Where are we at in Theaters of War development?

I think where we're at right now is that we have some really good feedback and positive vibes from the recent test. We've taken that and utilised that feedback to kind of solidify the direction that we want to go with Theaters of War, specifically scenario one, which is Crossroads of Crime. So Crossroads of Crime is the first scenario within Theaters of War. And then we're going to be basically pushing on to what we've really wanted, scenario two, which is kind of a more ship-centric mode. So if you think of scenario one, which is, for people who haven't played it, you start off on the planet, you start off not in ships because there's AA turrets that basically shoot the ships down and you see those AA turrets shooting the ships as the Valkyries are coming in. And then obviously you progress to a more open area with a huge radar dish and ships then start to come in and then you progress up into the upper atmosphere. So it's kind of a progression from on foot up into space, but it's still quite a lot of on-foot combat there. We want to really push towards, and we're starting to gear up now, now that we've kind of understood what we're going to get from scenario one, now we want to explore what we're going to get with scenario two, where the needle is more shifted towards... So we're pushing towards more of the ship-centric ideas alongside the ships themselves, but also for the on-foot people to be more involved in space, so in EVA and EVA combat and around that area. So what we want to do as well is we want to start integrating the features that we've been pushing live to Star Citizen. So tractor beam, for example, we've got mounted guns that we're pushing live and trolleys and manipulation of entities from one place to another. So that's where we're starting to come. We're working on healing right now in terms of being able to revive people who've gone into a downed state. So you don't immediately just die and respawn, die and respawn. Actually, you could die or go into a downed state. Somebody could then revive you and bring you back. And that will change the whole dynamic of this premise of just, death is a consequence in the PU. The combat is still fast-paced, but it's not supposed to be not strategic. You're still supposed to be able to play as a team, coordinate around a singular objective. And so where we're at right now is that we're kind of closing out scenario one, and then we're moving on to more of the cinematic elements around scenario one. So they saw in the recent playtest, we had an intro video that kind of shared the lore and the reasoning behind the Hathor Group and the UEE Advocacy coming in to take out the Supreme and the story of that game mode. We're actually working with the VFX teams and the cinematic teams to try and help us bring some of that cinematic feel to the game so that we've got kind of the core gameplay loop itself. Obviously, we're still, as a whole company, across all three games in terms of Star Citizen, Arena Commander and Squadron 42, as you know, on all three of those areas, we need to improve the performance. They're all coming from the same code base. They're all coming from the same build. So we need to improve performance in the next thing. So that's where we're at. We're working on that as an initiative. We're working on the cinematic feel for scenario one in terms of adding in the outro videos that we haven't got yet, the additional, like the radar dish that we have in there, that will blow up and destroy. And you'll get that positive vibe from when you're going from phase two to phase three. It's kind of layering all that on. And then the art is obviously also doing a final pass on all the art, because obviously it was not placeholder. I think that would be disingenuous. I think it's fairly advanced. You look at it, it's still the microTech planet, still all the same microTech foliage and so on and so forth, but taking it to that next level so that we were really happy with it. And on the other side, we're starting off scenario two, which is like, okay guys, we kind of know what we're going to get when you're going from the planet up towards space; now what do we get when you start in space, and the manipulation of landing on asteroids or working within space stations or having predominantly fleet battle around it while you're working on gas clouds. So that's kind of where we're working. And all of these things, all of these questions, all of these developments that we're working towards, they have real-life consequences on what we want to do in Star Citizen. Now, I want to be very clear with what that means. That doesn't mean that Arena Commander drives how Star Citizen plays. That's not the case. Sean and I work on Star Citizen much more so than Theaters of War. But what it does mean is it allows us to kind of fast-forward that development to be able to push it into the developers' hands, get it right there, that we play it and we go, oh, okay, this is how it impacts it. This is what happens when a ship flies into a gas cloud, or this is what happens when we start having combat around this scenario. This is what happens when we've got lots of EVA players playing it. So that's kind of where we're at now, is disseminating that information that we got back from the playtest. It's validating where we want to go in terms of, we made some bold choices in terms of removing all the boundaries, pushing a bit more breathability or breathing space in Star Citizen, that it's not just open the door, I shoot my gun, I die, I respawn back in the room, I open the door. It's like, oh no, I open the door, or I'm actually only spawning in vehicles from now on, because that was a conscious decision we made. You're spawning in a dropship or you're spawning in a mobile spawn point from an Ursa that's been moved into a tactical position behind the objective now, because you can move it into that objective space. And that changes how you approach that map. That changes how your team plays. So you might want to be a sniper in the hills. You can be now. And so what we do, we've opened up that flexibility of how you potentially could operate and achieve an objective success with a team-based mission in the PU. And the Theaters of War element there is about seeing that future picture of what we want Star Citizen and how we want that combat to feel and play, and then bringing them both up so that they're at parity, so that we do have, as Sean says, this distillation of that 30-40 minute experience of Star Citizen.

And to extend on that, if I even can a little bit, what Richard mentioned, and how I term it, is being very tip of the spear with a lot of the stuff that we're trying to do. It's meant to highlight issues early, long before we ever really want to run into this within the PU. And a great example was our very first Evocati test that we had done with Theaters, right? The performance was really brutal. We were working hard, trying to get that performance up to where it needed to be. But in terms of any game running at 20 frames, 25 frames even, that's tough to play. That's tough to play combat, that's tough to play anything that isn't fairly passive or whatnot. So you tend not to, I'm not saying you don't deal with it, but it becomes less of an issue if your game doesn't necessarily require it. And I would argue that every game requires at least 30 to 60 frames. And I don't think anybody in Star Citizen disagrees with that. But what we were able to do was, just between the two tests, and something happened between the two tests too, but between the two tests, we almost doubled the frame rate, because that's mainly what we're working on. But very little of it was a Theaters thing. It was all to do with a ship component update, an actor, one of the characters updating. A lot of it doesn't come down to GPU or even the assets that are in there. It's just the systems that we've got and putting them under load, putting them under stress, basically making them all happen, because quite arguably your game's not running at 30 frames a second if the guy's just standing there and there's not a whole lot going on. The game is happening when you're playing it, when you're shooting, when you're getting shot at, when you're running around, when you're spawning. That's when stuff is happening. So we try to be very much at the tip of the spear. So what happened between those two was Xenothreat. And actually, Xenothreat would have suffered a lot worse performance had we not been in there trying to make some adjustments and really just calling out all the different systems that are spiking and that we've got to do something about. So being able to replay and have this analytical environment for us to do this is super important. But it also comes down to the gameplay stuff itself, as Rich was talking about. Healing, we are able to do that right away. Mounted guns, that's very useful right away. If the tank comes along, right, there's going to be a place for that to exist, versus, again, what would be there. So we try to be very, very, again, very tip of the spear, trying to get to where Star Citizen will end up. Because again, you've only got 50 people in this full solar system. But once server meshing is in, we would have hundreds of people. So you can expect that a lot more is going to start happening in terms of players, right? Or PvP or whatnot. And as I said a while ago, it's got to be fun when we get there. It can't be, we just get there and we're like, oh, holy crap, performance is really rough. Or, oh, holy crap, that ship's too good. Or whatever.

It's a very symbiotic relationship between Star Citizen and Squadron and Arena Commander and Theaters of War. That's one of the ways that we can do this cross-development between the different platforms.

Honestly, I think a lot of it has to do with the structure and the way we're approaching this. Again, we've got Firesprite working with us, working with Rich day to day. But Rich is also running an entire pillar. And then we're also working with John, who is also running an entire pillar on the ship side. But the beauty of it is because we're working on this mode, we've got basically a game team that works on the mode. Then we've got the two main pillars that contribute to that mode. So that's vehicles and that's actors, big characters, let's say. And both of those go into this mode. So because we're working on that and they're working on that for us, it's kind of perfect. It all aligns. So really, we're able to make some pretty decent progress on a lot of these features because of the way that it's set up. But it's a lot of work. It's a lot of work because not only are you, again, running three teams, but you're running a third-party external team that really is taking direction from us on the design, on the art or whatever, and delivering on it. And they've been doing great.