CIG showed about an hour gameplay of Squadron 42.

I'm personally much more interested in Star Citizen PU than Squadron 42 but I have to say what they showed was very impressive. It was good to hear that even if the game is more linear experience it is still using sandbox elements which gives players multiple of ways to do the missions.

I think it looks good, but their choice of gameplay to show couldn't have been any more boring, about 10 minutes of excitement and 1 hour of slowly walking/flying around plus some talking.

At first I was more interested in SC too, but then it started to take a turn for too much of an EVE-ish MMO thing and I just don't like that at all, not one bit, so I guess now I'm more interested in SQ42; I just hope it's at least a bit like freelancer, with some freeroam in it (and not just mission to mission)

@onarum: I found their choice of gameplay pretty interesting because it shows player can do things slowly and enjoy the atmosphere. The gameplay includes a new tour in the ship - Idris - which many has waited to see for a while. The ship is not just a level/map but a player flyable ship in a virtual space with a crew with 24/7 schedule, internal and external damage modelling, etc. It is pretty impressive.

It is good they are working on two different ways of enjoy Star Citizen and hopefully at least one of them will please majority of players. If I have understood right Squadron 42 will be in the same universe than Star Citizen meaning they are not building levels or maps for missions, and it that case is would have plenty of room for freeroam what comes to areas.

It seems like it's a game too large and ambitious not to fail in some major way, but everything I've seen of it I am impressed. That said, it has become one of those games that they keep adding to and it just never seems to be finished. I'm just disappointed that I'll probably never play it unless I get a good enough PC to do so. It looks like a really cool sci-fi to get immersed in and spend hours upon hours in. I really appreciated how you transfer in and out of ships for instance. You fly from a planet, to ship, and then instead of a cutscene to get out of the cockpit and VTOL, you actually walk out of the ship by getting out of the seat and opening the door to walk about a large ship. It's small but impressive when considering the scope. It looks very impressive and unique in some important ways. I like that they're talking about ways they can fix a lot of the things we can see are janky. A very good commentary. It seems like a game that could be amazing, but I'm skeptical.

I'm not sure if they are adding any more new big features into Squadron 42. I think Tyler Witkin said a year or so ago that all the episode 1 missions are already playable.

Star Citizen PU is much larger game and it should get new tech and features over whole lifetime to keep it alive just as other MMOs does. I think all the alpha releases shows a steady progress and big improvements over each others. Since they are moving to quarterly releases and planning to get alpha 3.1 for evocati testers in February, I think they should show alpha 3.1 features pretty soon. I would expect at least scanning mechanisms (ships and people) and mining to be included.

It is good to be skeptical with crowdfunded projects and E3 trailers. In openly developed software are in a bit bad situation because developers are expected to give information but in software development you never know if plans needs to be changed.

I found the following article pretty interesting.

"Randall went on to draw a parallel to the film industry, where movies are announced years in advance, and pointed out that transparency like that wouldn’t work in video games. “Games change during development, this is a universal constant no developer would argue with, but toxic culture can’t handle that.”"

Kotaku: Game Designer Says Developers Would Be More Candid If Gamer Culture Wasn't So Toxic

@spacegg: I'm just going off the news I've followed. It hasn't been much because I know it's not a game I will play anytime soon if it releases within the next couple of years I assume. It looks very cool, but I put my excitement in check considering I know I won't be playing it, so I don't keep up on the news much. Also, I didn't necessarily mean anything negative about that. I think it's really cool that (as far as I know) the team making it doesn't have a time limit to work with, so they can work on it leisurely to make the best possible game they can for the people that supported it and just in general. The idea that it's crowdfunded is, at first something to be cautious about, but if a talented team can get behind something and they have enough money put behind the project I think something special can come out of it. I just meant that the scope and the way they want things to be seamless, and as immersive as it can, seem too good to be true for something truly spectacular. It's rare if ever that something like that comes to a full realization. That said, hardware gets more advanced and things can start to really be pushed. It's not likely we'll see Star Citizen on consoles, to say the least; at least not this generation ha ha.

@ntm: It is good idea to go slowly with Star Citizen and Squadron 42. It will definitely take still some time before we have final product to play.

I find crowdfunding interesting topic and very positive thing for gaming in general;

• It has already brought some "dead" genres back alive and give players a bit more control over what games could be done in future.
• It has made development more open. I personally like that we are able to see and even test the development versions, give developers feedback and submit bug reports. But just like in Kotaku article the developers says and what we have seen happening around SC development being open doesn't come for free - unfortunately. I think gaming community has plenty to learn from open source community where testing development versions is normal and instead of whining about bugs, they are being discussed and filed to bug tracking system.

I'm skeptical about all crowdfunded projects I have supported but still be positive in a way I do my best to give teams feedback according to alpha testing. The reality is that software projects fails quite often and games are not expection. This is where games which has been worked behind closed doors wins - we don't even ever hear about them because publisher doesn't make an announcement.

CIG has made several mistakes but in the other hand thinking how complex and ambitious their game is and keeping four studios working with each other seamlessly is not easy for sure, I'm pretty forgiving about the mistakes. But I do understand people are frustrated about delays and changed plans from Kickstarter days.

Luckily the development of Star Citizen PU and Squadron 42 (finally) are pretty open so it is easy to see how the development is doing. Even better is that we are able to test SC PU test versions. Those whose has not supported either of the games I think they should wait and see where they are heading.