Squadron 42 Now Has A Steam Page

On Saturday Cloud Imperium Games took a huge step towards legitimacy. The studio's first planned game, Squadron 42, debuted its Steam page 14 years to the day Chris Roberts announced the game to the world at GDC in 2012. The game has been slightly delayed from its planned November 2014 launch but Squadron 42 now has a Steam page.

Most of the world has no clue what Squadron 42 is. And no, Squadron 42 is not the "Ultimate Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything," no matter what CIG may say. But the Steam page does have a description.

Enlist as a rookie in the UEE Navy and step into a cinematic, single-player space adventure where you are at the center of the action. Live, work, and fight alongside your crew, brought to life by an all-star cast, as the story unfolds across fighter cockpits, capital ships, space stations, frontier outposts, and the front lines of a galactic war. Through intense combat, sacrifice, and the choices you make when it matters most, you will earn your place, your rank, and your legacy. You don’t watch the rise of a hero. You become one.

A very generic-sounding game, right? A video naturally appears on the page with some screenshots.

The pretty good trailer should help attract attention, especially with all the stars appearing. The cast would have been much more impressive 10 years ago when the game was originally planned to launch. How much the delay costs in lost sales is something we might find out next year.

Any loss in star power the cast lost probably was made up by the technological advances made in PCs over the last decade. From everything I've gathered Squadron 42 will really benefit from running on high-end PCs. From watching Star Citizen over the years I really don't trust the minimum specifications posted on the Stream page. Also, I think the game still needs optimization. The computers for the event participants in Manchester this past weekend all had 5090 video cards and still encountered issues. 

SQ42 is one of the few games currently on the market I have concerns about my computer running with acceptable performance. I own a machine with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070Ti graphics card with 16 GB of video RAM, an AMD Ryzen 9 7900 X 12-Core processor, 64 GB of DDRS RAM, and 1.8 TB of hard drive storage. I'm just glad that the game is coming out in the first half of next year. I'm afraid what the requirements would rise to if CIG was given 2 more years to develop SQ42.

The surprising thing to me is that the Steam page still lists a release window (Q2 2027) instead of an actual date. I suppose the launch date announcement will kick off the 42 day advertising blitz window mentioned at the event. But for now I have the game wishlisted and followed on Steam. We'll see how things pan out over the next year or so.