During this year’s PAX East, Star Citizen developer Cloud Imperium’s director Chris Roberts demonstrated a bunch of additional features that have been/will be introduced to the game, and one of those features was the upcoming Arena Commander.
In the latest update regarding Arena Commander, Roberts revealed that the module will release to Star Citizen backers on Thursday, May 29.
Arena Commander is Star Citizens’ latest dogfighting alpha module that allows for players to mess around with a small portion of the game (specifically the portion regarding to the in-universe starship hanger and some additional gamemodes), and through this module you’ll be able to practice your flying capabilities and test your skills on the game’s leaderboard and such the like.
When the module releases, Star Citizen backers will be given access to the singleplayer “Free Flight” and “Vanduul Swarm” gamemodes, and the first batch of multiplayer testers will also receive their access to the game’s multiplayer gamemodes.
“ Let me begin with the information you most want to hear: we intend to launch Arena Commander in two weeks, on May 29th, ” Roberts started off with in the update. “ The goal is that every backer will have access to the single player ‘Free Flight’ and ‘Vanduul Swarm’ games modes on this day, and the very first batch of multiplayer testers will get access to the game’s multiplayer game modes.
We will scale up the multiplayer as quickly as possible starting on that date, increasing the number of players as it is stable and stopping to fix bugs where needed, ” he added.
While May 29 is still a couple of weeks away, Roberts has also offered some insight into the game’s development process, stating that the release date of Arena Commander was based on the studio’s best possible projections to what still needs to be done in terms of development over the next couple of weeks.
“ This date is based on our best possible projections using the latest information put together by Star Citizen’s production team as of this afternoon [at the time of the update’s initial release], ” he continued. “ This is a big part of what the often-unseen production side of game development does: schedule out every task they believe is required for a game to ship.
Sometimes (in fact, more often than not) things go wrong and these forecasts change: bugs we don’t foresee appear, features we didn’t realize we needed become necessary and so on. This is why we haven’t had a solid release date yet; it’s not to better schedule marketing or because we want to keep you out of the cockpit… it’s because game development is a complex beast, and there are few games more complex than Star Citizen !
At this point, we’re close enough that we feel fairly confident in this date… but the next two weeks will be a march! ” he finished.
Robert’s full rundown of what Cloud Imperium still needs to do up until Arena Commander’s release has been detailed on the game’s official website via the source link below.
Star Citizens crowdfunding campaign still receives contributions every day towards its development. The game’s funding reached its $31 million stretch goal in late November, and shot up by $37 million in a few short months.
The game is anticipated to open up for Beta sometime in early 2015 , with many features to the game being unlocked in a modular fashion. What’s more, Star Citizen will utilize the recently revealed artificial intelligence platform named Kythera .