Star Citizen Live: Arena Reborn, Part Three

Oh, yeah. Well, and I mean, private lobbies is something that really hurt my heart from the standpoint of I was running the team when we had to remove them. And it wasn't something that we actually removed. It was we had changed over some details that Duncan will probably get into, some details with the lobby system so that we couldn't continue to support the private matches. Now, it was always the thing was next quarter, we'll bring it back. Next quarter, we'll bring it back. Next quarter, we'll bring it back. And it was always something got, the resource got taken, something got missed or whatever. So finally, with a little bit of collaboration with our new friends at Turbulent, we've been able to bring back online private lobbies. So Duncan, do you want to talk any more about that? Maybe some details over why it went away?

Yeah, so it went away essentially because we did that big refactor where we got the friends and party systems to the new system that we've got that you're using in the PU now. And that just simply wasn't compatible with what we had in Arena Commander. So the option at the time was we delay this or we shut down private lobbies for now and we revisit it for the next thing. And as Sean says, priorities got shifted, people get moved on to different things and it just kept getting pushed out. Now, thankfully, we're working on it. And we didn't want to just bring them back. We want to do better with them. We want to give more. So private lobbies aren't called private lobbies anymore. They're called custom matches. And custom matches leans into you'll be able to customize more things about it. And we've got so much more planned for it. For now, we're getting what was old back with private lobbies. But we've got so many ideas, so much requests from the community for what we can add there as well.

Yeah, so this leans into the whole "we want to do better with the private matches." So the almost obvious thing is letting you arrange your teams beforehand. So we've got the idea of you've got a party leader, you've got moderators that can help switch people between teams and whatever. And then you've obviously got the members that join. And then for right now, we've got that team organization. And we're hoping to get some custom settings in and expand upon that. But yeah, bringing back org content to private matches is such a big thing for us because we knew how much orgs used it. We saw the weekly posts on Spectrum like, hey, we're running an org event. Who wants to join? And as soon as the private lobbies went down, that went away. And I'd get pinged constantly about, hey, when are we getting them back for that specific use? And we really want to start accommodating that again.

Yeah, because basically the competitive scene basically shut down without private matches, without being able to customize the match parameters. And it's something that we always want them to be able to have within AC, because ultimately the PU is a multiplayer experience. AC is played best in multiplayer with friends, and we want that to be as easy as possible. And honestly, being able to set up your own little scenarios, I think that's really cool.

So there's actually a lot to this question. Now, right now, behind the scenes, we do have, there is a ranking. And behind the scenes, it works here and there, but it's really not as simple as just a single value. We've come a long way in matchmakers in the game industry overall, where it's got to be region-dependent, it's got to be skill-dependent, it's got to be time-dependent. There's so many different angles of matchmaking. Sort of with that, Duncan, do you want to talk a little bit about what we're going to do for these guys?

Yeah, so as you guys know, we have the leaderboards that are currently online and they haven't really been representative of, well, leaderboards for a while now. The algorithm behind them broke. People have found many exploits behind them. So we want to completely rework those at the same time as doing this proper matchmaking. And that matchmaking is the thing that will have to come later because it needs more help from Turbulent on the online side. But the competitive community in Arena Commander and Star Marine is so passionate, I'll say, about leaderboards and that matchmaking behind it. And we really want to hone in on that and especially push Squadron Battle and Duel to be our primary competitive modes because we think those better reflect those as well.

Yeah, so we have a lot of ideas. We had a brainstorm session where we had so many ideas of different ways to reward people. And right now, we're going with the simple wins. So we're keeping it simple with Spectrum badges because they're fairly easy to get. But we've got some more, I would say, challenges coming up, which we're hoping will have better rewards. It's more than just a Spectrum badge. We're talking with PU teams, the Spectrum teams, and seeing what more we can give that's got a little bit more flair to it. And even within Arena Commander itself, we want to reward people with stuff in-house to Arena Commander. So Arena Commander actually supports skins and all this stuff. So we're hoping to get those as rewards eventually.

Yeah, so to piggyback off that, the questions in regards to some of the matchmaking, ELO ranking, as well as this are all related. What this has to do with is some level of progression within Arena Commander, a reason to play this. And a lot of us, this generation of gaming or before, we kind of need some progression. You need some level of a little bit of persistence and a little bit of progression within each one of your game modes, so that you kind of feel like there's the reason to keep logging in and to keep playing it. And we want to have all of those things within Arena Commander. And it's nice because we have an entire game of content to pull from. And a lot of these are the same conversations that we had during times of when Firesprite was working on Arena Commander. It was all the same sort of progression that we'd like to still put in place here. But we've got to get all the fundamentals, just like we talked about, in place first, which is the badges, the experimental modes, and private matches. And now that we've got that kind of stuff, now we start making more reasons for the players to be there and a little bit more driving the engagement, if that makes some sense.

I think it would be a pretty obvious choice to have a special paint or whatnot that says "I kicked ass in Arena Commander," and you get it through earning that.

Well, it's even further, because what Chris wants, and definitely something we've talked about at length before, is the connection between Arena Commander and the Persistent Universe. Because for a long time, we've had the sim pods; the sim pods were in the hangars. We want them in the Persistent Universe. We want it so that they can go from the Persistent Universe, jump into a sim pod, be in Arena Commander. You're in this simulation that we talk about all the time. But we don't want that to be meaningless. We don't want you just to leave and go to a different sort of game. Why not be progressing Arena Commander reputation? Why not be progressing some level of persistency within the PU so that all the stuff you're doing in Arena Commander is actually benefiting you in the PU or vice versa? What about things happening in the PU benefiting you in Arena Commander? What about ships you own benefiting you in Arena Commander? So there's so many layers of connection that can be made once that progression and persistence, I guess, and I hate using the word persistence, but once some score persistence is in place, because the persistence I'm talking about is not the Persistent Universe. This is just keeping a score.

Yes. I want to make that very clear that yes, we do want spectator modes. And I'm going to go off on a little bit of a diatribe as I do, because spectators to me in Star Citizen and in Arena Commander itself are more like newscasters is what I always saw this as. I always saw this as a newscaster role, as a reputation or something you could do where there was this idea of always being able to record things that were happening in the Persistent Universe. And I think you've heard this pitch from me before, Jared. Where you would go in as a newscaster, you'd want to put "press" on the side of your ship and all these kinds of things. But it'd be dangerous to be capturing battles and things like this that were going on. So I like the idea of spectators actually being a real thing within Star Citizen. But within Arena Commander, I think the little more classic game sort of standpoint makes a lot of sense. Just to be able to, especially during the race, like during qualifying or whatever, you want to be able to spectate and see what's going on. Especially now, oh man, with these new racetracks and watching some of the Evocati people play them. Yeah, you want to be able to spectate these guys because they're freaking good. Really good.

Yeah, I'll take this one. So as you might have read in monthly reports and in ISC, we're introducing the spawn screen to pretty much every game mode. The first step of that is just getting a simple spawn screen with a deploy button. The second step is getting selection of your loadout, that being a different ship or a different kind of loadout. As you know, we've got, I think, three different loadouts at the moment. You've got both Control ones and Elimination. And then step three, I think we're on step three, yeah, is the customization of those loadouts. That's a very complex system we're dealing with there when we're customizing things. So FPS is a little bit better for us. That's pretty simple. You've got your armor pieces, you've got your weapons, you've got your consumables. For 3.20, we're simplifying it down because unfortunately, we haven't been able to get the customization in time for 3.20, but we're wanting to make the Flash experience in the front end better because that UI is not the best to deal with. But instead of having so many tabs and so much to change all those pieces, now you just change your armor set and your weapons. But eventually, we want all that customization to be part of the spawn screen itself so you can change everything on the fly. And the same with vehicles, but vehicles will, of course, come a lot later down the line because that is a far more complex thing than FPS, where ships have so many different variations of loadouts. So that's going to take a little bit longer. But yeah, we definitely want to get all that in-game, so it's a far better experience. You switch it on the fly, customizing on the fly, like you're used to in modern games nowadays. We just have to catch up to that. And hopefully it's not too far after 3.20 for that.

Very likely. I love the medical gameplay that has been being developed for Squadron 42, and we're probably bound to Squadron 42 bringing online their medical gameplay first before that comes into AC. But as soon as it is, I mean, there's game modes that make a lot of sense to have our medical gameplay.

Another part of that customization I was talking about earlier is the utility slot is now actually a utility slot, whereas before you were bound to, it was a knife, which isn't really utility, but now you can bring in your multi-tool or your med gun in there. So we're hoping to expand that in the future. It's just right now, as you know, Star Marine doesn't have the downed state. We have that disabled because it just doesn't work for the fast-paced game modes that we have right now. But maybe as we explore different things in the future, we'll use experimental modes, for example, to test medical gameplay and see how it suits the current game modes and future game modes we work on.

Well, I guess this is kind of a performance question, really. It's a question of networking and performance overall. And it's a great question because this is the bread and butter to what the challenges to making this game always are and always have been. I do want to mention that it was recent. Duncan had actually sent me a streamer at one point that was beside himself with the frame rate that he had. Who was the streamer, Duncan? I can't remember.

Leric. He just got off from playing the PU, went to Star Marine, and he was like, "Why is the FPS so high?"

Right. And it was The Good Doctor, which is typically the heavier of all the maps anyways. But yeah, he was running at like 120 frames, 140. It's just a ridiculous frame rate in comparison to what a lot of people will report from the game. To answer the actual question, though, it's already improved. One of the big things that has actually changed was that we've been experimenting with these 144 hertz servers, just at a way, way faster update rate. There's been a couple other tests that Duncan's actually done just himself. Do you want to talk about some of those, the large-scale player tests?

Yeah, so we noticed that players were paying more attention to networking and looking at Star Marine for how the networking handles on that, because you'd see that clip, for example, of Leric, and the game is running really smooth and great, but then he encounters other players, and they're desyncing, they're jumping back and forth, they're doing all this weird network-related stuff, and that kind of caught our attention as well as the player posts about it. And we're like, what can we do to improve this? So I literally just jumped in to our servers because I noticed that our servers always run at their max FPS. I've never seen it drop below. So I was like, hmm, I wonder what we can do here.

The Arena Commander servers.

The Arena Commander and Star Marine servers. Anything I talk about is Arena Commander; that's all I know. But yeah, so I jumped in and I spawned 300 Vanduul. And the client obviously died, but the servers, totally fine. I think they were running at 60 FPS in the end after all 300 had spawned. Our servers in Arena Commander are really robust and that's led to some experimentation like Sean hinted at there. We're experimenting with 144 hertz servers now and seeing where we can go with that. There's a bunch of refactors associated with it. It's sadly not a case, as I was hoping, to just unlock that cap and see a performance increase. There's a couple of refactors which we need to do to accommodate that increase. But I'm hoping that we see some network improvements, because I think that's our last, well not last, but the major hurdle that we've got now in terms of Star Marine performance, and the game runs amazing. Like we were saying, 120 FPS is average now, but the network issues are glaring because of that.

Yes. Chris wants this so badly. And this is a mode that we've really got to get done. And I want to get one thing done first, and then we will be getting into something like this that has PvE, because, yeah, he wants to capture the Idris. We want a combined thing that is the experience everybody wants. You start off in a fleet battle and you end up trying to take over a cap ship. You're assaulting the Idris. You're taking over a Bengal. Whatever it is, an assault on a huge capital ship that actually doesn't just happen outside is a super fun experience, I think. And that's what a lot of people are looking for. And now, with experimental modes set up in the way that we are, it's very, very easy for us to run and try out different modes that could be as complex as this. We wanted to start easy, and we did, with sort of single-weapon elimination type stuff, Tonk Royale stuff, and even gun game. But there's no saying that more complex experimental modes aren't on the horizon.

Yeah. So we obviously have our classic maps there. And we've got Echo 11 that we've made a variant of for 3.20. As Sean said, starting small for now. But we're looking at the PU, essentially, for more locations that we can take stuff from. Because as we touched on in ISC, the PU has countless awesome locations that we can take and get into Star Marine in our FPS modes so you can practice there. And we've been talking with the location teams and they're so excited to work with us to get their locations into Star Marine and see where we can take that. Now, another aspect of that is I saw so many requests for a practice mode for FPS. We have Free Flight for your ships. But for FPS, there hasn't really been anything. You can get out of your seat in Free Flight, but all you have is the basic loadout with a pistol. Part of our spawning refactor and the spawn screen refactor is we're actually getting that loadout that you can use in FPS modes into Free Flight as well. So eventually that's going to be the place where we do FPS practice as well. But yeah, FPS is my preference. I'm no good at spaceship fighting. I love FPS. So I'm very excited to see all the locations that we can bring in to Star Marine and get more variety in maps there.

The question was actually about unique maps to Star Marine, like Good Doctor, Echo Eleven, locations that don't exist in the PU. Are there any plans, any work ahead for maps unique just to Star Marine?

No. In no uncertain terms, not really. This is on purpose, though. This is to keep the team small. The team has always been small and will continue to be small. We don't want to hire up or form an art team just specifically for Star Marine or FPS levels. We have a huge art department within Star Citizen and within Squadron 42, and it feels like we should be able to piggyback off that large department. Now, does that mean we pull resources from Squadron or from Star Citizen? Not necessarily. Not if we don't have to. And that's why right now there's no plans really to pull any significant amount of resources from either one of those teams for making something that is unique just to Star Marine. What the team is comprised of is designers, engineers and tech artists. So that is what we have. And we will continue to do things that make sense with the team that we have.

I think it makes sense. It's work smarter, not harder. It utilizes all the art that's already being created by all these other teams for the PU and finds ways to repurpose that into Star Marine. And then Star Marine really does fill its role as a simulation within the Persistent Universe.

Exactly. And again, I really tried to promise to the community that we don't pull resources from Star Citizen. We don't pull them from Squadron 42. That is a very challenging aspect of the Arena Commander team, but it's a very important mandate that we have, that we try not to pull resources anyways from either one of the products. We do our own stuff as much as possible.

Yeah, not just do our own stuff, but assist those teams in their testing and stuff. Like the SPK, for example, we've now got that in Star Marine. We can get very focused, quick feedback on that. Obviously it's been out for a while now, but when a new location is introduced, we can get that feedback from Arena Commander really quickly. Whereas it takes time for the PU, or maybe it's not ready for the PU. We can feed back to that team straight away. So we're actually helping those teams as well as they're helping us.

Yeah, I'm excited about this one, but Duncan, do you want to take it?

Yeah, sure. So this is something that obviously comes after 3.20, not part of 3.20, but it's part of that experimental mode initiative. We see all the comments. What happens if the AI are actually on a perfect server? People have encountered the AI on a good-running PU server and went, well, they're really good. It's a really fun experience. We want to get that into Arena Commander so that we can test and provide feedback to the AI team. While we're waiting for the PU to catch up on performance, we can get that feedback now in Arena Commander. So it is definitely something that we're going to be looking into pretty soon here. And again, I'm really into FPS, so I'm really excited about that. And Sean might be able to talk about this more, but we made The Good Doctor for this purpose. It is a player versus AI map.

Yeah, that was exactly it. Back when Duncan was at Firesprite anyways, that's what we had started The Good Doctor for. And I laugh because the whole intention of that map was to be a PvE FPS survival. So exactly like Pirate Swarm, exactly like Vanduul Swarm, just with FPS. And it just so happened our AI wasn't quite to the state that we needed it to be at the given time. Took some training for certain people. And in the end, we were happy just to get it in as a deathmatch PvP map, but we do want this thing to be in. There was a whole story for it. The whole concept of The Good Doctor was there was a bunch of, they were like scientists, kind of cultist people. And The Good Doctor was this one guy that was basically taking over and stealing all these people from their cities and stuff. It was a whole story and you were going to fight the cultists, but yeah. Neither here nor there, but we do want PvE survival. That's an important aspect.

Safe to say that a swarm mode for The Good Doctor at least is still somewhere on the to-do list?

Yeah. And now, again, with Squadron being much, much further along with the AI, we have this concept of spawn closets, this whole concept of just spawning an AI behind a closed door or something like this. So now that we've got all that, it's a lot easier to do.

Well, can't we have both? I mean, I feel like we could have both of those things because it does serve both purposes. It serves the purpose of being a testbed and everything for us. A good example is this Tonk Royale that we have right now, Team Tonk Royale and Tonk Royale. Put those in there right now, and it gives focus testing in the wild of the tank. And we get so much feedback that is... sometimes you might think it's really obvious feedback, but actually it's not. Sometimes it needs to be played over and over and over in combat to get that kind of feedback. So it's a testbed. But Arena Commander is still a place where, when you're bringing somebody into Star Citizen, I'm going to think that most of the time you start them on Arena Commander and then you bring them into SC. I'm not saying people don't just bring people into SC, so please, no emails or anything, but most of the time the easier startup for Star Citizen is within Arena Commander. So I think it's a bit of both. Sure, sure. Well, good point, actually, because the noob stomping that is happening right now within Arena Commander, it does not make it very welcoming for new players.

Yeah, no, that's a perfect response. We want Arena Commander to stand on its own, to be the strong product of Star Citizen, both the competitive aspect and the new player aspect. It needs to be new player friendly and it needs to accommodate that top 1% that we do have right now that are really into the competitive aspect of things. But we need to bring it back a little bit to being the testbed as well to benefit the PU. And we're really passionate about all aspects of that.

Yeah, so this leans into what Sean was mentioning there about noob stomping. Battle Royale is unfortunately the default game mode. Everyone just goes there to experience flight really quickly in Arena Commander, but it is not the best game mode. And it has the most active leaderboards. So the competitive community, they go into Battle Royale. But Battle Royale, being named Battle Royale before Battle Royales were a thing, it is just free-for-all. And free-for-all is not the best place to have as your main competitive mode. So we want to take Battle Royale away from that position and make the competitive focus Squadron Battle and Duel, where Squadron Battle is team versus team, whereas Duel is one versus one. It's a much more controlled competitive environment than a free-for-all. And I see the requests about Battle Royale and the complaints about Battle Royale. Well, it makes sense, we should do these things, like maybe anonymous mode and all that. The real problem is that that is the competitive mode. That's where people go right now for competitiveness. We need to move that focus to the other modes. And the reason it's not in the other modes is because they were buggy or there were problems with them, like Duel didn't have rounds and so forth. 3.20 fixes most of those. So we're hoping to see that transition to those being the competitive modes. And then again, we'll visit the leaderboards: should Battle Royale even have a leaderboard? We need to get the Duel leaderboard in there, so that people actually have a leaderboard to grind for that 1v1. And there already is one for Squadron Battle, but again, the bugs prevented people from enjoying that as they should.

A hundred percent, man. A great way to explain it. And let me take you one step further: what do we do with all of that now? So, okay, we have the experimental modes where we're doing tests and trying new things. And we've got our sort of solid modes. These are the ones we know are being played. We like them. Everything's good. AAA, these are great. So what we'll be checking on during the experimental modes is, are people playing them? Are they really engaged with them or not? And should we promote it to a mode or not? And then at the same time, we'll be looking at all the current modes that are online. We're going, okay, are people playing them? Are they engaged with them? If they're not, we're going to drop them. If they are, then we're going to promote them. And basically, you'll see the game modes shift around like this. But we're going to data drive it. There's no reason to just guess. We have the analytics for all of this information. We know how many people play Pirate Swarm versus how many people play racing. So we can make decisions according to that. I think it sets us up in a really nice framework to be able to do all this.

Yeah, let me explain a scenario then. I don't think you log them out is the point. I don't think they log out of the PU. I think they're still there. So if you've ever seen Black Mirror, there was a great episode anyways where they would go into a VR and basically they put this little thing on the side of their head and boom, they were out. They were like laying on their couch. And at one point in it, a little kid comes in and he's kicking the guy in his legs and he gets this little notification. And then he comes back out and he's back in the world. And I love this concept of you sitting in your fighter ship. You're in quantum. You log out, you want to go get the high score, you want to race one of the circuits, whatever, while you're doing quantum. But you get a little beep, beep, beep, shut down whatever you're doing in Arena Commander, get back to reality and you're under fire from a bunch of pirates that interdicted you or something. I love that concept. And that's where we would love to take Arena Commander to, but obviously it requires some pretty significant technology in terms of our server meshing and persistence to be able to keep those ships around whilst we boot up. And actually, since we're pontificating, let me be clear. This is pontification. We are theorycrafting here. This isn't a plan. This is an idea that we would love to get to. But the tech that it requires is significant. Having said that, though, Duncan, of course, and in every one of these so far, I think I've had a "Duncan has tried an X." So Duncan has tried to have a standalone Arena Commander run in the past. Did you want to talk about that a little bit or no?

I can say that, yeah, I did the test. It kind of works. Arena Commander as a separate executable was one of the strategies I wanted. Would it even work? Is the load time acceptable? With all the performance upgrades that we've had in recent times, the load times are incredibly fast now. And we're able to boot from nothing straight into an Arena Commander game in about 40 seconds, which is pretty impressive considering it's booting up the entire game to do that. Yeah, that was the test that I did. I don't know if it'll go somewhere, but it's exciting nonetheless to see how fast things are improving in terms of load times. And you'll see with 3.20 when you load into a map, it is ridiculously fast how fast you get into the action now. Whereas before, you may have a minute on a load screen for some of the maps.

It's one of those things where a programmer is in a meeting and they hear a director or a designer say something like, "Oh, it's probably not possible." To a programmer, that's a challenge. I want to figure out how to do that. So people were like, "You can't just load into Arena Commander like that." I bet you I can. That's essentially what it becomes. And that prototyping, that's part of the fun as well of game dev. And I love doing that kind of stuff. Sean may have stories of my prototype folder that I have of just random things I've tried throughout the years. And some of them became things. So the Pirate Swarm update came thanks to one of those videos that I made of just something I was experimenting with, and the new Vanduul Swarm that's coming for 3.20 as well.

I want to make sure we answered that question, though. It was about logging out, whether or not he can log out. So we got the dream. In the next little while, we want to get the sim pods back into the PU and make sure that that's actually working. I have one very specific implementation that I want the sim pods to be at. For every time that we have a racing map within Arena Commander and within the Persistent Universe, I'd like some sim pods to be around the Persistent Universe location, because that way when you show up, you don't have to risk your ship for the first time. You can actually park your ship, lock it, jump into the sim pod and try it out, and then jump into your real ship and actually do it. But it's those kind of connective things that we want to do a lot more of. So anyway, hopefully that fully answers that question.

As some people may know, with the old Arena Commander that's currently live, you're locked to a maximum of four people in your squad, whereas the game modes themselves vary in player limit. I believe Elimination is 12 players or 24, one of the two. And Squadron Battle is 16, I believe, 8 versus 8. But you can only bring four people as part of your squad. So the player limits are staying the same for now. Experimental modes, we're going to experiment with upping some player limits. We already did that for 3.19, I believe. We upped the player cap of Free Flight from, I think it was 12, to 24. And we got a lot of really good data from that. And players got to experience bigger org events inside Free Flight. But to go back to the squad thing, you're limited to four right now, but with this new front end, we're finally able to unlock that cap that was there. So now it's whatever the limit is for that game mode. If it's Elimination, you can bring up to 12 friends into an Elimination match with you. Or if it's a team mode, it's the amount of people you can fit into a team. So for Squadron Battle, that would be eight as your cap for your squad.

But do you want to go on record? The PU is running 50 players at the moment. 25 versus 25 for Arena Commander, does that entice you?

I want to see it, yeah. I want to see more. Like I said, I spawned 300 Vanduul.

Theaters of War.

I like it. I like it. And the nice thing about the pipelines that we've developed here, being able to take the entirety of a PU location within, I mean, hours, it's super fast for us to be able to replicate. So it's quite nice. Makes a lot of sense to do these. So you do it the same way as an experimental, to a degree. We would take an event if it was a super, super popular event. Let's say Siege of Orison is perfect. Siege of Orison is a popular event. Everybody's playing it. Everybody still wants to play it. Maybe we put something similar to that into an experimental mode. If the engagement keeps up, then it turns into a fully-fledged game mode of itself. But this is all possible now, absolutely. And each one of these, any time there's a scenario, and I hate to go here one more time, but any time there's a scenario, I always call it very similar to what Theaters of War is. When there's a scenario, that's what we've always called a theater of war within Arena Commander.

Yeah, so when 3.18 first went out, I saw something fascinating, which really opened my eyes to what Free Flight can eventually become. And that was that the PU went down. It wasn't available for a good couple hours at least, I think. But that was when salvaging came out. And players really wanted to salvage. So their solution, instead of going to the PU, they went to Arena Commander. I would hop into a match or I'd go on Twitch and open up a stream and they're salvaging in Arena Commander. I'm like, damn. That's something we should be accommodating. And that goes for mining and all these other gameplay loops. And mining, let's put some mineables in there. If they don't want to go to the PU for now, they want to just do a quick little test in Arena Commander, hop in, hop out. We can supply a simple mineable in Broken Moon, say, and they can just fly up and do their mining gameplay. It's not going to have the progression that the PU has where you go off and sell those things, but you'd be able to experience that gameplay and practice that gameplay before going through all the jumps and hoops to do that in the Persistent Universe. So yeah, expanding Free Flight to accommodate all these things. Maybe not the bounty hunter stuff. We have the PvP game modes already for that, but definitely when it comes to mining, salvaging, and these other non-combat roles, we can use Free Flight as our mini sandbox.

Are we talking about in Free Flight or not? Because I have feelings on all the different modes and what they should be, because actually I don't think it's all shared and it's all the same. In Free Flight, 100%, you should be able to get out of your turret and walk around your ship and do things. Here's the thing. We have multi-role ships that have an engineering panel. We've got other things to do within the ship than only manning a turret that can actually help. And there's tons of design already in place that is going to be done so that there is more multi-crew stuff to be done. Long story short, you've got to be able to access the inside of your ship. And also, just in general, I've always hated games that make you a cockpit that is glued to the camera, rather than I'm a character inside of a ship flying around. It's what I've always really liked about Star Citizen, is that we don't really fake any of it. You're not a cockpit flying around and just hovering around. You're an actual character inside of the ship inside of space flying around. So I think you should be able to walk around.

Duncan, I'm not actually sure.

Yeah, so unfortunately, the multi-crew aspect of the spawn screen didn't pass its go/no-go, so it's not coming with 3.20. We're going to see what we can do, but it's unlikely to be in that patch. Definitely a follow-up, because it's something we're super passionate about. But as far as the plans for that multi-crew, we've discussed multiple ways to go about this. Like, do you spawn into a turret and then do you use your F keys like you do in other games to switch between the turrets, hot switch? No. We want to be representative of the PU. You go into the PU in a Hammerhead as, say, eight people. You've got all those turrets. You've got a co-pilot, pilot, and so on. You should be able to get out of that. Say you've got a damaged turret. You need to go repair some module within your ship as an engineer. We want to support that in Arena Commander. So we don't want to introduce these gamey things where you just hot switch between your turrets. Yeah, you can maybe die and end up back in the spawn screen, select where you want to spawn again. But in terms of how you move about your ship, we want to help the PU once again in exploring this multi-crew gameplay and how that affects the game overall.

The short answer is yes. Free Flight, or any mode, you can go down and do whatever you want. Some modes have playable areas, so you can only go so far. But in Free Flight, just like you can in Broken Moon and Dying Star, you can go land on these landing pads or the space station that we've got there. And the Winter Circle, the atmospheric map that we've got coming for 3.20, you can go land on the planet. You can run across the beaches, go dip in the water if you really want to do that. Now, the map isn't necessarily built for that. It's meant for these flight modes at the moment, but I'm hoping we can expand upon that and give more reason to go down in FPS. Like I was saying earlier, now that we've done the spawning refactor and we can get you in your actual FPS loadout rather than this default one with a pistol, you can set up some event where maybe you set up an org event in Free Flight and you want to go down on the planet and have that 12v12 experience or whatever it may be on the ground of this planet. We want to really facilitate that, especially in Free Flight. Being able to do what you want.

Kind of. So we worked with the planet team on building this brand new planet. But it takes a lot more work to get a planet ready for the PU than it does for Arena Commander. For Arena Commander, we can be like, you're going to be generally above the tree line. You're going to be fighting at a distance from this and that. And we can contain you within an area if we need to. So we say that to the planet team and they're like, all right, this is what we can achieve. We can get this close to bringing Green to life. Now it's going to be lacking a lot of the things that are PU-exclusive items, like bunkers or mission locations, cities, whatever it may be. But what we've got right now is in there for Arena Commander. And that's why the ground isn't necessarily built for it just yet, because it's focused on the flight modes for now.

We did, however... back to our skybox.

Yeah, we got the real Pyro skybox.

Fun fact, Dying Star.

Yeah, so Dying Star now has the actual background that is built for the Pyro system.

Built for Pyro. I'm sure they'll update it too, but yeah.

The very cool thing about our new map creation process is if it is changed, we get the change. As we're developing the Pyro skybox, maybe something does change. You'll be able to see that in Dying Star up until you can see it in Pyro for yourself.

That's right. There's testing of Master Modes right now. And actually, full disclosure, I was way more worried about doing this. And it was Duncan's real passion for Master Modes and actually for the game overall that actually got this in, because he really, really drove this one through. So I want to let Duncan talk about it.

I mean, we go back to that whole "we want to bring Arena Commander back to being a testbed." There is no better way to make that statement than to get such a monumental feature, such a fundamental feature to our flight model featured in Arena Commander so we can get that feedback now rather than much later. As you know, Master Modes, it's going to take a while before it reaches the PU. It's a full retuning of every ship, and everything is changing. If we can get that testing done now with a limited selection of ships... right now we've got the Gladius running in Evocati. You can jump in the Gladius in, I believe it's Duel, Vanduul Swarm, and Free Flight. And the feedback we're getting has been tremendously helpful. I've been in the chats with the vehicle teams. They're seeing stuff that has helped push the direction of Master Modes, but also fix up bugs, which are better fixed now than later, when it affects the PU. And yeah, right now we're testing it in Evocati. It's going very well, very well received and lots of amazing feedback. And we don't want to stop with Evocati. PTU eventually, with the waves from PTU, we want to get their hands on Master Modes, get even wider feedback from a wider range of players. And of course, that leads us into live. It's part of our experimental mode drop. And yeah, it's a shame we couldn't talk about it on ISC before. It just missed it. We filmed for ISC and I believe the next Friday after was when we got the final approval for Master Modes to be featured in Arena Commander, because we wanted some extra updates from Squadron in there, and we looked at it and it was an amazing experience, and we want to share that testing process with players, and now we finally can thanks to the invention of experimental modes.

Sorry, just to piggyback, you hear how tight that layer is now between the two. The reason I was so worried about this was the timing, the fact that even between your ISC and now, a whole new mode, multiple modes actually, and changes to ships were able to be brought online. So I mean, just the layer between players and devs on the experimental modes, it's so thin, which is really good for feedback.

The whole thing of experimental modes came about because we have weekly playtests. Every team has weekly playtests. But I like to join other teams to get their perspective on how they're doing things and how Arena Commander can help their progression. And I was joining the vehicle teams regularly, and we were testing Master Modes. And we would go into Dying Star, and we'd be like, all right, here's the tunings that we're going to be testing today. Next week, it's a different set. And I was just in those sessions. I'm like, man, I wish we could share this with players. How much valuable feedback will we get from being able to share this with a wider variety of people? And it really resonated with everyone when presenting to them as well on what we can bring to experimental modes.

Yeah, so some of it was actually already done ahead of getting the game mode developed. The game modes were originally developed... I essentially made them the week after I had that thought when I was sitting with VFT. I met with Yogi and some of the other VFT programmers. I'm like, how can we get this across? And they're like, well, we use a CVar, a command variable for non-game devs, and this turns this on, we need this, this, this on, and so forth. So we got a big list of all the things that need to be on, and we made them what we call game rules parameters. Game rules being the parameters that control all of our game modes, for lack of better words. And we turned CVars into parameters so we can change it per game mode. So we're not affecting the PU. We're not affecting other game modes. We are affecting only the ones that are labeled as Master Modes to have these certain things enabled. And thanks to some fine tuning from the vehicle team and [unclear] on making those features available, we were able to do that. And again, going with the Gladius, we had to take the old Gladius and get it to work with new systems. And thankfully, the vehicle team experts in that area were able to take these new systems and plug them into the old Gladius so that we can have, not the full experience, because some of it isn't ready yet to even get feedback; it wouldn't be valuable feedback for now. But we've got what we need to be able to get good feedback in the current Gladius so that there's no holding back. We don't want to wait for this and that to finish to be able to get this in your hands. Once it's in an acceptable state where we can assess that feedback and benefit from it, that's when we want to push it out. And now is that time.

Oh, it's such a pet peeve. Chain link fences, small, small, small trees will stop you, little rocks. Not forever, of course not. We're working internally on quite a large project. I want to call it a refactor of our damage system, and it's called Maelstrom, and Jared, I'm not sure how much Maelstrom has been discussed. Never? Okay. It doesn't matter, it's not really an NDA thing, it's just an internal system that we call Maelstrom, and what it's going to be is our physical damage and how that all works together. So basically, it's destructibles, it's how the ships break apart, it's how characters break apart, all these things. So yeah, we want to make sure that things that are in those levels with the tanks, especially with ground vehicles, in any of these scenarios, because it's not just tanks, the Ursa really shouldn't be stopped by things. All those should be physicalized within the world. Now, it's a little easier for us to do this within Arena Commander than it is within Star Citizen. Not in terms of making the asset. I mean in terms of persisting it. Think about it. You've got a whole bunch of chain link fences. You've got to run them over. Then you've got to persist the fact that they're all actually falling down. There's a whole bunch more extra work to be done in Star Citizen to scale across everything. But in Arena Commander, I think you can expect as much: that fences come down, and small trees and things that you would expect not to stop you don't stop you within Arena Commander.

The Arena Commander team is made up of people that are super passionate about modding in games. A lot of us come from modding backgrounds, myself included. So I resonate a lot with the old Counter-Strike game mods, Gun Rush being heavily inspired by that. So that's a personal favorite of mine. But I want to explore some more out-of-the-box ideas along similar lines. So I've always wanted asymmetrical teams or multiple teams, something along those lines. The first thing that comes to mind is infection, where you've got one versus 50 or something like that, and that one is super powered. Maybe it's FPS, maybe it's not, maybe it's one tank versus 50 guys just running about, who knows? I want to experiment with asymmetrical gameplay and maybe multiple teams as well, things like that.

Yeah, well, Theaters of War, that's one of them. But beyond Theaters of War, what I'd like to see is, actually, it's funny, similar to Duncan, Goliath mode. Goliath mode is like a 1v4, a 1v6, asymmetrical sort of gameplay. Again, it's kind of expected in Theaters scenarios that we do have asymmetrical gameplay. But yeah, something like a Goliath mode I think is really cool, fun modes like that.

Yes, for my heart. Oh my goodness. I need this. I need this for my soul. I need this to go to the experimental mode, the exact map, Crossroads of Crime, that we had been developing and continue to develop and kept in decent enough shape that it can be wrapped up and it can be shipped. So we want to get that done and get that into an experimental mode. We want to get it done.

Yeah, I mean, Theaters of War is near and dear to my heart. Spent many years working on it. We playtested it every single week with the company. And it's one of those things I look back on, similar to my experience with the vehicle team: why aren't players involved? There are shortcomings of it. But with experimental modes, hopefully we can have that caveat. We can bring the player cap down. We want to target 50-plus or whatever it may be players. But for now, we're going to try 20 because the performance is more acceptable and so on and so forth. But yeah, we need to get it out there. It's been in the cooker for far too long. Players just need to experience it. We need to continue developing it. And part of stage one, laying the foundations, which we've been experiencing up till 3.20, is all about getting those critical refactors that were maybe holding some critical things back with Theaters of War and other things that we want to work on. And we simply needed to take that time, do those refactors, and then we can visit the big exciting things. Because otherwise, everyone wants to work on the big exciting things. That's a given. No one really wants to do these fundamental refactors of very low-end code that doesn't give immediate results. But now that we finally have done these things and they're coming to a close this year, we can unlock the potential of all the things that we want to do, and included in that is Theaters of War.

Yeah. And Duncan said it. And the way I said it was my appetite at this point for cuts and chops to make it so that we can get this so that it's shippable, so that we weren't just having everything that we wanted, and we weren't making any cuts, and we weren't going to move anything. No. We want to get this out to the players.

So I think there was a statement made maybe just two weeks ago, probably somewhere around June 28th: Theaters of War is being worked on. Our immediate focus is on improving these features and getting this new foundation for Arena Commander underway, then working on things like multi-crew spawning and all that stuff. But as for the ToW game mode itself, we want to bring it back to a playable state because you can't leave it too long. Things decay. You can't ignore it for too long. You don't want it to fall into disrepair and it just can't be used. So the team's going to return back and put some focus on that with the hope of returning it as an experimental mode sometime in the future. I'm not gonna say any period of time.