Star Citizen’s Arena Commander module receives its biggest update yet

Chris Roberts announced earlier today the releases of Arena Commander v 0.9. This is the biggest update to the latest module introduced to Star Citizen and it includes plenty of bug fixes and balancing as well as some new game modes. Among the new game modes we can find Racing and Vaduul Swarm Co-op. The first one is a Star Citizen simulation of the famous Murray Cup race and comes complete with a new map called New Horizon. Meanwhile, the Co-op version of Vaduul Swarm allows you to team up with three of your friends so that you need not face the challenge alone.

The way you do this is via the friend code system, which was also introduced with Arena Commander v 0.9. To top it all off, Star Citizen now has leaderboards as well and they will show you how’s the best possible pilot around. Aside from new game modes and game modes related features, update v 0.9 adds a couple of new racing ships called M50 and 350R. Also, players now have access to several new hangars and they can select which of them they want the game to load in from their account or the official website. Moreover, Chris Roberts and Cloud Imperium Games have also worked on a few game improvements for Star Citizen. These include:

• Six Degrees of Freedom: As we’ve continued iterating and improving on the physics based flight model, we’ve now implemented 6DOF controls and flight mechanics for all of our ships. This will allow players to move along every axis and shows off the flexibility of our flight model as well as what makes space flight so cool!
• New control schemes: You can now select between multiple popular preset control schemes. This represents the first pass at personal customization the full version of which will be coming shortly, planned for patch 13.1 which will allow you to completely customize your control scheme.
• HUD Improvements: v0.9 introduces some significant usability improvements to the Combat Visor Interface. Navigation within each context window has become much more streamlined, in addition to becoming navigable with a mouse cursor. We’ve also introduced new hotkeys for managing your ship’s power and shield allocation quickly in the heat of battle.
• Fixed Weapons and Convergence: With the introduction of the Lead Target Indicator we’ve also introduced fixed weapons and fixed weapon convergence. Now class one weapon mounts are properly fixed forward and no longer gimbal. They do however now automatically converge based on your range to the target lead indicator to ensure that if you line up your gun cross properly, you won’t miss.
• Improved Ship Performance: We’ve increased the top speed of every ship. With this we’ve also reworked the afterburner mechanic to increase acceleration instead of top speed. We’ve also added the ability to temporarily boost the output of your maneuvering thrusters to more quickly arrest undesirable angular velocity, such as in a tight turn.
• Improved Sound: We’ve added a number of sound effects that help make the ‘Verse feel more immersive. Everything from the ships, weapons, and environment have completely new sound effects. We have also fixed numerous sound bugs and given our legacy sound effects another pass to make sure they meet the quality of our new sound effects.

Star Citizen recently managed to reach the $53 million milestone thanks to all the backers who have contributed to this ambitious project. Needless to say, this is still the most successful crowdfunded game of all time and that probably wont change any time soon.