In the latest episode of Inside Star Citizen, you can have a sneak peek at the upcoming Engineering mode of Arena Commander, which will allow you to experience the Engineering gameplay on a smaller scale.
This experimental mode will board you on a Crusader A2 Hercules in three different scenarios, where you need to do your best to repair different parts of the ship to buy time for the rest of the crew to eliminate the opponents and survive the attack.
The Engineering mode comes with 1v1, 1v6, and Free Flight variants. In the first variant, two A2 Hercules ships will go head to head until one knocks the other out.
In 1v6, the A2 Hercules must deal with 6 Aegis Gladius fighters and survive the intense battle, while the engineers doing their job to keep the ship running under heavy attacks.
Finally, the Free Flight version allows you to experience the engineering at your pace, allowing a select number of ships to be boarded.
As an experimental mode, you will not have access to the full Engineering gameplay yet. While you will be able to use the ship’s engineering map to learn which parts are damaged and need repairing, that will not include all the ship parts and all the repairing methods.
Along with the Engineering mode, Arena Commander also receives a good amount of maps, with most of them focused on racing tracks in Hurston, Crusader, and Jump Points. Moreover, you will also get to play as your very own character in Arena Commander rather than a pre-made standard avatar.
Last but not least, VOIP will be enabled for Arena Commander as well. This will be a crucial change, especially for the upcoming Engineering mode, as players will need to communicate to quickly repair the ship and let the pilot know about the situation.
Star Citizen Alpha 3.23 is currently at the EPTU state with the Wave 2 testers trying out the new features and providing feedback for the developer.
While some features like Freight Elevators and Personal Hangars will no longer be released with Alpha 3.23, Cloud Imperium Games has made some secret changes to the Salvage income as well as the ship prices that you might need to check out.
