First Info Drop from the #Squadron42 interviews. Catch all interviews in the comments below - Squadron 42 plays leaps and bounds better than Star Citizen. - Ship speeds have increased back to 700+ normal and 1000+ afterburner. - The dialogue system has folks cagey; it sounds like there's been some work on slightly branching conversations sometimes. - Performance was very, very solid. Of 12 interviews, there were only a few crashes and rarely dropped frames. - There were several progress-breaking bugs that required checkpoint restarts from different testers. - (Relevant to above) At least some computers had 5090s in them. - Mark Hamill was there and met attendees. - There are potentially up to 150 attendees, with 1 of 2 groups being described as "around 60 people". Not all content creators. - A chunk of the playtest was the prologue, which made things feel slow and exposition-heavy. A few players reported just getting into things towards the end of their time in a mission later in the game. - FPS combat and NPC AI surprised basically everybody I talked to. One even compared to Battlefield 6 - Enemies flank, reposition, communicate, throw grenades to flush you out, and revive each other. - Maelstrom exceeded expectations, with ships and armor disintegrating as they are shot, even with helmets described as getting chipped away. - Player skills are alive and well - GTA San Andreas style - you can lift at the gym on the Idris to increase stamina, for example. - With things like no Master Modes, and other tweaks (including control changes), several reported flight feeling quite different from Star Citizen. - I asked for scores 0 - 100. They all landed 80–95, averaging around 88. - Genuine disagreement on whether it could have shipped in November, but the majority conclude that, if this is the most polished part of the game, it would indicate it was not ready to ship this holiday season. More to come tomorrow, and a full summary here late next week! Have a great weekend :D Thank you to all who participated <3