Luke Pressley · Live Designer, Star Citizen Persistent Universe, Foundry 42 UK

Okay. I mean, these guys might be happy to hear that the power-ups have been taken out of Arena Commander, apart from the swarm modes, where obviously you have to keep being able to repair and that; it's a war of attrition, right, the swarm modes. But yeah, the pickups have gone from Arena Commander now anyway. So first I had to go away, and I thought it was a really easy game mode to do, technically easy to do. I went away and asked around, and yeah, the game code side of it is fairly simple. You would just, when you die, get booted out back to the front end. And then the UI side of it is fairly straightforward. The resources for UI are so squeezed right now that anything is a nightmare to get, but they seem to be quite reasonable. If we were to, say, just replace Battle Royale and make it a real battle royale kind of thing, then we wouldn't have to do much on the back end because a game mode exists in that place, so it shouldn't be too difficult. And the complexity then came: okay, we might be able to do this quite quickly and easily, but should we? Does the game mode make sense at the point in the game development we're at, when the numbers of people playing AC right now are quite low and can fall off quite considerably towards the release and the taper off? Now, imagine that you're looking for a fair amount of players to go into these game modes to fight against each other. And then the moment you're dead, you'd want to get into another game quite quickly, and that also be full of players. That's quite difficult to do right now with the numbers that might be playing it. If we just take the numbers that are playing Battle Royale right now, that would mean you'd be waiting for quite some time for maybe those people who were just playing that game you were in to come out of it. Also, the maps aren't very big, and without pickups everyone goes in... Take PUBG, for instance. The reason that can last for 20 minutes, even people who die quickly might get five minutes out of it, is because there's a big map, they all drop in and they collect. Part of it is coming from a very balanced player that has nothing apart from his fists, and who can collect the best: an element of luck, but also skill and where you land. In our game, you come in fully loaded with things that aren't balanced. Some of the ships are obviously better dogfighters than others. So this game mode, the more I thought about it, is very hard to balance, and we may not have the players to make this an actually fun experience like you'd imagine. It took a lot of me struggling with this idea to come to the conclusion that basically we are not ready for this, even if it would be something we could possibly technically do quite easily. The game's just not ready for it.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

It's interesting because Arena Commander isn't the game. We often get that confusion that people think Arena Commander and Star Marine are standalone products. They are not the product that we are building, they are not the product that we are shipping. Star Citizen is, and that's the persistent universe. And that's borne out in our numbers. That's where the overwhelming majority of our players are playing the game that we're actually working our butts off to design. Arena Commander and Star Marine were test modes. They were modes designed to get us to the Persistent Universe. And in recent months and recent years, since the Persistent Universe has come along with such good strides, work on Arena Commander and Star Marine has fallen behind. And we see that in the player numbers.

Luke Pressley · Live Designer, Star Citizen Persistent Universe, Foundry 42 UK

Exactly. Arena Commander has been ruined by our own success in the PU.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

Yeah, so Erin mentioned earlier this year that we're considering the possibility of hiring a development team specifically for Arena Commander and Star Marine. We're not ready to announce anything in that regard yet. But if that happens, then you can expect development of these two side features to pick up again, and maybe we evaluate something like this again at that time. But right now, if you were to jump into a mode with one kill and one kill only, you'd be sitting in either spectator mode forever, at least I would be, or you'd be sitting in a queue that's even longer than it already is right now. So it's just not the gameplay experience we want to put out there right now. But definitely an interesting idea. When we talked about it for 30 minutes, I took this guy's side. I'm like, no, this is what he wants. There's lots of advantages here. I mean, yeah, it'd be imbalanced, but you could really expose those imbalances. Ultimately, it's a neat idea, I think. It's definitely something worth considering.

Luke Pressley · Live Designer, Star Citizen Persistent Universe, Foundry 42 UK

It totally is. And I was very excited by the prospect until I started looking into it deeper. It's still a great idea. The game's just not ready for it.