This evening CIG held their Star Citizen holiday live stream and the main event was a showing some footage of the single player Squadron 42.
The video takes viewers through a mission to demonstrate the transition between space combat and ground combat. This was to show how CIG plan on integrating the two and also how they want to tell a story.
The video below lasts for around one hour and it’s a quite drawn out. While this is only a snapshot of what they plan to eventually release, it was sadly a little dull places. Some of the dialogue and voice acting was also bit ropey but we’ll assume some of this is placeholder stuff. At least we hope so.
While it’s lovely to walk around a ship and have NPC’s say “Sir” continuously, you can’t help but want to get to the action quicker. During the scouting segment, once the pilots finally left main ship after some slow corridor walking, it became overly long, and dare I say it, boring.
GIG is obviously aiming for a cinematic quality which is greatly appreciated, but this is game and not a movie and it’s finding the right balance that will be key.
The video was not a great demo of what’s to come, the framerate struggled, the ground combat looked ropey, and it just looked unexciting. A lot of backers will have pumped cash into Star Citizen for Squadron 42, myself included, but while I was impressed by the visuals, I was left disappointed by the gameplay.
There needs to be more work done on refining this small slice we have seen because Squadron 42 is what could save the Star Citizen project if they get it out fast enough.
You can watch the full stream below or just the gameplay segment.
