Over 10 Years After It Was Announced, Star Citizen’s Single-Player Squadron 42 Is ‘Feature Complete’ - IGN::Star Citizen developer Cloud Imperium Games has said Squadron 42, the single-player portion of its controversial space sim, is finally “feature complete”, over a decade after it was announced.
Maybe if they didn’t spend a ton of their budget hiring random big name actors to be in a video game, they could have been done much sooner.
it’s such a wild example of feature creep, and yet it’s not quite the wildest example of Star Citizen’s feature creep. When Roberts’ funding exceeded his wildest dreams, he should’ve changed nothing from his original pitch and simply delivered that. For reference:
Original funding goal: $2 million US
Funding by end of Kickstarter campaign: well over $6 million US
If they finished the project with a $4 million surplus, great! They’d have ample budget for post-launch support, and maybe even for some free post-launch content updates to improve goodwill. If that’d gone as planned, the dude’d be sitting on a whole new generation of goodwill.
Oh, and we’d have a game like this:
Instead they immediately pivoted to a pay-for-ships funding model and let the scope grow to seemingly every one of Roberts’ wildest whims
The tech demo is cool. Realization of no-loading-screen transitions from surface -> atmosphere -> orbit -> microgravity -> docking with another ship is wild. Being able to watch your pilot and gunner do a space battle from out the window, while you go walking about the ship is wild. But having it be only a tech demo for this long is so disappointing, and having the focus pivot from singleplayer-with-online to online-with-singleplayer are significant disappointments.
funding timeline: https://starcitizen.fandom.com/wiki/Crowdfunding_campaign
original pitch/campaign: https://web.archive.org/web/20121015042706/http://robertsspaceindustries.com/star-citizen/
“Why make less money when you can make more money?”