It’s been almost a year since there were reports about the launch of Squadron 42 - the single-player campaign portion of the now 12-year-old crowdfunding boondoggle Star Citizen—was "feature complete" and in the "polish phase."
Now, several years later, the game’s original 2015 release target, developer Roberts Space Industries (RSI) suggests that, with just a year or two of additional “polish,” the game will finally launch sometime in 2026.
The announcement came during the recent CitizenCon, as per IGN, where RSI founder and CEO Chris Roberts showed off a roughly hour-long prologue of the game’s promised 30 to 40-hour storyline. The outlet also reported that the live on-stage demo suffered “a number of crashes, bugs, and graphical problems,” which helps explain why a little more time is needed to get from “feature complete” to “actual release.”
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The Game Was Planned To Launch In May 2014
"We did say we were doing it live, risking the demo gods, and they brought their wrath down on us," Roberts said on stage, as per the IGN report. "Both the team and I are confident of giving you this game in 2026. Obviously, you can see it’s not going to be tomorrow because you saw a few crashes there."
The weekend’s festivities gave fans nostalgia. The game was planned to be released in May 2014 but was eventually delayed until December. At the time, Ars Technica noted that "a full release of the Star Citizen MMORPG [would be] expected near the end of 2016," a date that now seems as vague as the original 2015 launch window for Squadron 42. “We will build the game you are dreaming about”
Back in 2014, Roberts Space Industries raised just $67 million from crowd funders eager to see Roberts’ lofty vision for a new era of space simulation games. Now, that funding has climbed past $731 million from players purchasing pricey virtual ships in a game that exists only as an unpolished alpha plagued with significant gameplay issues.
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Squadron 42 Becomes Butt Of All Jokes
Roberts said in a March update that the team had "spent significant time looking at what Star Citizen 1.0 means and what it would take to get there." As of now, the team "is hard at work, heads down, driving toward the finish line" for Squadron 42, as highlighted by the game's public progress tracker.
The lengthy development path for Star Citizen and Squadron 42 has become a joke in the 12 years since it first became a crowdfunding darling. But it’s not like fans weren’t warned.