And are you therefore saying you don’t consider Arena Commander to be a standalone release? Because wasn’t Star Marine supposed to be the equivalent of Arena Commander in terms of how it was released to backers? I.e. as a separate module available prior to and outside of the persistent universe?
Yeah, I think maybe you are a bit confused about how these things are set up. Which is kind of understandable, given how it’s all kinda meta.
Arena commander is exactly the same as star Marine is slated to be. Like, seriously, the exact same.
Both have always been “games” which exist within the star citizen universe. That is, due to his obsession with immersion, Chris Roberts didn’t want to make the modules that they were making for testing gameplay elements into truely separate things.
Instead, he made them into games that exist within the star citizen universe, that you play from the computer consoles within the game. (Later, they added a shortcut so you could just skip the immersion stuff and launch it directly from the main launcher menu)
Star Marine is, and has always been, exactly the same. When you are done flying your spaceship around and doing missions, you will be able to go to your simulation pod, and play Star Marine, just like you can play arena commander.
Roberts is right that at this point, it’s not really as important to the player base, since we already have the ability to do literally everything that was supposed to be in star Marine, in the regular larger universe at this point.
But they are still making it, because it can still provide some utility that we described above, once the universe starts being more persistent, and death incurs things like equipment loss, etc. At this point, since you can just respawn yourself and your ships at will, the only thing that star Marine will add is the gold horizon map and the leaderboards. Not really that important, but they are in fact doing it anyway.
