My notes on the first 10 minutes of the video:

• They were not allowed to run any overlays or ‘r_displayinfo 3’
• The goal is to allow the game to run well on only 8GB of VRAM
• The game settings they ran on were maxed with no upscaling
• Game ran well. Only minor hiccups occurred during cutscenes (Kingship weapon + heavy particle effects
• Cutscenes for the prologue were deliberately not skippable for their session because they wanted everyone to see the differences.
• The prologue has had a lot of work from when we last saw it.
• There were some bugs that halted his progression and required reloading the game several times.
• They were able to play through Ch 0 (prologue, Ch1, and then they skipped ahead to Ch 5.
• per Dave Haddock (Lead Writer/Narrative Director) there won’t be any cliffhangers between Sq42 and future episodes. “It’s an entirely contained, perfectly wrapped hero story”.
• There are 4 difficulty settings:
  • Rookie
  • Wingman
  • Ace
  • Legatus (Locked at first or maybe it just wasn’t ready).
• Difficulty could be adjusted seperately for FPS and Flight.
• Usual accessibility options:
  • colorblind modes
  • crosshair, text, size, color controls.
• Translations were already available - Some others playing there had French and German subtitles enabled.
• Mixed FOV settings for both FPS and Flight.
• There is controller support, and 3 different levels of aim assist.
• Advanced Camera options in Star Citizen are also available in Sq 42.
• Maelstrom looks fantastic. It really slices bits off in a way that doesn’t feel like pre-selected slice points.
• One bug possibly related to maelstrom in his play through was that his ship (Blade) was disabled and he was unable to progress until his ship eventually drifted the 5km required to proceed to the next part.
• Repeated headshots on an enemy would crack open/pop off their helmet. A skill that’s basically required to get through the Ace mode difficulty.
• Mobiglass is much cleaner than in SC.
  • There are 99 collectibles of various types (ship models, trading cards, plushies).
• 4 main attributes that can be increased:
  • Fitness (increased by high G maneuvres and running)
  • Reflexes (increased by FPS takedowns and aimed shots)
  • Fortitude (increased by taking hits and takedowns)
  • Strength (increased by running, dumbbell workouts, vaulting, and mantling)
• Increasing attributes doesn’t provide major bonuses, but it’s still rewarding to increase them.

I played a bit yesterday as well. The only issue was that the ASOPs and elevators to hangars around New Babbage weren’t working. I just avoided New Babbage and everything else went well.

There are a lot of “Event Groups” going around as well. I ended up in a group of ~60 players with everyone running various missions and sharing them just before turn in.

It was also great that one of the event missions allows anyone to get a free rental on the Constellation Mk 5.

Alright, 20hrs later and additional stats are now available for the wishlist: Currently sitting at rank 429 with18,002 players wishlisted. https://steamdb.info/app/4045720/charts/

I’m expecting Summer of next year, but, yeah, it’s officially up on Steam now to be wishlisted.

I’m curious to see how quickly this moves up in the whishlisted ranks (currently ranked #3555).

The trailer is having issues loading for me on the page. Maybe too many people trying to watch it at once?

Luckily it can also be watched here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTHEkEZhMgM

The announcement doesn’t affect hardware giveaways for the Sabre Raven. It’s limited to the Intel Optane SSD promotion and AMD R9/R7 GPU promotion where anyone could go out and buy the hardware to get a code (at the time).

Edit: Although it’s possible DaPoets used a code from the SSD promotion, I find it more likely that this code came from CIG specifically for the giveaway… I’ll try to remember to ask him the next time I run into him at a Bar Citizen/CitizenCon.

Edit2: Nah, it’s totally possible that the code there did originate from the SSD promotion. That being said, this announcement doesn’t prevent CIG from generating new codes and renewing the promotion with Intel in a different way.

These are specifically for hardware promotional codes. In the case of the Sabre Raven it would be from the Intel Optane SSD. The promotion for this ended in 2018. https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000059982/memory-and-storage/client-ssds.html

The Mustang Omega:

The Sabre Raven:

He got a lot of criticism for the last video (SCL Gamedev: Siege of Orison). He might be trying to take a break from the spotlight to let things cool down.

This is also a brand new series, so they might be trying to let someone else take charge of this series and give Jared a bit of a break.

Yeah, we definitely should have been told sooner. Especially once Rockstar re-confirmed the release date in June 2026.

It is worth pointing out that the GTA VI release date was delayed twice. Originally it was set to release sometime in 2025 (announced in Dec 2023). In May 2025 they announced a delay with a release date of May 26, 2026. Then in November of 2025 they delayed again with a release date of Nov 19, 2026. I’m sure CIG was hoping for GTA VI to be delayed again.

Sounds like it’s delayed until Summer of 2027, mostly blaming GTA 6.

They will at least open it up so that a small group of players can test it out, and it sounds like we’ll get the official release date locked in soon after that:

We are allowing a small number of original backers and long-time Star Citizen content creators an opportunity to play Squadron 42 this October 9th and 10th. We’ll be making further announcements about our release plans during this time and a specific release date shortly afterwards.

Not really, the whole article is worth a read. Here’s the next section (and there’s a lot more after that):

Putting It Into Practice with Alpha 4.10

Our focus has been on the following core areas:

• AI
• Docking & Refuelling
• Economy & General Exploits
• First Hour Quality of Life
• Freight Elevators
• Hangars & ASOP
• Inventory
• Login & Connection Errors
• Quantum Travel & Starmap
• Ship Loss

Twice a week, QA, Production, Player Experience, and Community teams come together to look at the issues having the biggest impact on players. We weigh what we’re seeing internally against your Issue Council reports, looking at how often an issue is reported, how many players it affects, how long it’s been around, and how severely it impacts gameplay. We pull those factors together into what we call an “Impact Score,” which helps us decide what needs our attention most.

Your Issue Council reports play a significant role in that. In several cases, detailed reproduction steps, supporting information, and video evidence have helped us get from knowing something is broken to understanding why it’s broken - and that makes a huge difference for getting a fix.

With Alpha 4.10, we can start to see the results of that approach.

At the time of writing, Alpha 4.10 has reached 1,239 bug fixes submitted over its release cycle, compared with 295 in Alpha 4.9. Those numbers naturally vary depending on the size and scope of each patch, and 4.10 is a significantly larger release with more content, which means more issues to identify and resolve.

What matters more is the context here though. Of those fixes, 479 addressed bugs that were already present in Alpha 4.9 or earlier. That’s a more useful measure of the progress we’re making toward improving the existing Live experience, rather than simply counting issues discovered and fixed while developing new content.

We’ve also seen a significant improvement in client performance. Over the last few months, new content without corresponding performance improvements had contributed to a steady decline, with Instancing and Siege of Orison making that gap particularly apparent. That led to a coordinated effort across Engine, Physics, AI, Gameplay, Rendering, and Content to address some of the worst performance offenders.

Across all hardware configurations, measured in equally populated Landing Zones between Alpha 4.9 and Alpha 4.10, average client FPS has improved by 15.5%. Your next Lorville run should show a noticeable improvement!

I jumped in already. It was actually running far better than I was expecting. I went straight to Siege of Orison (a quick solo run). Enemies were very reactive and deadly if I wasn’t cautious.

Performance-wise the FPS seemed better.

Inventory worked better than 4.9 as well, I could drag attachments to weapons from the main inventory view without issues. The only issue here was, at one point, with putting some tea into my hand to drink. Either right clicking and “carry” worked or just dragging it to my hand worked, so it was only a momentary hiccup for a few seconds.

Ships spawned fine for me, I didn’t notice anyone in chat complaining about any major issues (but I wasn’t paying too much attention once I jumped into Siege).

You’re absolutely right, I should have just followed Hitchens’s razor from the start:

What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.

Their financials are more public than many companies, you can dig through them yourself if you suspect something.

They summarize everything from their most recent financial statements here.

Or you can review everything in much more detail with what they submitted to the UK here.

Direct link to the most recent 51 page document here.

As far as fake ships, most of the announced ships have already been released and are playable today. They’re continuing to release new major updates a few times a year that anyone can play. So, I’m not sure what you mean by “no output”.

The single player game (Squadron 42) is supposed to release this year. Monthly newsletters still state this, but they haven’t locked in a release date for it yet. I wouldn’t be surprised if they pushed it back to next year.

They showed off over an hour’s worth of gameplay footage for the first mission recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1H-0x4xk2Xk

The Star Citizen 1.0 release date won’t be for at least a few more years (I would guess 5 years if they stick with their currently projected release items).

On the plus side, the game is in a much better state than where it was 2 years ago. Server crashes (30k’s) are practically non-existant. We have fauna in game now. There are some “boss fights” and raid-like gameplay. NPCs don’t T-pose all over the place. NPCs can be very reactive (if you find a good server). There can be ~700+ players flying around across the 3 solar systems at the moment. VR support has been added. However, the learning curve is still heavily geared towards learning the workarounds to common bugs.

There’s always controversy for one reason or another. My biggest recommendation is to avoid grinding for anything in this game. Just play to have fun.

Interesting, I’ve never heard the “front for some government op” angle. Care to explain some more?

Or, put simply: launching a major patch and running a wider Free Fly in the same week… we’re not going to do that.

Well, it’s good to see that they’re trying to handle the inevitable fires before the next free fly.

Day 27: I have finally earned their trust with an “abandoned” 890J that my crew was able to repair and show off.

The whales are planning to join us on a tour around Crusader tomorrow.

They suspect nothing.

I noticed that they didn’t make any mention of a reputation system. In my opinion integrating a reputation system (similar to what EVE Online has) would be useful for all things party/communication related.

For instance, in EVE Online reputation can be assigned at different levels:

• NPC Factions
• NPC Corporations
• Player Corporations
• alliances between corporations
• Your personally assigned reputation to others

So, I can see how my organization/alliance has rated individuals and make informed decisions based on that. This makes it relatively easy to identify which players would be hostile, friendly, or neutral in certain lawless areas.

Although, it could be argued that an org level reputation system would splinter players into territorial groups and make it harder to find random groups to join up with. Maybe that’s a part of what can make EVE Online so toxic compared to other games.