Cloud Imperium Games has announced that Staggered Development will affect both Star Citizen and Squadron 42. However, due to the transition to this development model, the Squadron 42 beta start date has been delayed by 12 weeks. Staggered Development involves spreading multiple development teams between different release dates.
This allows you to get into a rhythm where individual teams release major updates every couple of quarters. However, due to the "stepped" approach, players will still receive updates every quarter. Moving development teams to 6-month cycles instead of 3-month cycles ultimately gives more time to more fully implement features and reduce bugs. At least that's what Cloud Imperium claims.
While this all sounds great on paper, Cloud Imperium has now also announced that the Squadron 42 beta testing phase has been delayed by 12 weeks. The developers claim that this step was necessary due to the change in the overall pace in the process of creating the game.
Single-player Squadron 42 beta testing was supposed to start in the second quarter of 2020. However, due to another delay, now we should count on the 3rd quarter. Moreover, the full-fledged launch of the story-driven space adventure will now most likely be postponed to 2021 instead of summer 2020, .
Source: 3dnews.ru