The hope from the start has been that Squadron 42 would kick off a whole series of games, much like the 'main series' Wing Commanders back in the day... while the Star Citizen persistent universe would kick off at an unspecified point in the future and continue to evolve in its own way. Once we've built the technology and evolved the world and balanced everything, there's unlimited stories to tell. I know we talked about additional Squadron 42s early on, because we joked about calling them Squadron 43 and Squadron 44 back in the early days
All you're seeing now is that we're trying to figure out the best way to express that. Squadron 43 and Squadron 44 are good joke names, but they don't really make sense... It's more reasonable to brand 'Squadron 42' as a series rather than something like 'Squadron 42 2.' The only real 'change' here is that Behind Enemy Lines isn't a Secret Missions-style mission disk anymore... it's going to be the next part in the saga. And at least some of our backers get a great bonus, an additional AAA single player game because they backed early.
As for estimated hours to complete the game, I can only say... I really hate trying to quantify those kinds of estimates. It's a game with no one way to play it that we haven't finished yet. Is that 20 hours to play straight through? 50 hours to play every branching mission? To bring it back to Wing Commander: knowing the game today, I can finish the Vega campaign in about two hours. But in 1990, when Wing Commander was new, that took me at least a month of hard-fought battles. So if somebody asks me how long it takes to play Wing Commander, what do I say? There's a reason they don't put those kinds of estimates on box copy.
I will say - Squadron 42 is not any smaller than it was the day we set out to make it. Content isn't being cut or subdivided or parceled out for extra revenue or anything like that. If we mentioned 20 hours in one interview and 50 in another it's because someone was having two different thoughts about the same amount of content... it's in no way indicating that we've removed anything from the initial pitch. because we absolutely haven't.
