With the plan for AC 2.0 to be a 'baby PU' are we still going to be able to bring the larger multicrew ships into the AC we have now?asked by AngelusNex

Yes, what we're basically calling Multicrew, or what we've decided, we made the switch to SC Alpha 1.0 a little while ago, but really, with multicrew, that's... that's pretty much you're going to be getting what we would consider sort of SC Alpha, because you're going to have the full sort of space experience on a huge massive scale. You're gonna have all the sort of combat FPS elements there, you're gonna have social elements, so all the things you see up until then will all be there in one package. So, then you can probably look at it and say, yeah, you could call this an early Star Citizen alpha. It still won't' have landing on planets and taking off from planets and going to different star systems, but a lot of the game mechanics will be there, it'll be sort of the test bed that will be adding into. Now, the question is, would we be able to bring large mulcicrew ships into Arena Commander, which is sort of the game within the game, AC is the sort of practice mode for you to play to make sure that you have a chance to get good at combat before you actually put things on the line with your real ship out there in space. And I would say that, that is the long-term plan. In the short term, the very first release of SC Alpha, what we're calling 1.3, which is going to be the multicrew release, it'll have FPS and social and all those things in it, we won't have the ability to bring you multicrew ships into AC as it stands. You can still do AC, still be ranked, still have the matches, but it will be the set of ships that you have right now. In a subsequent release, the next one, or the one after, we will, cause mainly the issue is there's a whole new lobby UI that you'd need for multicrew ships in an Arena Commander sort of arena battle mode where, here's my constellation, and here's who's going to be in my upper turret, here's my lower, here's my copilot, which we don't have that lobby UI, and we sort of decided because we're building the multicrew release to be sort of this 'baby PU' or 'SC Alpha', you will spawn on a space station and you and a bunch of other people will spawn on a space station like, you spawn on ArcCorp right now on the social module, and you can call up which ship you want on a landing pad that you have from your account, you go to it, and your friends can join you in that ship and then you can take off and explore around and fight other AI that are on the large map or come across other players, or sort of do what you want in a free-form fashion. So, that's sort of the initial way of using the multicrew ships. There's a lot more territory to explore, different locations to find and explore, so I think people are gonna have a lot of fun. We'll be building out and fleshing out gameplay and functionality and features in this sort of map that I think I've referred to in the past as sort of a test kitchen of all the sort of in depth gameplay, and I think when people get SC Alpha 1.3 / multicrew, and play it, that will be the experience to go, okay, I see how all of this stuff fits together in Star Citizen, and I am psyched, because I am pretty psyched. So, that's sort of the goal and then later on, like I said, we will make Arena Commander also work with multicrew ships, and maybe there's classification of you know, the best Connstelation pilot, or the best constellation combat person, because we still have plans for Arena Commander, and also for Star Marine to have more in-depth matchmaking, sort of ranking systems, so that we'll be much more akin to what you would see on you know, Blizzard do very well with their Battle.net stuff. So we'll definitely have that, but we thought the first thing we want to do is get you into this big large world map with your friends and adventure around. So, you won't be able to really do AC as sort of the game within the game with a constellation in the very first release of multicrew, but it will be in a subsequent release. THe one after, or the one after that, and it sort of depends when we can fit the time for the UI for it in, because everyone's pretty much tasked fully on everything they're doing right now. Working hard to get you something very cool!