Our continuing coverage of Star Citizen’s annual confab, CitizenCon continues here with the release of an entirely new game mode for the non-persistent universe piece of the game. At the moment, we have Arena Commander in game for a variety of spaceship based combat modes as well as Star Marine for FPS combat modes. Well today, those two get combined along with the added bonus of ground vehicles into the new “Theatres of War” mode.

　　Theatres of War is an approximately half hour session which will take place across up to 3 “phases” with up to 40 players in it. The phases combine to create one “theatre” which has also been pulled from Star Citizen Lore – so players are reliving battles of “old.” Phase one starting out on foot with the traditional FPS type of match. Players will be on foot and work cooperatively to establish/capture a base using a variety of ballistic and energy weapons, mostly futuristic takes on the traditional pistol, assault rifle, shotgun and sniper rifle as well as the items such as grenades and health applicators. If they are successful, the game moves on to phase 2. If they are not, the game ends and the defenders win.

　　After phase one, the players will move on to the second theatre which will combine FPS and vehicle combat. In Phase 2, players will get to choose from a variety of vehicles, including space ships and ground vehicles such as tanks, bikes and more which CIG added in several years ago so these are the focus here as players look to assault/defend the base from phase 1.

　　The final phase theatre obviously ends up in space combat since, let’s face it, this is what Star Citizen is primarily about (yes yes, I know lots of you will moan that you want to mine or trade etc!), including smaller dogfighting ships such as my personal favourite, the Anvil Super Hornet, but also larger ships so that players can man turrets etc if they’d rather not be responsible for both flying and shooting. Players will use these ships to take over an interstellar base, then do FPS combat inside the base as they mop up remaining defenders.

　　Theatres of War will be a very interesting game mode. Star Citizen is already very playable but performance continues to be something of an annoyance in the persistent universe due to the size and scaling of the game. It has been improved over time and will continue to be improved of course but for those that are looking for a smoother gameplay experience, this has traditionally been reserved for Arena Commander and Star Marine which are much smaller play spaces so the back end bottlenecks are less prevalent.

　　All of these modes are available in game of course but where in game you’d have to spend hours coordinating with multiple players to achieve this, Theatres of War prebuilds the scenario for players in full and gives designated objectives and systems to allow groups to get up and running and finish a game relatively quickly.

　　Check out our earlier coverage of the opening keynote where we saw microTech's New Babbage landing zone as well as the Anvil Carrack, plus our exclusive yesterday about Star Citizen going into actual space with MyRadar!