FireSprite Devs Working on Star Citizen’s Theatres of War – GOOD OR BAD?

Star Citizen’s CLOUD IMPERIUM GAMES AND FIRESPRITE have UNVEIL a DEVELOPMENT PARTNERSHIP FOR Theatres of War… This is a mixture of drama BUT potentially good news for ToW… and even Star Citizen as a whole OR is it?!

Firesprite are a UK Base Game Development Studio and on the 18th of March they announced that they were working with CIG on the ToW combined arms multiplayer module for the game. Let’s read you the rest of the press release:

This announcement comes as the ground-breaking multiplayer combined arms mode approaches its latest closed test within Star Citizen’s handpicked Evocati community.

Star Citizen’s “Theaters of War” mode is a PvP multiplayer experience first unveiled at Citizen-Con 2019. Gameplay features intense, large-scale, team-based skirmishes between attackers and defenders across multiple phases of combat on planetary surfaces, in upper atmosphere, and a final orbital assault on a space station.

Firesprite’s collaboration with CIG on Theaters of War began in early 2019, when CIG outlined the vision for a multiplayer combined-arms experience taking place within the Star Citizen universe. Since then, Firesprite and CIG have collaborated to design and build this experience utilizing Star Citizen’s proprietary technology, tools, and game assets. The combined learnings and advancements made for the combined-arms game mode have benefited and continue to benefit the core gameplay of both Star Citizen and Squadron 42.

“Thanks to the talented team at Firesprite, we’ve managed to work closely together to bring significant improvements to Star Citizen’s Theaters of War mode, and as a result benefit key aspects of Star Citizen and Squadron 42,” said Sean Tracy, Technical Director of Content at Cloud Imperium Games. “I can’t wait for players to see the progress we’ve made together during future playtests.”

“We’re so excited to be able to convey what a privilege and a pleasure it’s been to work so closely with Cloud Imperium and develop Theaters of War from the kernel of an idea into a full-fledged experience,” said The Managing Director at Firesprite. “I want to pay tribute to our strike team here at Firesprite who have worked really hard behind the scenes in close collaboration with the talented creators at Cloud Imperium Games.”

Theaters of War was first unveiled at CitizenCon 2019 in Manchester, UK, with positively received test sessions for event attendees. From that event onwards, player feedback from Theaters of War closed tests for select Star Citizen community groups has been vital for improving the combined arms mode’s quality. Further online closed community tests are scheduled to begin this coming weekend, with more playtests to come throughout the mode’s development. This combined arms mode will continue to see iteration and development to help progress Star Citizen’s and Squadron 42’s combat, and future tests will expand beyond the closed Evocati group to eventually include players in the Public Test Universe.

We actually talked about firesprite a couple of years ago as we started to see indications that they were working with CI on some bits AND in fact One of the Founders of Firesprite is called Chris Roberts BUT it is a different one xD

It’s an interesting one tho… it means that the TOW mode will get constant focused attention as a gamemode BUT it will be interesting to see if it evolves in it’s own eco-system as a game at anypoint… and is it a possibility that CI might want to buy Firesprite in the future or invest heavily in it… we saw that with Turbulent.

Firesprite were involved with the Good Doctor and Echo 11 Revamped maps for Star Marine… so it’s not just TOW they are working on it is Star Marine and potentially AC too.

Some people will be excited for a studio with some games under it’s belt, especially when they have some VR experience too to be involved with the game… BUT others will also see that maybe going out of house for work in Star Citizen is the wrong choice… it certainly was a bad partnership with Illfonic in the past. For those of you that don’t know they were building out the FPS module of star citizen in the early days and the enders game style SataBall… but there was some confusion as I understand it and it was built to the wrong specs… some communication problems and… well… the studios parted ways adding to delays and unfilled game modes.

Another potential as well is that Firesprite might be looking at console porting SQ42 or ToW as well… though that is much more in the realms of MAYBE… at this stage…

We have more ToW Evocati closed playtests very soon… according to this article as early as this weekend?! But we will have to wait and see I suppose.

Duncan CIG appears to actually be a Firesprite Employee and he added:

Not all of Firesprite is working on Star Citizen. We’re a multi-project studio.

Firesprite make up the ACSM (arena commander, star marine) (inc. ToW) team mentioned a couple years ago and in the talks on ToW.

Very honoured to be working with all the wonderful people at CIG these past few years, incredibly talented folks.

So there you have it… Cloud Imperium are working with another studio on TOW & SM… however ToW needs to deal with it’s janky networking, performance and animations. I really enjoyed TOW when I played it at CitizenCon 2019 and I do think that it could be a pretty fun game if done right!