Star Citizen: Calling All Devs - Theaters of War Update

Theaters of War came up because we've already got two extended modules from Star Citizen. One is Arena Commander and one is Star Marine. And each of them are specific. Arena Commander was meant for ships and then Star Marine was meant for infantry. So what we wanted to do was combine the two. And basically extend Star Citizen's combat into a round-based analytical format that, one, we can profile, we can get performance better, we can balance all our weapons, balance all the vehicles, give them a real reason to exist within these certain worlds and within a very controlled kind of scenario that has some structure to it so that we can work on that, but also deliver a super fun game mode that has very, very little barrier to entry, whereas again, within the PU, it takes a little bit to get to the combat. And in some cases, people want a 30-minute quick boom, let's go have some fun kind of experience. And that's what we're bringing to it now. It is an extension of Star Citizen. And Rich has a great term, which is 360-degree gameplay. That is one of the things that makes Star Citizen what it is. So we want to bring that in there. And again, Theaters is all about finding the best 30 minutes, 40 minutes of combat within Star Citizen. What does that look like? How can we structure that, put it into a round-based mode, and integrate it into one of those given modules, whether it was Arena Commander or Star Marine or its own? And right now it is an extension of what the Star Citizen experience is. And again, it's very centered on the combat and action-oriented active elements of Star Citizen versus some of the less active or, let's say, even more passive or less combat kind of gameplay. So that is the reason. And that is what Theaters of War is. It's a round-based mixed arms combat mode within the Star Citizen universe.

I do want to add that through the scenarios, though, it's also a great look at Star Citizen's history.

Right on. Usually we talk about that. Tell us the stories.

A chance to look back at Star Citizen's history and explore some of the key events that have shaped the universe before the present-day Persistent Universe.

So within CIG, we partnered up with Firesprite and we've basically allocated 10 staff within Firesprite as resources that we can use on this mode specifically now. There's all kinds of challenges when it comes to directing a game internally, having external resources working with you on a given product. And that's why, again, we've got some internal staff at CIG that are working directly with Firesprite. Some of those include myself, Rich, even some people out of the Actor Feature Team. Jens helps out. Rob Johnson from the PU team reviews some of that stuff coming in as well. So there is some internal support that happens with Firesprite. But again, it's just 10 people. It is definitely not the entirety of the Firesprite studio. They've got lots of projects that they're working on internally. It's really access to 10 resources that would have been hard for us to pick up otherwise. And it was already a team that was all put together. So that's what we're using right now. It's a 10-man team, all in all.

The one thing to understand as well is why we've just made this announcement now in terms of that relationship with Firesprite. But actually, they're the guys that we've always been working with. So ever since we did Theaters of War at CitizenCon 2019, those are the guys that helped us put that build together. We've been working with them all the way through this time. So in terms of the grand development of Star Citizen, it's a drop in the ocean in terms of resource. And that's why that team as well not only focuses on Theaters of War, they also focus on just keeping Star Marine and Arena Commander in a playable state.

So like all the CitizenCon stuff, everything that we had worked on, this is the same team. Now it's gone up and down in terms of resources because there's turnover anywhere, including Firesprite. So it's gone up or down, but it's never been bigger than 10. And quite honestly, at a 10-person team within CIG, we're talking 1.6%, I think, of the overall development budget anyways in terms of staff goes towards this. And again, what Rich said is super important. This is the Arena Commander, Star Marine, Theaters, all of those round-based modes, that is this team.

I think where we're at right now is that we have some really good feedback and positive vibes from the recent test. We've taken that and utilised that feedback to kind of solidify the direction that we want to go with Theaters of War, specifically scenario one, which is Crossroads of Crime. So Crossroads of Crime is the first scenario within Theaters of War. And then we're going to be basically pushing on to what we've really wanted, scenario two, which is kind of a more ship-centric mode. So if you think of scenario one, which is, for people who haven't played it, you start off on the planet, you start off not in ships because there's AA turrets that basically shoot the ships down and you see those AA turrets shooting the ships as the Valkyries are coming in. And then obviously you progress to a more open area with a huge radar dish and ships then start to come in and then you progress up into the upper atmosphere. So it's kind of a progression from on foot up into space, but it's still quite a lot of on-foot combat there. We want to really push towards, and we're starting to gear up now, now that we've kind of understood what we're going to get from scenario one, now we want to explore what we're going to get with scenario two, where the needle is more shifted towards... So we're pushing towards more of the ship-centric ideas alongside the ships themselves, but also for the on-foot people to be more involved in space, so in EVA and EVA combat and around that area. So what we want to do as well is we want to start integrating the features that we've been pushing live to Star Citizen. So tractor beam, for example, we've got mounted guns that we're pushing live and trolleys and manipulation of entities from one place to another. So that's where we're starting to come. We're working on healing right now in terms of being able to revive people who've gone into a downed state. So you don't immediately just die and respawn, die and respawn. Actually, you could die or go into a downed state. Somebody could then revive you and bring you back. And that will change the whole dynamic of this premise of just, death is a consequence in the PU. The combat is still fast-paced, but it's not supposed to be not strategic. You're still supposed to be able to play as a team, coordinate around a singular objective. And so where we're at right now is that we're kind of closing out scenario one, and then we're moving on to more of the cinematic elements around scenario one. So they saw in the recent playtest, we had an intro video that kind of shared the lore and the reasoning behind the Hathor Group and the UEE Advocacy coming in to take out the Supreme and the story of that game mode. We're actually working with the VFX teams and the cinematic teams to try and help us bring some of that cinematic feel to the game so that we've got kind of the core gameplay loop itself. Obviously, we're still, as a whole company, across all three games in terms of Star Citizen, Arena Commander and Squadron 42, as you know, on all three of those areas, we need to improve the performance. They're all coming from the same code base. They're all coming from the same build. So we need to improve performance in the next thing. So that's where we're at. We're working on that as an initiative. We're working on the cinematic feel for scenario one in terms of adding in the outro videos that we haven't got yet, the additional, like the radar dish that we have in there, that will blow up and destroy. And you'll get that positive vibe from when you're going from phase two to phase three. It's kind of layering all that on. And then the art is obviously also doing a final pass on all the art, because obviously it was not placeholder. I think that would be disingenuous. I think it's fairly advanced. You look at it, it's still the microTech planet, still all the same microTech foliage and so on and so forth, but taking it to that next level so that we were really happy with it. And on the other side, we're starting off scenario two, which is like, okay guys, we kind of know what we're going to get when you're going from the planet up towards space; now what do we get when you start in space, and the manipulation of landing on asteroids or working within space stations or having predominantly fleet battle around it while you're working on gas clouds. So that's kind of where we're working. And all of these things, all of these questions, all of these developments that we're working towards, they have real-life consequences on what we want to do in Star Citizen. Now, I want to be very clear with what that means. That doesn't mean that Arena Commander drives how Star Citizen plays. That's not the case. Sean and I work on Star Citizen much more so than Theaters of War. But what it does mean is it allows us to kind of fast-forward that development to be able to push it into the developers' hands, get it right there, that we play it and we go, oh, okay, this is how it impacts it. This is what happens when a ship flies into a gas cloud, or this is what happens when we start having combat around this scenario. This is what happens when we've got lots of EVA players playing it. So that's kind of where we're at now, is disseminating that information that we got back from the playtest. It's validating where we want to go in terms of, we made some bold choices in terms of removing all the boundaries, pushing a bit more breathability or breathing space in Star Citizen, that it's not just open the door, I shoot my gun, I die, I respawn back in the room, I open the door. It's like, oh no, I open the door, or I'm actually only spawning in vehicles from now on, because that was a conscious decision we made. You're spawning in a dropship or you're spawning in a mobile spawn point from an Ursa that's been moved into a tactical position behind the objective now, because you can move it into that objective space. And that changes how you approach that map. That changes how your team plays. So you might want to be a sniper in the hills. You can be now. And so what we do, we've opened up that flexibility of how you potentially could operate and achieve an objective success with a team-based mission in the PU. And the Theaters of War element there is about seeing that future picture of what we want Star Citizen and how we want that combat to feel and play, and then bringing them both up so that they're at parity, so that we do have, as Sean says, this distillation of that 30-40 minute experience of Star Citizen.

And to extend on that, if I even can a little bit, what Richard mentioned, and how I term it, is being very tip of the spear with a lot of the stuff that we're trying to do. It's meant to highlight issues early, long before we ever really want to run into this within the PU. And a great example was our very first Evocati test that we had done with Theaters, right? The performance was really brutal. We were working hard, trying to get that performance up to where it needed to be. But in terms of any game running at 20 frames, 25 frames even, that's tough to play. That's tough to play combat, that's tough to play anything that isn't fairly passive or whatnot. So you tend not to, I'm not saying you don't deal with it, but it becomes less of an issue if your game doesn't necessarily require it. And I would argue that every game requires at least 30 to 60 frames. And I don't think anybody in Star Citizen disagrees with that. But what we were able to do was, just between the two tests, and something happened between the two tests too, but between the two tests, we almost doubled the frame rate, because that's mainly what we're working on. But very little of it was a Theaters thing. It was all to do with a ship component update, an actor, one of the characters updating. A lot of it doesn't come down to GPU or even the assets that are in there. It's just the systems that we've got and putting them under load, putting them under stress, basically making them all happen, because quite arguably your game's not running at 30 frames a second if the guy's just standing there and there's not a whole lot going on. The game is happening when you're playing it, when you're shooting, when you're getting shot at, when you're running around, when you're spawning. That's when stuff is happening. So we try to be very much at the tip of the spear. So what happened between those two was Xenothreat. And actually, Xenothreat would have suffered a lot worse performance had we not been in there trying to make some adjustments and really just calling out all the different systems that are spiking and that we've got to do something about. So being able to replay and have this analytical environment for us to do this is super important. But it also comes down to the gameplay stuff itself, as Rich was talking about. Healing, we are able to do that right away. Mounted guns, that's very useful right away. If the tank comes along, right, there's going to be a place for that to exist, versus, again, what would be there. So we try to be very, very, again, very tip of the spear, trying to get to where Star Citizen will end up. Because again, you've only got 50 people in this full solar system. But once server meshing is in, we would have hundreds of people. So you can expect that a lot more is going to start happening in terms of players, right? Or PvP or whatnot. And as I said a while ago, it's got to be fun when we get there. It can't be, we just get there and we're like, oh, holy crap, performance is really rough. Or, oh, holy crap, that ship's too good. Or whatever.

It's a very symbiotic relationship between Star Citizen and Squadron and Arena Commander and Theaters of War. That's one of the ways that we can do this cross-development between the different platforms.

Honestly, I think a lot of it has to do with the structure and the way we're approaching this. Again, we've got Firesprite working with us, working with Rich day to day. But Rich is also running an entire pillar. And then we're also working with John, who is also running an entire pillar on the ship side. But the beauty of it is because we're working on this mode, we've got basically a game team that works on the mode. Then we've got the two main pillars that contribute to that mode. So that's vehicles and that's actors, big characters, let's say. And both of those go into this mode. So because we're working on that and they're working on that for us, it's kind of perfect. It all aligns. So really, we're able to make some pretty decent progress on a lot of these features because of the way that it's set up. But it's a lot of work. It's a lot of work because not only are you, again, running three teams, but you're running a third-party external team that really is taking direction from us on the design, on the art or whatever, and delivering on it. And they've been doing great.

First off, we get feedback internally from the people who make Star Citizen because, A, they don't on a day-to-day basis play it. So it means that we can utilize people to come and play the game and it gives them a bit of fun. They can come and enjoy playing, shooting each other. That's fun. It's good to have a bit of a blow, a bit of steam off in the day. And everybody who is a game developer, I hope, I pray that they like games. And if they don't, they should give up the position. It should be mandated that you give up your position to somebody who does like games. But anyway, so on that front, it's good that they're the first bastion. They're the first gateway for us to be able to get feedback from. And the people are super passionate about Star Citizen and they're super passionate about what we're doing. So it's an incredible amount of feedback that we can get back. So they're the first gateway that we have. So we go, okay, let's see what the 700-odd Star Citizen developers say about it. Then when we go to Evocati, obviously Evocati are our, they're the top gun, should we say, they're the 1% that are able to come and help test the game mode. And they understand that the performance might not be the best, that they might run into crash bugs, that there might be these issues that they're going to run into, or they might have to jump through hoops or copy their account over or do X, Y, Z to be able to play the game. And it is a specific window on a Saturday or a Sunday to go and do that. And that's an incredibly valuable asset to use to be able to get that information. Now, as Sean already touched on and I touched on previously, the game mode that we're making, in terms of the environment that it's in, to understand the fun, to understand the gameplay, I think the performance has to be at a level that you can at least see past it. You can at least go, okay, I see what they're trying to do here, but I'm walking over a bit of hot coals to get there. So, oh, maybe the audio is not that great or the balance of the weapons is not that great, but they know that the balance is intrinsically not that great in this area in Star Citizen, or they know that we've disabled missiles or whatever. And I think when you have to caveat a lot of what you're trying to achieve, like healing's not in there or mounted guns are not in there or the tank's not in there, I think when you have to caveat a lot of the gameplay, going to a wider audience is always a risk. A risk because the reason is not why we're going wider. The reason is why do we do these tests in the first place? Well, we do these tests in the first place to gather information, to gather, like, is the map balanced? Advocacy versus Supreme, do we get roughly equal amounts of wins? Yes, we do. How do people feel about the balance between air versus ground versus ground versus ground? How do we see the progression? Are people actually playing through the map? Do they understand how to play the game mode? Is it doing what we want? Are people utilizing all of the area that we're giving them to play? And I think when we have that information and we can distill that information, or above everyone, what is the mean FPS of all the users that are playing it? Now, as long as we've got a big enough sample size to be able to ascertain that information, then that's all we need, because that validates what we want. There's no reason for us to do a test just because we should just do a test. We do a test because we want to gather information back to make sure that, A, we're going down the right road. B, have we made improvements with the performance? C, is the map and the creative areas of the map, are they hitting the right boxes? Are they doing what we're trying to achieve? And that's why when we go to Evocati, I think we get that information. Now, we could go to wider PTU, but I know personally, I would rather have slightly better performance before opening up to a wider audience. And we saw that with Evocati. We saw the litmus test where when we went to Evocati the first time around, performance was poor and it prevented us getting back information that we needed to progress the mode, because the only information that we got back was performance is poor. We did address that. We pushed another patch out like four weeks later. I think this was way back when. And then, lo and behold, we did get a load of feedback back, like, okay, I'm not sure about the spawn screen, or how does this work, or what? And we got some really good feedback to understand what we needed to do next. And I think, so, we will always advocate going wider to the PTU. I think there's no reason for us to go live live, because if we go live live, it's just dropping it there. We're using it as a tool to learn and iterate and understand what happens when we make these changes. And Evocati is giving us that information and internally is giving that information. We've done quite a few tests where we've gone, actually, you know what? We've had quite a lot of information from internal. Let's not go to Evocati. Like, we've already canceled one Evocati playtest because we had enough feedback internally where we were like, okay, we feel like we should address this before we go live. And that's not just performance related. So then we can iterate on it. So in terms of going wider, that would be the honest answer, is that we've got the information we need before we go to the next step.

Before we feel like we can go to that next gate, we still want to take care of a bunch of stuff, and it has everything to do with feedback. And those stages, each one of those stages just opens up wider, right? So like the internal company test, like he was mentioning, we usually get about 200, 300. It really depends on the time and what else is going on also and what our QA is doing. But we get, again, 200. When we went to Evocati, the last one anyways, we ended up with 706 unique users, 161-some-odd rounds. And mean frame time was actually reasonable at this point. So it was sitting in the 30s, which is great. But the last thing we want to do is just dump out a game mode and do whatever. And I've seen the messages. I know people are worried that we're just going to dump out the game mode and go, good luck, have fun with it. This is not what we want to do. One, we want to use it as a tool as we have been using it, but we don't want to just put it out and let it die or just leave it to not be updated or to not do anything with. So we want to make sure we've got our plan well put together long before that actually goes out. What's really important is that we're hitting our stages. And the point is, my expectation even from 18 months ago was that we were going to be past these stages long ago. But you've got to be honest. And again, we're not in a huge, huge rush on this. It wasn't ready. It just wasn't there. Performance and some of that same stuff. Rich nailed it, though, too, is that a lot of the feedback that we go over now at this point is actually properly about the game, which is great. Now we're seeing real feedback rather than, oh my God, performance is so brutal, or all my inputs are super delayed. And there was lots of feedback that seemed to be about the game, but so often it was actually just that the poor guy is running at 15 or 20 frames a second. So clearly having it running at a reasonable frame rate gives real feedback.

And to be honest, when you go wider, the barrier to entry becomes higher. So for example, any product where you have early adopters, early adopters are willing to walk over more coals. I mean, for example, if we just released Star Citizen right now as a fully fledged game, finished 1.0, we'd get so much critique, because the expectations of players going in are not what they expect of a finished retail product. Whereas because we're pre-alpha, people can go, okay, this has gone out. It's got bugs. I understand that it's got bugs. Those bugs are frustrating. It doesn't make it any less annoying. But it's the appreciation that, okay, yeah, I understand, I can move on. And I think when you get something where this is hyper-focused and it's very comparable to other games, it's very easy to just look at the barrier of, oh, controls feel sluggish, it doesn't feel great. And it's like, well, we know that Evocati understand where we're at with what's coming from the technical side of things for Star Citizen, and that it isn't just this bespoke game mode, it is a real planet. You can just fly in one direction and circumnavigate the planet for the whole half an hour of the game mode, and you'll probably never circumnavigate it because it's that big. We don't cheat it. It's the real deal. So any benefits that we're making to Star Citizen benefit Theaters, and any benefits we're making to Theaters benefit Star Citizen. So we want to make sure that it's playable, that people can understand what we want before we start ripping the plaster off, shall we say. I wouldn't be comfortable releasing Theaters to a wider audience until the performance is respectable, that you could boot it up on a mid-spec machine and not worry about frame rate. Because frame rate affects so many things. It's not just about, oh, slideshow, because it very rarely is, right, even if it's above 20. It's about the feel. It's about your turning. It's the feeling of going into ADS, going to the reload, or you feel unfair when you die, because you think performance has impacted how you've played, and in fact it does. So I think performance has such a huge layer on everything that that is the ultimate. And to be honest, there is no when until we basically fix the performance and the net sync and get that.

And we've also got a minimum set of things we want to ship with. A good example is that with Crossroads of Crime, if you've played it within Evocati or you've seen videos of it, right? It's on a planet, it's very, very infantry focused, like Richard said earlier, 70-30. I want to have at least two scenarios when this thing rolls out. And it's more to go to the tastes of the people that are involved, right? We have basically both sides of it. We could do a 50-50 one, and then we wouldn't really know. But I think having one that's based in space, that has a lot of ship combat going on, on top of then Crossroads of Crime, which is all ground-based, mostly ground-based anyways, and FPS heavy, is an important component of it too. So we've definitely got that minimum set as well as the features, because most of the feedback comes down to squad gameplay, healing, some of the stuff that they've got used to in other games, as those features come on. That just makes all the sense in the world to be putting that in.

From where we were, I remember when we did CitizenCon, we had the feedback forms and we had a question on there: was the overall game mode fun? And overwhelmingly it was agreed and strongly agreed that it was. And that for me shows that we're still on the right track, that we are moving it, pushing it forwards. There's just so many different things that allow us to focus and improve on it. So I think, to answer your question succinctly, I feel great.

At this exact moment, I feel awesome about what we've been able to do, not only for Star Citizen, but for the game mode by itself as well. There's a lot of work ahead of us, of course, to help Star Citizen on the performance, try to pull some priority for that, given performance to be a big priority alongside server meshing and those things. But all in all, yeah, I feel pretty darn good about it.