Star Citizen dev working on a preview of a mock-up of a work-in-progress roadmap for Squadron 42

Star Citizen developer CIG is struggling to put together a roadmap for the long-in-development Squadron 42 story campaign.

Motivated by a Reddit post from disgruntled Star Citizen backers, developer Cloud Imperium has responded to fan requests regarding more regular updates about Squadron 42.

Squadron 42 is the single-player, A-lister-star-lead story campaign, which – like the main game – was announced years ago but has yet to be finished. The most recent development roadmap had the Squadron 42 beta pegged for the third quarter of this year.

In March, following a lack of regular updates, CIG told players it will share more Squadron 42 news as part of its various developer updates and AMAs, but the developer only included some updates in newsletters sent to backers, not the wider community. The general silence on this part of the game compared to the rest made fans uneasy.

This week’s developer response, the team’s way of assuaging concerns, is quite a thing to behold. Bordering on parody, the blog post is very detailed but doesn’t end up saying much. The post effectively boils down to revealing a four-step process that’s meant to lead into the formation of the actual updated roadmap. Sort of like roadmaps for the roadmap.

In it, CIG explains that it had originally intended to produce a new show called The Briefing Room, that would be quick to produce and offer an efficient way of updating players on Squadron 42 progress.

“We planned for this to be a semi-regular show, with its cadence depending on how well the content was received and how disruptive (or not) this first episode would be to our dev team,” the post reads.

Unfortunately – or perhaps ironically – the curse of feature creep caught up with The Briefing Room before the first episode even debuted, causing the team to reexamine the entire presentation, resulting in that delay.

“What we discovered after the whole piece was finished and getting ready for publish was that our approach resulted in an underwhelming show,” it went on.

“Not only did the episode have major audio issues due to [working from home] recording, but it lacked visuals to support the talking, and we truly prefer to show rather than tell. Ultimately, we decided that it wasn’t good enough to show, even for a ‘scrappy’ video that was not meant to be a marketing sizzle trailer.”

That video is still being worked on, and CIG reckons it will drop “in the next few weeks.” The roadmap, too, is being updated to reflect the current schedule but it won’t simply be published at some point. Instead, CIG plans to release several communications that culminate with the reveal of the full roadmap.

• Give an explanation of the goals of our new Roadmap and what to expect from it.
• Show a rough mockup of the proposed new Roadmap.
• Share a work in progress version of the Roadmap for at least one of our core teams.
• And then finally transition to this new Roadmap.

Squadron 42 was originally set for release in 2016.

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