Sean Tracy · Technical Director of Content

Hello everyone, welcome to CitizenCon 2949. I'm Sean Tracy... No, I won't go through the whole presentation. So basically what happened was, at CitizenCon we wanted to be able to bring an updated game mode that basically takes all the work that we've done with Arena Commander, all the work that we've done on Star Marine, and put it together. Basically, if you could decide on the best 30 minutes of a PU experience, where you could jump in and it was immediate combat, what would that look like? And this is what we brought to CitizenCon. So we worked on this with a small internal team, and we wanted to bring it to CitizenCon, make it playable, nice and stable, good performance and everything, and get the feedback from the players, see if this was even something people liked or wanted. Because again, to progress on Star Marine or Arena Commander, it really doesn't make a ton of sense to continue to progress in just isolated bits. It makes a lot of sense to put it all together, and again, make it a lot more like what the PU experience vision will be. Because this kind of combat, and again, if you've seen the videos and stuff like this, we expect to get to this level of interaction between players and everything in the PU. When we get there, it's got to be fun. It can't be, great, we've got a thousand people in the server now, all this combat is happening, and oh my goodness, the Cutlass is overpowered, or this weapon takes down a ship, like an FPS weapon, or if you hit a ship with a knife, the ship goes flying off because of physics or anything. So basically, it's got to be fun when we get there. And there's no reason to wait. We've got to start putting that stuff together now. And a big part of Theaters is you're really playing stuff that is already there. That was the whole mentality of this. So yes, did we build a new planet? Not a brand new planet. We put some new compounds and setups within a new bit of lore onto basically pre-existing assets, right? There were a couple new things that we added, but I'm sure we'll get into that as we go throughout this. Not a whole ton. This wasn't like making a whole new game. This was like taking all the content that we've already got, putting it together in a bit of a structured scenario, and getting it fun. And that was easily the most important part of it: bring something fun to CitizenCon that shows all our Star Citizen glory in terms of combat. Because the last thing to say is that every time I talk about fun, it's not that the PU isn't fun, it's that it can take a long time and there's no guarantee; you could play for two and a half hours and not necessarily fire a shot, which is great, that's by design in Star Citizen, but there's a whole part of Star Citizen that would make entire games all by itself, that needs to be balanced, analytically tuned, and played a lot.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

We hope that Theaters of War will provide us a concentrated version of that where we can iterate very quickly, where we can get feedback very quickly. Not everybody has an entire day to dedicate to the Persistent Universe, or even two hours. Some people only have 15 minutes, 20 minutes, 30 minutes between dinner and whatever. That's their time to play in an evening, and we still want the feedback from those people. So Theaters of War is our way to get everybody involved in this process, whether you can dedicate 10 hours to us, 2 hours to us, or just 30 minutes to us.

Sean Tracy · Technical Director of Content

Yeah, and if you could get basically a 30 minute injection of Star Citizen, what does that look like, right? And my contention is that it looks like Theaters of War. It's a combined arms game mode, and I'm not even sure I mentioned that. It's a combined arms game mode. We put infantry, we put ground vehicles, we put ships all together, and we figure out their roles. These ships and ground vehicles and everything were designed with certain roles in mind, but in a lot of cases, a great example, just to go against where the PU is at, owning a Ballista in the PU right now is not that fun. There are instances where it can become very useful, but in Theaters, it's a powerhouse. It's incredibly important. So the Ballista, for those that don't know, is an anti-air vehicle. But it is a ground vehicle and it's got to be transported around and stuff like this. So having a map basically with multiple phases that span quite a bit of distance, but we're not talking about solar system distances, we're talking about distances on a planet. So the Ballista is very powerful there, whereas in the PU, currently, it just doesn't get used that much. Currently, because, again, we've got about 50 players in that server with these massive, massive planets. You could sit in that Ballista all day.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

So that's a perfect example of the microcosm that we hope Theaters of War gets us. While the PU continues to iterate, we can provide scenarios that allow for the testing of our mechanics, of our vehicles now.

Sean Tracy · Technical Director of Content

And I would also argue that it's a really good way to tell stories from our lore. I love the lore of Star Citizen. There's so much of it. So much history that's been written by the lore team. And it's really great to have a YouTube video where we go over the lore and we talk about a planet or so. But it's a wholly different thing to experience something like that as if you were doing a reenactment, as if you were doing battle reenactments or something like this. I think that's a way more compelling way to tell those stories, because then when you end up in the location in the PU, present day sort of, you're like, oh, I know the story behind this whole thing, right?