Star Citizen's Arena Commander Hits 1.0

Another milestone for Chris Roberts and the Cloud Imperium team: Arena Commander, the space combat simulator module for Star Citizen has reached 1.0 status. Everyone that backed the game's funding campaign can download the simulator and try a variety of single or multiplayer game modes. Version 1.0 includes a slew of new features and enhancements: several new fighter craft, new guns and missile racks, an in-cockpit user interface (the HUD), and a new game lobby for meeting up with other players. Find out more on the RSI website, or in the Wing Commander-style game manual. Meanwhile, the month of November added another $6 million in funding, for a total of $67 million from some 700,000 backers.

Arena Commander 1.0 is here! Today’s release marks the most significant update to Arena Commander yet, adding both the long-awaited lobby system and more than tripling the number of flyable ships. Every variant of the Aurora, Mustang, 300 and Hornet are now flyable, as are the base models of the Cutlass and the Avenger. If you’ve been waiting to fly one of Star Citizen’s single-seaters, there’s a good chance your ship has come in today!

Arena Commander 1.0 adds a host of new ship upgrades as well as significant enhancements to many of the game’s systems. Included for the first time are a ship signature system, a thruster power system, and a lateral g-force system. It contains the first iteration of the game’s lobby and we have launched a friends system in the game and on the RSI site to help you connect. Audio and visual effects have been updated throughout the game, with new animations, new textures, new cameras and more. You can find the complete list of changes, which range from the major updates below to dozens of game balancing changes and technical fixes, in the patch notes.

As you know, the team has been working very hard to release Arena Commander today and we’re especially excited to publish this patch before our Holiday break. We would have ideally liked another 4-5 days of internal stress testing and polish but with everyone looking forward to some well-earned time off I didn’t want to eat into people’s break. That said, being cognizant of the fact that the upcoming holidays are a time when everyone (myself included) looks forward to playing their favorite games we wanted to make sure that we released Arena Commander 1.0 for all our backers to enjoy over the holidays. With that in mind, I’ve opted to push today’s build of Arena Commander 1.0 to all of our backers today. So please, enjoy this significant update, give us your feedback, and we’ll come back in the New Year ready to continue polishing Arena Commander and developing the BDSSE!

I would like to stress that today’s release of Arena Commander 1.0 is a beginning, not an ending. This milestone does not denote the completion of Arena Commander, it kicks off an even more significant phase of its development. With this update, we’ve added a significant number of ships, items, missiles, and systems which means more interconnected systems, more servers to stress and more bugs to squash. These future changes won’t be limited to fixing technical glitches and balance issues.

Some elements, like the initial Avenger and Cutlass, will be converted to the new modular ship component system, but we wanted long-waiting owners to get an early look at their ships. So I encourage you to experience everything we’ve added to Arena Commander 1.0, but also to know that much, much more is in the works!

And that is where you come in! With this update, there’s a lot more for the community to help us test. So get on the forums and share your feedback and let us know your thoughts, criticisms, and ideas on everything that we’ve added. Every experience you report today, positive or negative, will help us make a better game tomorrow and come January 2nd, we will go back to work making Arena Commander even better.

Thank you for your continued support, and I sincerely hope you enjoy Arena Commander 1.0. I think that it’s a great indication of where we’re going with the Star Citizen experience. I’d like to close by saying Happy Holidays to backers everywhere. I wish you all the joy in the world and look forward to continuing our journey in the coming year.

- Chris Roberts