At CitizenCon 2954, Cloud Imperium presented a new demo for the single-player campaign of Star Citizen, Squadron 42. In addition, the devs revealed that the game will be released in 2026. To celebrate this announcement, they also shared a new trailer which you can find below.
Squadron 42 is the single-player story-driven game set in the same universe as Star Citizen. The game will run on StarEngine, and it’s got a bunch of famous actors in it. You’ll see people like Mark Hamill, Gary Oldman, Henry Cavill, Gillian Anderson, and John Rhys-Davis. And there are more actors like Liam Cunningham, Mark Strong, Craig Fairbrass, and Ben Mendelsohn in the game too.
Now as you will see, Squadron 42 still looks great. StarEngine promises to offer a lot of modern-day techniques. For instance, it will feature physically-based atmospheres with multiple light scattering. The devs are using a 64-bit engine that lets you smoothly go from space to the ground without any loading screens. This means you won’t have those annoying loading screens like in Starfield. Cloud Imperium even said that you can explore all the planets without any loading screens or limits.
Cloud Imperium has also claimed that it will be using RTGI (ray-traced global illumination). From what we know, the devs will use RTGI in both Squadron 42 and Star Citizen. And yes, the game will most likely support DLSS, FSR and XeSS.
Back in October 2023, CI shared a really impressive tech demo for StarEngine. I don’t know whether we’ll get another one at this year’s CitizenCon. So, if you haven’t watched it, I strongly suggest doing so. That demo still looks great.
In this one-hour video, we get to see a lot of in-engine cutscenes. And the good news is that these are real-time in-engine cutscenes. However, for some weird reason, there is a lot of tearing. At 16:23, you can also see a bug that changes the face of an NPC. Now that made me laugh. Oh, and the game crashed during CI’s presentation.
Anyway, let’s hope that CI will hit the 2026 deadline. A lot of players have been looking forward to Squadron 42. So, let’s hope that it will be worth the wait.
Enjoy!
UPDATE:
Cloud Imperium has released a direct-feed video for the demo. And, things are looking pretty rough. There are a lot of framerate drops and major stuttering issues (that you will easily notice). Not only that but there are numerous bugs. For instance, there are a lot of flickering lights and shadows. Now I know the game targets a 2026 release date, but things are rough.
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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