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Space sim Squadron 42 is "feature-complete" and gunning for Starfield's lunch with massive new video
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this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2023
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No, 10 years since the announcement of their intent to build the game. Then they had to build the company, the engine, and they are building 2 games at once (SQ42 and StarCitizen).
Developing a AAA single player game + an MMO at the same time, with the components working across the 2, and now being at the point where they are feature complete on SQ42, is pretty impressive.
I still kind of doubt it’s going anywhere fast. Because a game with this scope has already signed up for some pretty massive post-launch support. Let’s be generous and say it takes them another 2-3 years to develop this single player and another 5-6 to finish star citizen. That’s very generous.
They started pre-production in 2010. So it’s already been 13 years of development with near unlimited money on SC. So again, add 5 years till a mainstream launch and another 3-5 years of active support and you’ll be well over two decades deep in a single games development. That’s half of someone’s career to develop one game. Now we add another game on top of this.
The other game is admittedly much easier to develop but still it will take massive amounts of support. If Bethesda can’t do it well, why does anyone think this dev can and in such good time? I have my doubts.
googles
Five years ago, this guy tried suing to get his money back when the thing was a third the size it currently is.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/ne5n7b/star-citizen-court-documents-reveal-the-messy-reality-of-crowdfunding-a-dollar200-million-game
So if they still are on the hook to provide all that stuff and many people are in a similar situation to this guy, that's a lot of merch that they gotta produce after they have done the game.
This is what bugs me the most about this whole fiasco. I paid into the original Kickstarter because Wing Commander through Freelancer were my favorite games and I wanted more of that.
The current project, even if we were to VERY charitably call it a game and call it playable, is nothing like Wing Commander or Freelancer.
If they were still making an actual Wing Commander type game after all this time, my copium might still be in full effect. But this current... THING... isn't even the game they promised in the first place. It's so disappointing.
I didn't quote that bit, but that's actually what he was upset about too.
I didn't really enjoy it, but did you play Elite: Dangerous?
And I guess that there's the X series, X4 now, though the focus isn't really dogfighting.
Everspace 2? I disliked one of those, can't remember if that was it, but it is fighter-ish space combat.
There are also atmospheric fighter combat games.
I played Elite for a little bit, maybe a month or two, before it got to the point where it just felt like a job.
I love the X series. I have hundreds of hours in X4. It's definitely my favorite of the bunch.
Everspace 2 was fun, but never hoked me for some reason.
The most "Wing Commander" game in recent memory was Star Wars: Squadrons, IMHO. Shame they decided to make it CoD in space though... I'm not big on the multplayer aspect and the single player campaign was super short.
Starfield was a huge disappointment. etc etc
I believe they said the last expansion for X4 was the last one. Here's hoping there's an X5 coming.
Yeah, it never really clicked for me, and I didn't like the "faux online" aspect either. I bet that it's probably pretty in VR, though.
Ah, okay, I didn't think that that'd be your cup of tea, because while the game does have fighters, it tends to favor large ship combat, and my take is that the dogfighting isn't too elaborate -- like, if you can leverage strafing in X2, the enemy AI isn't all that great at predicting where you'll be. There isn't, I don't know, breaking missile locks or whatever. Though I guess that exploiting dead zones in fields of fire is a thing. And there's a management focus, and the ability to indirectly manage many ships. I hadn't played much of X4 myself, though I did do X3 a fair bit.
Do you enjoy the fleet command aspect of it? There's a game that I recall that felt more like a fleet naval combat simulator in space, not on the first-person dogfighting aspect. Lots of naval warfare-ish jargon, focus on sensor and counter-sensor stuff -- I suspect that people who like something leaning a bit more milsim would like that. It was early access when I played it, but probably enough to have some fun with it. Let me find the name.
googles
Got it. NEBULOUS: Fleet Command.
They flash through a lot of functionality in a few seconds quickly in the demo vids there on steam, but you can see the ship and weapon configuration, fleet and ship commands, system-specific damage control, some of the electronic warfare stuff, things like that.
So, I enjoyed what was there, but I can imagine someone finding the faux-naval jargon a bit opaque. Sort of like operating a naval group, with ships with specialized roles. The graphics are okay, but beauty isn't their goal -- they're trying to do a combat environment in space.
I actually ran across it when looking for a non-space milsim fleet naval combat game, and was pleasantly-surprised.
Yeah, ditto.
I liked it, but then I wanted a Skyrim or Fallout 4 out of it, not a space combat game. Yeah, the space combat there isn't much more than a pretty minigame.
Sorry to bear the bad news, but Elite: Dangerous has abandoned developing any further VR functionality.
To my knowledge VR still works in ship cockpits and is still amazing there, but the last big expansion's big draw added new on foot content that doesn't support VR at all. In VR it displays in headset as a giant 2D screen in front of you, if it chooses to work with the headset at all.
Well to be fair, X4 isn't my favorite of the bunch because of its (lack of) similarity to Wing Commander. It's not really that kind of game. But it is fun and scratches the space economy itch more like a Freelancer or Eve.
I hadn't hard of Nebulous. I see what they're going for graphically (Homeworld style). I'll have to keep an eye on it. But yeah the fleet combat part of X4 never quite got me interested beyond "if I make 100 fighters, I should be able to take out pretty much anything". Controlling large fleets was always a weakness of the game, one of the janky bits. But Building stations, setting up an economy, piracy, and all that stuff is still fun.
Ah, gotcha, fair-enough.
Ah, okay. I was just trying to figure out how it differed from some of the other things you listed, and fleet combat was one. But the economic side is another, and, yeah, I can see the economic side of the X series being appealing if building a big space empire is a goal.
If you're looking for a space economic sim, that's entirely-absent from NEBULOUS, and in fact they even mention that up-front on the product page -- they're going for combat simulation. So it won't fill that slot.
Yeah, probably not my cuppa tea, but I will keep an eye on it. Space ships blowing each other up has potential, even if it's not my favorite style of said activity.
And I bet it releases before Star Citizen for a fraction of the price!