A lot of buzz around Star Citizen died down after alpha 3.0 was released to the public. It was difficult to keep the game in the news from the critics’ perspective because a large chunk of the game is now playable and widely visible around YouTube and other livestreaming services. Additionally, fanboys don’t have much of a reason to troll comment sections to pimp the game since… well, you can just go watch it for yourself on YouTube. Nevertheless, Cloud Imperium Games have continued to release new footage of the upcoming builds as well as discuss the development around upcoming updates for the game.

In the latest episode of Around the Verse, they talk about balancing the creation of weapons and how they play out in Star Citizen.

The early part of the update video covers some of the team’s work on what they’re working on next for the persistent universe mode, including how the team is coming along with alpha 3.1.

One of the new changes in team dynamics is streamlining the development of certain features to cut down on what they called “ping ponging”, which occurred due to different teams from around the world working on different aspects of the game. Instead, they’re now compartmentalizing the development streamlining so that they can further optimize the game, and optimize the way development occurs across multiple studios.

This ties into the new 3.0.1 patch that they’ve managed to push out to Evocati, which is the limited testing environment where the content is pushed out to a small number of users.

The U.K., team is also currently working on modular hangars that will be used throughout space stations and outposts scattered throughout the galaxy.

The team is also working on expanding the weapon manufacturers and weapon selections. This includes adding a new Gemini R97 shotgun to the game, which is set to appear in alpha 3.1.

Alpha 3.1 will also include the persistent character creation utility, which will allow players to choose their skin color, face shape, eye color, hair style, and hair color.

The character creation utility is still rather crude at the moment, but they have plans on updating the character creator throughout the development cycle.

The rest of the video covers the balancing of shields and weapons in Star Citizen when it comes to ship combat in the game.

It’s explained in the video that they balanced out all the weapons so that there’s no particular weapon that’s a be-all, end-all for dogfighting.

One of the interesting aspects of the combat is that each ship has different armor types depending on its variation. For instance, they breakdown how pirates may have the exact same ship as the player but they will have weaker armor than the player’s ship, which will make them easier to blow up.

In the video they mention that they’ll continue to expand on the options for the ships, weapons, shields and armor, so that there’s no just one single loadout for space combat in Star Citizen.

You can also check out the develpoment road map for Star Citizen over on the official website.