Sean Tracy · Senior Director of Tools and Technology Content

That's right. There's testing of Master Modes right now. And actually, full disclosure, I was way more worried about doing this. And it was Duncan's real passion for Master Modes and actually for the game overall that actually got this in, because he really, really drove this one through. So I want to let Duncan talk about it.

Duncan Bunting · Lead Gameplay Programmer, Arena Commander feature team

I mean, we go back to that whole "we want to bring Arena Commander back to being a testbed." There is no better way to make that statement than to get such a monumental feature, such a fundamental feature to our flight model featured in Arena Commander so we can get that feedback now rather than much later. As you know, Master Modes, it's going to take a while before it reaches the PU. It's a full retuning of every ship, and everything is changing. If we can get that testing done now with a limited selection of ships... right now we've got the Gladius running in Evocati. You can jump in the Gladius in, I believe it's Duel, Vanduul Swarm, and Free Flight. And the feedback we're getting has been tremendously helpful. I've been in the chats with the vehicle teams. They're seeing stuff that has helped push the direction of Master Modes, but also fix up bugs, which are better fixed now than later, when it affects the PU. And yeah, right now we're testing it in Evocati. It's going very well, very well received and lots of amazing feedback. And we don't want to stop with Evocati. PTU eventually, with the waves from PTU, we want to get their hands on Master Modes, get even wider feedback from a wider range of players. And of course, that leads us into live. It's part of our experimental mode drop. And yeah, it's a shame we couldn't talk about it on ISC before. It just missed it. We filmed for ISC and I believe the next Friday after was when we got the final approval for Master Modes to be featured in Arena Commander, because we wanted some extra updates from Squadron in there, and we looked at it and it was an amazing experience, and we want to share that testing process with players, and now we finally can thanks to the invention of experimental modes.

Sean Tracy · Senior Director of Tools and Technology Content

Sorry, just to piggyback, you hear how tight that layer is now between the two. The reason I was so worried about this was the timing, the fact that even between your ISC and now, a whole new mode, multiple modes actually, and changes to ships were able to be brought online. So I mean, just the layer between players and devs on the experimental modes, it's so thin, which is really good for feedback.

Duncan Bunting · Lead Gameplay Programmer, Arena Commander feature team

The whole thing of experimental modes came about because we have weekly playtests. Every team has weekly playtests. But I like to join other teams to get their perspective on how they're doing things and how Arena Commander can help their progression. And I was joining the vehicle teams regularly, and we were testing Master Modes. And we would go into Dying Star, and we'd be like, all right, here's the tunings that we're going to be testing today. Next week, it's a different set. And I was just in those sessions. I'm like, man, I wish we could share this with players. How much valuable feedback will we get from being able to share this with a wider variety of people? And it really resonated with everyone when presenting to them as well on what we can bring to experimental modes.