Star Citizen is a game of many parts. Rather than focus on a single core concept Star Citizen is all about choice. You can go anywhere. You can do anything. A concept as sprawling as this needs something to rein it in a little though, which is where Squadron 42 comes in. For the legions of Wing Commander fans out there, Squadron 42 is Star Citizen.

Essentially it’s the single-player component of Star Citizen, and we were itching to drill down to the core of what this module is when we had a chat with Foundry 42 director Erin Roberts. While Star Citizen basically exists in a persistent universe, Squadron 42 is going to be the single-player core that offers a mammoth campaign for old-school space shooter fans to get involved with.

Access to Squadron 42 comes bundled with a Star Citizen pledge right now, if you splash out for a ship now then you'll be able to grab Squadron 42 when it arrives next Summer. “Right now if you paid $40 that gets you the hangar and the basic ship," Roberts says. "You can go and play the Arena Commander dogfighting module right now and you'll also be able to play Squadron 42 when it's out.”

In terms of the amount of work that goes into a Star Citizen module like Squadron 42, there is a team of around 80 based in the UK beavering away on it at Foundry 42. This is just a fraction of Cloud Imperium Games’ five studios spread across the UK, the United States, and Canada. Each studio is responsible for a different aspect of what has become a sprawling title, and the onus of campaign creation falls on the team at Foundry 42, who also work on the aforementioned Arena Commander dogfighting module, which is already live. “A lot of the work we've done on Arena Commander carries straight over to Squadron 42 so it makes a lot of sense for us to work on both,” explained Roberts.

“So, Squadron 42 is basically the next Wing Commander in terms of the big, single-player experience,” Roberts continued. “I was out in Germany for Gamescom 2014 meeting a bunch of backers and it was amazing how many people came up and said they'd bought in to Star Citizen specifically for Squadron 42. They said the persistent universe is great but what they really want is Squadron 42, because it's the next big AAA Wing Commander title.

“It's basically a single-player story taking place just before the persistent universe starts. You are recruited into the military and you do a massive military campaign, and then when you finish the campaign and you muster out, you then go out into the persistent universe and start your online life.”

It’s a fully-rounded single-player campaign within a multiplayer experience essentially, but Roberts was quick to denounce a focus on one aspect over the other, saying “You don't have to do Squadron 42. You can go out into the persistent universe and not do it, but the timeline is designed in a way that Squadron 42 comes first.”

Progression in Squadron 42 comes through a number of story-based based missions, and throughout the campaign players will rank up and earn a number of benefits that transfer over to the persistent universe, including any credits you earn. Any contacts you meet within Squadron 42’s story mode you’ll be able to go out and find within the open-world, and having already made trade deals with them will be good to go for some exclusive items.

At one point we got a look around one of Foundry 42's early missions, where players are tasked with defending a mining base from an enemy onslaught. Lead environmental artist Ian Leyland introduced us to the gigantic Shubin Mining Base, which comes in at around 6km long. At the time we saw it Shubin was nearing greybox complete stage, which is almost all intended geometry place in, but no textures on any of the objects.

The sense of scale is unprecedented, and Leyland took us on a tour of the gigantic mining station that was created in meticulous detail despite its size. "Shubin's overall design is quite large, so you'll be dogfighting in and around it," explained Leyland. "It hasn't got engines so it won't be flying anywhere, it would have been made on site out of prefabricated components.

"For our missions one of the things that we wanted was to be able to fly in and around the environments, so you'll see these little nooks and crannies that you'll be able to fly through, with little trenches which, with our advanced AI, should prove pretty exhilarating. When you get on the six of an enemy fighter they'll try and lose you through narrow gaps and trenches."

Throughout the battle Shubin will steadily get more beat up, what starts off as a pristine space destroyed soon gets battered by laser fire. Depending on how successfully players defend the ship in the mission it could be a bit of a wreck after, with blown fuel tanks and destroyed gun turrets.

Perhaps most astonishing about the scale is that after high-tailing it around in a spaceship you can actually land on the station itself and walk about on it. "You'll be able to get out and go inside it and really get the scale of the structure you've been flying around," Leyland said with a grin. "We've got a first-person level of detail on a huge kilometre space station, which proved to be quite a technical challenge. Imagine the level of fidelity that you'd see in a Crysis game, but obviously you're rendering that and a 6km space station. Also this takes place in and around a fully volumetric nebular cloud, so we've got a fair amount of technical issues to figure out, but we're confident."

Land on the ship itself and it's set to be hubbub of activity, filled with AI walking about and ships landing, which Leyland believes encourages exploration. In fact all of the single-player locations have been built with the MMO side in mind, so "when you play Squadron 42 you'll see that it'll take place in areas in the persistent universe and then when you go back and see it you'll be like "Oh I was there before!""

Despite the sheer amount of time and effort that goes into each location through the campaign, anyone worried that Star Citizen would be left wanting when it comes to single-player needn’t worry, Squadron 42 will contain between 50-100 hours of gameplay. In fact Erin claims “the on-foot first-person shooter segments alone are the size of any FPS game out there, and that doesn't include the space combat sections.”

It sounds like a mammoth task Foundry 42 has on its hands and it will surely be fascinating to see how things play out over the next year or so. The first and second parts of Squadron 42's five-part run should be arriving around the middle of 2015, with parts 3 and 4 set to follow in 2016.

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