Do you think they’re gearing up for a release? Do you think they’re gearing up for another 2 years+ of game development and delays? I personally think it’s kind of weird that they’re able to stay silent for so long. Surely they must be working on something.
To add on to this, they are doing everything the hard way to try to build out a more complete system. This adds a ton of tech debt as the more complicated things get, the harder it is to keep everything working when drastic changes are introduced. It has the benefit of paying attention to all the fine details, but at a cost to how long it takes to develop the game.
Luckily a single player game is much simpler to handle than a multiplayer game, which is why we’ll see more features in Squadron 42 than in Star Citizen. And this is also why we don’t have to worry about how major backend changes (like PES) can affect the game.
To explain this a little better, it’s very helpful to watch a video like this: https://youtu.be/L3Fhed3MtVw where they explain a lot of these tricks that game developers employ.
So just looking at the first example from that video, hands are one of the things that a lot of game devs will use camera angles and such to trick you. In this case they make you think that items are changing hands from one character to the next, but they hide these occurrences from actually appearing on your screen.
That whole video is worth a watch, I’m sure that with Squadron 42 CIG will still take advantage of some tricks like the “loading screen/scenes” as shown there.
Another example (that the video doesn’t go into) is how damage works. In a lot of games, the asset for something like a vehicle getting damaged can get quickly swapped out for a generically damaged one. Think of car doors being pounded in the same exact way no matter what hit you from the side. Or another example is a breaking dinner plate: Instead of implementing a damage system, you can just remove the dinner plate and quickly replace it with a bunch of generically broken shards of a dinner plate.
In Star Citizen (and SQ42), the visual damage is amazing in a way that each individual shot against a vehicle will appear and even cause holes to appear which you can actually see through rather than a simple sticker that’s overlayed on top of the vehicle, or a generically damaged wing.
The hand example you gave is a major reason why I’m even interested in Star Citizen. I’m glad they’re making the best game, not just the easiest one. I’m tired of this trend where audiences lower their standards so developers have an easier life and businesses make more money.