One of the more surprising reveals to come out of last year’s CitizenCon was Theaters of War, a 20v20 mode arriving to Star Citizen that sees players fighting it out in combined arms combat in multi-phase matches. In the most recent Star Citizen Live, fans got to hear from technical director Sean Tracy about what the mode is looking to achieve and updates on its development.
Ultimately, Theaters of War is a mode that’s meant to combine Star Marine and Arena Commander together to form a test bed for how a wide variety of combat vehicles and combat between players shakes down in live testing; a player could own a Ballista anti-air vehicle in the Persistent Universe but find no reason to use it for hours, meaning what its capable of isn’t really well known by CIG. The mode will also work on the Persistent Universe’s code base, meaning Theaters of War should ultimately bring benefits to the greater Star Citizen game at large a la Apocalypse for Ashes of Creation or Colossus for Camelot Unchained.
The majority of the broadcast, as is often the case with Star Citizen Live, was focused on player questions. One of the most prevalent questions was regarding lag and hit registry issues that plague the Star Marine FPS mode and the wider game as a whole now. Tracy immediately acknowledged that Theaters of War will suffer from precisely these same issues, but that’s the point: The mode is meant to bring these problems to the fore so they can be better addressed. There have been improvements made ahead of time, however, such as a reduction of an introduced “rewind time” feature added in 2.0 (which sounds a bit like rollback net code in fighting games) in order to make things feel more responsive. This rewind time feature can now also be adjusted in real time by the devs.
As for when Theaters of War is due to arrive, Tracy wants to get the mode online in the first half of this year and he reports that development is on track for that release window.
The video further took additional questions from players regarding things like the possibility of destructible environments, changes made to the mode since collecting feedback from CitizenCon, and how other gameplay focuses in the Persistent Universe like electronic warfare and medical gameplay will be introduced to the mode among other questions. You can find the full video below.
