I sat down at the Large Pixel Collider earlier this week pumped for some space violence, but you're not going to see me lasering anything to pieces. Watch this 1440p, max settings video of my first experience with Star Citizen's new Arena Commander mode , and see me be bad at dogfighting. Pretty, though!

I didn't have a flight stick handy so I used a mouse, which moves freely in the center of the screen to aim my laser turret and steers near the edges. The ship is crazy agile, so I do a lot of spinning around when I move the reticle too far to one side of the screen. This is footage of my first two runs ever, so I was still experimenting with the controls, and mostly just looking at all the pretty space stuff.

At this stage, there's only one graphics setting, which I pushed up to 'very high.' I got about 40 fps in the hanger, which doesn't appear to have any LOD optimization yet, and managed to do better during dogfights. It looks gorgeous, as expected—my only complaint right now is the lack of anti-aliasing in the hanger, which covers all the pretty ships in marching ants. My next job is to force anti-aliasing in the Nvidia control panel (and see if I can get a decent framerate) and tweak CryEngine's config manually to see how much further I can take it.