay, zero gravity traversal, and other ship-based systems. Of course, plenty of movie stars like Gillian Anderson, Gary Oldman, and Henry Cavil can be seen during the mission too.
Those following the crowd-funded project may remember that Squadron 42 was deemed "feature complete" a year ago, with Cloud Imperium Games saying the project has finally moved to the polishing stage of production.
Today, studio co-founder and Star Citizen director Chris Roberts came on stage to say this about what has been transpiring since then:
"Last year we announced Squadron 42 is feature complete, so what has the team been doing since. Given the scale and ambition of Squadron 42, our teams have been focused on polishing and optimizing to ensure the game meets the high standards that I have, the team has, and you guys have. This level of quality does take time and we are committed to delivering an experience worthy of the journey."
If Cloud Imperium can stick to its newly announced schedule, Squadron 42 will be in the hands of fans sometime in 2026. The studio also continues to update the MMO space RPG portion of the experience, Star Citizen, with quarterly updates.