Notes from this morning's Squadron 42 townhall from tenpoundfortytwo
- Not sure if the latest FSR will be in the initial game
- Audio will be 7.1 surround
- Steam wishlist over 100.000 in the last 12 hours
- 1m copies pre-sold on CiG site (to us, the backers via access packs and promotion SC starter packs etc)
- Due to the many CiG owned pre-sales, Valve won't allow for Steam key convenience, which is sort of understandable because the whole Steam infrastructure would be used without them getting their fees.
- Pre orders = Soon- 42-day marketing campaign
- Collector editions with a lore-related plushy
- The only loading screen in the game is when you die (because you have to revert to the checkpoint)
- AI tech (with people reviving you and enemies reviging theirs) will come to Star Citizen
- Ships in Squadron 42 are generally at a higher fidelity (even) than in Star Citizen. The big question now, is if that's going to be brought into the multiplayer portion of the game.
- VR will have full-body motion control ASAP
- Flight model is fully liberated in terms of equipment dilemmas (shield/quantum travel) and is fully determined by how you set your power pips. But how it's going to translate to Star Citizen isn't known. The flight model will be further developed for the multiplayer portion.
- CiG devoted their time to accessibility options: They want every person with all kinds of disabilities — Eyes, motor skills — to be able to enjoy the game. Ship / fps difficulty can be split. There is gamepad/aim assist, captions, and colorblindness options.
- sound and music is such high fidelity, and there are dynamical crescendos between calm and intense versions of the same track depending on player actions.
- the co-op functionality that was pitched at the beginning was dropped long ago
- When Squadron42 is truly done, nearly everyone on the team that worked on it will be moving over to Star Citizen and begin to tidy up the multiplayer portion to the fidelity of the single-player game. That means more immersive missions with mission givers, Tessa Bannister will come back, the Maelstrom physics, alongside SC centric features like base building and more.
- a lot more of the core engine optimizations in Squadron 42 will come over to Star Citizen
- the baseline motivation in CiG was to get Squadron 42 in good shape, and that's why SC seemed a bit of a side project the last 3 years. Despite the massive technical advancements in rendering, server meshing, and more content. Star Citizen clearly will find a second wind when SQ42 is out. Now, the money they get from SC is spent building Squadron 42, and when it's out it will have to go the other way, so the game has to be the best it can be to make players enthusiastic enough to want to engage with Star Citizen.
- The game is one continuous streaming cinematic environment. No pre-rendered cutscenes. (apart from the opening credits)- they are working on eventual entity popping visible in the game.
- On the GPU side, they aim for 8 GB of VRAM usage if you play in 1080p, with a mid-tier card. They want the game to look good by adding flexible graphics settings, not only for high-end cards.
- Global illumination will come to SQ42 and Sc
- Almost 400 people are working on Squadron 42
- Squadron 42 will be a self-contained story. At the start of development, they wanted to make 3 overarching episodes/acts of single-player games. But Squadron 42 won't end with a cliffhanger. At this moment, there are some options being discussed for "episode 2," but it's not set in stone.
- Rich Tyrer (game director) said that the next focus will be to get Star Citizen to 1.0 as fast as possible.
- Prices aren't known at this point
The bit regarding Valve not allowing it is bullschit. There is an exception rule. Fraud management is a thing, and Star Citizen has a gray market. Regardless, Bethesda ported all their activations (in the millions) via their own launcher to Steam via API, and this included games not previously listed on Steam. The only real excuse here is the gray market. "Account-linked" distribution is available and is a method still used, and this isn't the only distribution method.
Steamworks is Steamworks. Third-party launchers can be incorporated. All in all, the migration path is there.
Their marketing campaign clearly started with this recent event. The quote above, and all others, has had the same speaking points. I know how this works. Is it 42 days until the next presales round?
Okay, CIG dropped Squadron 42 co-op. I don't know whether this has been communicated to their OG backers.
I think this game will be Nvidia-optimized. I mean, the game is likely to target Nvidia's tech stack. GI on AMD is not quite the same as GI on Nvidia. Not knowing whether the game will even support FSR 4 is strange, but I don't know what is meant by “latest,” Diamond???
Only 1 million copies pre-sold? This includes promotional copies like AMD's. They had 34 000 OG backers. People really loved purchasing ships, I guess. They only stopped selling Squadron 42 in May 2023, I think, and the buyback removal was in April 2026.
The game isn't gold, so it wouldn't have shipped in 2026 in any case. Nothing to do with GTA.
I don't think the minimum requirements are going to be low. 8 GB mid-range GPU @ 1080p. What is mid-range? A modern 70-series GPU?
They wanted to make three overarching episodes... The missions disk was promised to the OG backers, but so was co-op in Squadron 42. There are three containers on Steam, though that could be anything.
No hating here, but CIG is going hard on the PR and not using its own voice. In my view, there are two sides to this: they are avoiding direct engagement (not to set expectations) and monitoring reactions. The problem with today's impression system is that it is bot-powered, so sentiment is managed. I hate this, but marketing loves it.
