Shocking exactly 4 people on the planet, Squadron 42 might not make it’s just-recently-confirmed-absolutely-rock-solid 2026 release date. 😂

Although I will say that at this point even laughing about it becomes difficult. It’s been so many years, every joke has been made and every laugh has been had.

  • ameancow@lemmy.world
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    12 hours ago

    I love the game’s potential, I will regularly log in just to walk around stations or planets or hang out in my ship and enjoy the aesthetic. I like to fiddle with things and see what’s new. I love the sense of scale and freedom, just knowing at any time you can get up out of your pilot’s seat and open your cargo hatch and yeet yourself out the back just makes me giddy.

    All that said, I grow weary of the endless fuckery and delays and just uninstalled for the dozenth time to let the thing cook longer. The graphics, for all their beauty, require more power than my PC can put out so the frame-rates are almost unplayable in many areas. Quests and missions are still a complete dice-roll if they’re going to work or break at any moment. NPC’s in the ground missions are either dumber than rocks or clip through walls and you can never find them. The map/navigation system on your wrist computer is so janky that I dread having to use it, and that’s after several major overhauls.

    Server meshing is an amazing technology, but you have to have all your servers working, so there is always at least one area of the solar system that just plain doesn’t work. Stations that don’t answer your landing hail, quest locations that don’t work, lagged out doors and ship systems.

    The universe truly feels more vast than any other game, ever, because you feel like a tiny human in a huge expanse. Too bad that’s about it most of the time, there’s no sense of permanence, no bases you can build, no personalization you can do to your own apartment, no storage locker in your own room like every other game ever made, everything including accessing your personal gear has to be done through kiosks in lobbies. The lack of personal items and survival components other than eating and drinking once in a while leave a good 80% of every station or base useless.

    Sure you can buy a few cheap ass toys to put in your cockpit, but since most likely your game will crash and you will have to file a claim on your ship, you will hardly want to do this more than once.

    Ship interiors feel real, it’s highly convincing. It’s just too bad that they’re mostly useless. Other than moving cargo around a cargo hold, there’s very little else you can do on a ship.

    And you know what… I would be okay with all of these shortcomings IF THE GAME HAD GOOD CONTROLS. Seriously, look at a game like SCUM, it’s a survival PvP MMO where the gameplay is so detailed you need to manage your protein levels to build muscle and you have to poop regularly, you can even die of a heart-attack. You can load your magazines with several types of bullets and it will fire them in order. You can adjust how deep of a crouch you’re in and you can craft a vast array of useful items to survive and fight.

    And it does it all smoothly. Sure it takes getting used to, but it’s never tedious. You never fall through the floor. You never have to fiddle with a door panel, you don’t have to make sure you point your cursor to just the exact position to open a hatch, you can actually trust the line-of-sight from a hostile mech so you can avoid it.

    And that’s a game that’s far, far from perfect but they make a better gameplay experience than Star Citizen which has made exponentially more money from its players.

    I will still keep trying it out from time to time, but I really, really hope some new game comes along and takes all the best lessons from SC and makes a more polished game experience that keeps the scale and detail and freedom but gives you things to do.

    (No, I know about No Man’s Sky, it’s like a muppet/minecraft version of a space sim and too silly and unrealistic, totally different experience.)

  • HazardousBanjo@lemmy.world
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    15 hours ago

    Star Citizen may very well be the single greatest argument for Scrum Masters on Dev teams.

    Talk about infinite scope, holy shit.

    • sheogorath@lemmy.world
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      12 hours ago

      Competent Scrum Masters, 95% of the Scrum project that I’ve been part of caught on fire is because of an ass PO and an incompetent SM who can’t rein in the PO.

  • chunes@lemmy.world
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    16 hours ago

    Meanwhile I’ve done five or six playthroughs of Freelancer while this game has been in development and had more fun than I’ll ever have with Star Citizen.

    • ms.lane@lemmy.world
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      13 hours ago

      Just a few more jpegs and they’ll have the money to finish it!

      I do remember them spending a lot of money on Star-Trek style doors for the their HQ and now they’re moving, so I guess that was money well spent.

  • ZoteTheMighty@lemmy.zip
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    20 hours ago

    After much careful reflection on this news, here is my response: HAHAHAHAHHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHA!

    I think I could have written this headline 6 years ago.

      • P03 Locke@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        17 hours ago

        They may have been the first, but the sheer amount of failed disaster projects on Kickstarter, Paetron, wherever is staggering.

        Some of them end up being “successful” failures, just stringing their patrons along on hopes and dreams and donations until the well dries up. Star Citizen is definitely the most successful venture of its sort, but only because it’s the highest profile with a bunch of known talent in the mix.

        • vaultdweller013@sh.itjust.works
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          7 hours ago

          Just to give a more shit show example there’s also Yandere Sim. Theres so much to that shit show that I can’t even get into, mostly cause I’m fucked up on Tylenol. Point is there are multiple documentaries on YouTube about how that fucker just kept stringing folks along and self sabotageing for years.

    • pyre@lemmy.world
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      21 hours ago

      damn that’s good, we should have been using it for this game particularly but also pretty much every pvp survival game as well.

      • 🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 🇮 @pawb.social
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        16 hours ago

        My biggest problem with survival crafting games is the balance is always horrendously unfair and is just irritating as fuck, or there isn’t even anything to survive against because they didnt put any kind of antagonists in the game so the building part is completely aesthetic.

        The PvP focused ones do both at once! There are no enemy NPCs, and the balance between the human players is stupid AF.

  • BeeegScaaawyCripple@lemmy.world
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    23 hours ago

    It’s been in development for 15 years. Duke Nukem whatever was only in dev hell for 14. Y’all ever gonna admit you got scammed?

    • zqps@sh.itjust.works
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      6 hours ago

      You can say it’s a bad deal, they are mismanaging the project etc. but calling it a scam is just hyperbole.

    • BlameTheAntifa@lemmy.world
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      20 hours ago

      I got enough enjoyment out of it for what little I spent a lifetime ago. I go see whats new every couple years, which is usually quite a lot. The game is still a disaster, but it’s a strangely interesting disaster.

    • brsrklf@jlai.lu
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      19 hours ago

      It’s a bit fun to imagine that. People of the future playing a game that would be sci-fi to us, but really to them it’s like Oregon Trail.

  • Gerudo@lemmy.zip
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    1 day ago

    You know, when they mentioned 8k textures 10 years ago, I laughed because it was so overshooting gaming standards that it was laughable. Now I’m think they will be just on track when it actually launches.

    • brsrklf@jlai.lu
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      1 day ago

      By the time they launch, they’ll have a game with 8k textures and everyone else will be releasing games for Star Trek’s holodeck.

  • IvyisAngy@lemmy.world
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    23 hours ago

    I’ve spent hardly any money on that game. I did the first 20 bucks. Then a 15 to get a tiny mining ship to help get in-game money. But I wouldn’t have even gotten it if it wasn’t for my partner REALLY liking the “game.”

    I might like it too… if it actually worked and every bug I’ve ever encountered being perfect for setting all my progress to zero or even backwards. Because you have to buy supplies to do a mission.

    So fuck that. I’m not playing it until I can make progress- which will be never.

  • 9point6@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    At this point, I’m just looking at all this as an interesting social experiment on sunk cost fallacy

    I wonder how long they can go without delivering on anything

    • Carighan Maconar@piefed.worldOP
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      1 day ago

      I think the fact that they are very very glacially slowly delivering on things at least, all the while self-discovering software development instead of learning it, that aggravates me even more. Bloober Team could finish this faster and more competently than these clowns…

      • ripcord@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        Glacially is OVERstating how much and how quickly.

        Especially compared to their original predictions.

        • azertyfun@sh.itjust.works
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          17 hours ago

          It’s not even about predictions or estimations - everything’s so many years late everyone stopped counting. They just… don’t seem to understand “scoping”? The pitch is “ultra-realistic life-size universe sandbox simulation” and they keep hitting walls because they’re using tech that’s completely inadequate for the task at hand but they won’t let that deter them. They’ve probably reimplemented every subsystem of the Crysis 3 engine a dozen times by now, and it’s still not anywhere near capable of achieving even a tenth of their ambitions. Fuck, they just very recently got their server meshing thing barely working after like a decade of development (at the cost of rewriting everything again of course).

          It’s like watching a team raising billions to build the Burj Khalifa but all they have is a bunch of dry sand and some spoons. Deadlines aren’t really the issue.

    • reksas@sopuli.xyz
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      1 day ago

      well, they are still slowly actually adding more stuff to the game. I dont think they intend to scam anyone since they occasionally allow people to play the game for free and without that i would have been inclined to buy it many times now to see what kind of game it is (and would have felt scammed). Now i just keep waiting for them to add enough stuff for the game to be worth getting, but after hearing they might add somekind of p2w shop crap i think i might just forget about the whole thing if it really bad.

      Its too bad if the game collapses at some point since it really has promise. I resent them for first fucking around with the money they were given and making it all seem like a scam even when there is potential for it to not be.

      • homoludens@feddit.org
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        1 day ago

        Its too bad if the game collapses at some point since it really has promise.

        No one denies the game has promise. The problem is that it does not have much else. Having ideas is the easy part in game development.

        • reksas@sopuli.xyz
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          1 day ago

          the promise i see comes from things that are actually in the game. Though it still needs more to be worthwhile, so i’m not risking my money yet. They just need to add more fun things to do and fix the problems with what they already have and it would already be kind of ok, provided they keep adding stuff.

          • Greddan@feddit.org
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            1 day ago

            The times I’ve had with this game over the years I feel is well worth the cost of dinner at an fairly upscale restaurant or a night out drinking.