Will the drop of AC 2.0 multicrew mayhem see the addition of a few more maps to play in? Or will the existing two be expanded?asked by Nick

First of all, I think we're starting to, well not really starting to, we've decided it's not really Arena Commander that we're dropping, we're dropping multi-crew which is really, we've been calling it SC Alpha for awhile, but SC Alpha as we drop with the multicrew will have Arena Commander inside of it, it will have Star Marine inside it, it will have the social Planetside inside it. Plus, you'll be playing on a brand new map, so I think I've talked about this before. It's a large world map, it's much, much, much, much, much, much, much, much, much, MUCH, MUCH BIGGER than the Arena Commander maps, which are limited to I think about 8 to 10 km in diameter. For this map, it's hundreds of thousands or millions of kilometers in size, so it's geometrically larger by a long way. It's setup to be more like the persistent universe, it's not meant to be a simulation the way Arena Commander itself is, which is a bit more gamey. You are going to spawn on a space station the way you saw at the Gamescom demo. You'll be able to go to different panels and say "Oh, I want to pull up this ship from my account", and say you own a Constellation, so it will say "Yup, Constellation is on Landing Pad 3", and then you can go over to Landing Pad 3. It'll be keyed only for you use and once you've used it, your other friends can come and join you and you can take off from Landing Pad 3. We'll have a safe zone surrounding the starting space station, and it will be a station similar to what you saw at Gamescom, but with more stuff and more additions and then there will be other areas you can go and explore. So you could go and explore other space stations, other moons, asteroid fields, communication satellites that you'll be able to hack into and get information, and destinations you'll be able to go and fly. There will be areas you can go and salvage stuff, reclaim stuff. There's some asteroids, some space stations, there's some stuff where you'll be able to go and have PVP fights inside as well as on ships, there will be weapons you'll be able to salvage and scavenge, it's going to be kinda fun. It's going to be kind of a mini little game, much more free form and allow more things for players to do. So yeah, it's a pretty big map, and it's got a lot more than any of our other stuff has, and there'll be a fair amount of stuff for people to do. We're interested in seeing what happens. There will be random AI encounters you can go and find, sort of have a more single player experience, but there'll be other areas where it'll be okay to fight other players and then you can have at it. Yeah, it's going to be a fun, free form experience and like I said, it's our version of the test kitchen of the Persistent Universe, where we'll start to roll out new functionality and new testing. We get minable asteroids happening with the voxel tech we want to work on, put asteroids out there you can go mine, you can have that happening. You want to have a cargo mission where you go from A to B, those kinds of things would start to happen and spawn on here. That's what we're calling our large world map, Crusader, is the name of the map, and it's based around the gas giant of Crusader. Instead of adding new maps, we'll probably just keep adding points of interest because we're on a large world map so the thing is massive. It could be a couple billion kilometers across, so we'll be able to keep on adding points of interest. There will be places where you can repair your ship, there will be places where you can refuel. So yeah, a big difference between Arena Commander and what we are calling SC Alpha. Obviously then, we start expanding on that, because then at some point we'll let you go down and land on a planet, and then you'll be on the Planetside location as you've been seeing in ArcCorp. You can also buy and sell stuff, and then take off and go to other places. That's basically the Star Citizen game cycle, and then we keep adding more functionality, more locations, open up more jump points and then go on from there. It's going to be cool, and we'll be giving you the first drop of SC Alpha/multicrew ready for you after Citizen Con, so end of October. We're feeling pretty optimistic about being able to do that, but you know, that's still a little ways off, so don't shoot me if something blows up and goes wrong. So far, in what we've got left to do, in terms of scoping it we think we should be on that target, but you're getting it raw from the source, there's no padding in that. But definitely, you'll be playing it not far after that, and having a good time. We're excited about it, we're kind of keen to see how people feel about it, because there will be lots of more stuff to do and I'm sure there will be loads of cool videos you guys will be making and we've got a big plan to deliver a lot of content, carrying out from then onwards.