Star Citizen's Arena Commander module launching May 29th

Star Citizen or Elite: Dangerous? It's the new Daddy or Chips, and like that most ultimate of dilemmas I haven't yet settled on or t'other. My decision wheel gets more complicated with the news that Star Citizen's Arena Commander module (that's the dogfighting one) will release on May 29th. The mode will go out to all crowdfunding backers on that date, while the game's first multiplayer testers will (obviously) get to play around with its multiplayer options too.

Chris "Roberts Space Industries" Roberts relayed the news in his Arena Commander Weekly Report , stating among other things that "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."

When Arena Commander is eventually done (1.0 will arrive some time after the initial release, according to that weekly report, but will mean that "everyone can access the multiplayer and all game modes are in"), we still have around four more 'modules' to go, before Chris Roberts' full vision for Star Citizen - single-player, multiplayer, massively multiplayer and all - will be realised sometime in 2016, though that estimate is likely to change as development continues. Still, at least part of it will soon be done - and for those of us that dreamed of being spaceship pilots when we were younger, it's perhaps the game's most exciting part.

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Tom loves exploring in games, whether it’s going the wrong way in a platformer or burgling an apartment in Deus Ex. His favourite game worlds—Stalker, Dark Souls, Thief—have an atmosphere you could wallop with a blackjack. He enjoys horror, adventure, puzzle games and RPGs, and played the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VIII with a translated script he printed off from the internet. Tom has been writing about free games for PC Gamer since 2012. If he were packing for a desert island, he’d take his giant Columbo boxset and a laptop stuffed with PuzzleScript games.