Get ready Star Citizen pilots, it’s almost time to finally leave the hangar and do battle.
In a very lengthy update from Cloud Imperium they’ve revealed that Arena Commander, previously known as the Dogfighting Module, will finally launch on 29 May. This is slightly later than we expected based on their initial release plans following their reveal at PAX.
All backers of Star Citizen will have access to the the single player “Free Flight” and “Vanduul Swarm” game modes when it launches but not everyone will get access to the multiplayer right away. The multiplayer testing will be scaled and players will be added as quickly as possible from the launch date while they continue to identify and address bugs.
The schedule looks to have been meticulously planned and Chris Roberts has posted a day by day plan of action leading up to the launch on 29 May. Take note of the day prior to release and the launch day:
May 28th: The release candidate build of the game will be compiled. If all goes as planned, this is the version of Arena Commander you will be playing! The team at Turbulent will begin switching over the website to the version that will make Arena Commander available to backers. I will personally ‘sign off’ Arena Commander as ready for the community on the evening of the 28th. To be clear, we fully expect that there will be bugs remaining, potentially some bad ones. That said, our primary focus is getting a version out to the community to help us find all the issues and work together to improve Arena Commander.
May 29th: This morning, the web team will spin up additional authentication and web servers in anticipation of high traffic during the release. The engineering team will begin “warming” caches on cloud servers around the world, making sure the release candidate game is ready and waiting for users. By the end of the day, we will update the website making the game available, and the first public release of Arena Commander (which we’re calling v0.8) will be live to the world for testing!
After this we will continue to work hard finishing off game modes, making balancing calls and hotfixes as we spin up more and more servers, allowing for more and more concurrent multiplayer games.
- v0.9 will be an intermediate step with additional features, polish, fixes and the Squadron Battle game mode.
- v1.0 will be when everyone can access the multiplayer and all game modes are in (Capture the Core comes in with v1.0).
The next two weeks are pretty packed for the development team and anyone who’s been waiting for this moment will be super excited right about now. Let’s hope all goes to plan, bugs are addressed, and there are no delays.
