This is the Around The Verse episode that backers, onlookers, gamers, space sim fans, and even skeptics have been waiting for regarding Star Citizen. During the Around The Verse episode Chris Roberts, the chairman of Roberts Space Industries, confirmed that alpha 3.0 is now in the hands of select backers via the “Evocati” release.

The episode starts with Roberts confirming that hundreds of backers are currently discreetly play-testing alpha 3.0 under NDA, which means they can’t publicly talk about what they’re playing. After they find the major bugs that the select “Evocati” players find, they’ll fix those and then begin to move the alpha 3.0 build into the PTU.

The episode starts by recounting what the various teams went through to fix the two major issues they needed to get sorted at the beginning of the week on Monday.

However, after another meeting they found two more bugs that were causing massive resource drain on the client PCs while running the game. So by the next meeting on Tuesday, they had five major issues they needed to fix.

By Wednesday, October 4th, they managed to fix three major issues, but they still had the two major issues persist that caused the server to become unstable. The one bug made it really difficult for anyone to reconnect to a server.

One of the funnier bugs present was that the insurance wasn’t covering all of the ship parts, so when your ship would get destroyed and you would file a claim, the ship would come back to you but some of the ships were missing their doors, seats and panels.

By October 5th they had managed to dwindle down the major bugs, and then later that day Roberts gave the greenlight to put alpha 3.0 into “Evocati”.

Just under a thousand players were selected to play-test alpha 3.0… 800 players to be exact. However, it will be a while before the game is made available in the public test realm for every backer who paid to play the alpha version of Star Citizen.

The rest of the video is about the turret system, getting players oriented correctly in the seats, making sure that the turret dashboard works properly, and how they set up the feature so that the turrets won’t damage the ship it’s attached to.

They had to fix a major issue that included shooting through the ship and blowing up your own ship by shooting it. In order to fix this they originally made it where the turrets could shoot through the ship but not do any damage. This didn’t make a lot of sense given that the turret fire treated the ship like paper. They decided to make it where the turret can look and shoot in any direction except for being able to aim at and shoot at the ship it’s attached to.

The designers also managed to make the turrets a lot more fun to use, including alternate firing modes, improved targeting, and more realistic handling.

You can learn more about Star Citizen by visiting the official website.