With 2025 coming to an end, Star Citizen and Squadron 42 developer Cloud Imperium Games has provided an update on the development of both titles through a new Letter From the Chairman post by creator Chris Roberts. In his post, Roberts reflected on the number of updates that were made to the alpha builds of Star Citizen throughout the year, while also confirming that all chapters of Squadron 42 are now playable.
Roberts also noted that Squadron 42 measures in at over 40 hours in length, and that the developers are now working on “remaining polish, optimization, and bug fixing.” He also wrote about how Cloud Imperium Games had worked throughout 2025 to build on the development progress it had made on Squadron 42 back in 2024, with a focus on “bringing the game to content complete and closing out remaining core tasks in preparation for Beta.”
“A big part of what makes this possible is the technology we’ve built at CIG over many years,” wrote Roberts. “The ability to move seamlessly from on foot, into a vehicle you can fly and move around inside, down to a planet or across star systems, all without loading screens, creates a level of immersion that’s very difficult to replicate. That combination of close-up interaction and galactic scale is at the core of what will make Squadron 42 so unique.”
“Equally important is the quality of the content itself. From writing and performance capture to characters, environments, ships, lighting, sound, cinematics, and design, the level of care across the entire game is something I’m incredibly proud of. Combined with deeply interactive systems, it creates an experience that pulls you into the world and keeps you there.”
As for Star Citizen, Roberts also wrote about a recently-released experimental update released for the game’s Alpha 4.5 build which brings in support for VR headsets. He noted that this “Christmas Surprise” originally started as a passion project and started getting the attention of developers as well as fans of Star Citizen.
As part of this VR mode, “almost everything” has been physicalized, which means that it can be interacted with by players with their own hands regardless of whether they are playing in first or third-person views. The VR mode, he noted, also helps further justify the work that Cloud Imperium Games has put into detailing its various environments, props, ships and gear, since players can now experience these things at true scale. The VR mode is still considered “an early and experimental step,” however, and the developers are still working on more ways to improve it.
Looking to the future, the studio plans on bringing in a number of improvements to the technology it has already introduced to Star Citizen and Squadron 42. Among these making Server Meshing—first introduced to Star Citizen through an update earlier this year, allowing the server meshes to automatically reconfigure themselves in real-time based on player activity and server load. There will also be more in-game content introduced over the next year to Star Citizen’s alpha. Squadron 42, on the other hand, is currently moving towards its Beta release. However, Cloud Imperium Games hasn’t confirmed when this Beta release is slated to happen.
