During this year’s CitizenCon, Cloud Imperium Games and Roberts Space Industries rolled out an hour and a half worth of gameplay footage from Star Citizen alpha 3.3.0. You can download and play alpha 3.3.0 right now if you purchased the alpha build of Star Citizen.

During the demo, creative director Chris Roberts revealed that in alpha 3.3.5 you’ll be able to purchase and rent ships. This is something gamers have been requesting for quite some time, so they’ll finally deliver this feature in the game, so it will finally be made available in one of the upcoming releases of 3.3 before 2018 rounds out.

At the moment, you can only purchase ships using real money, or you can test them out during the free-fly weekends. So being able to rent the ships using your in-game money will give gamers an idea of how the ships perform in the actual game.

Additionally, in alpha 3.3.5 you’ll be able to actually visit the main Hurston Dynamics headquarters that looms menacingly over the planet’s main city, Lorville.

They also plan on overhauling the flight models in Star Citizen, with different ships having different control mechanics and handling depending on if they’re flying within a planet’s atmosphere or if they’re flying out in space.

You can see some of the new features in place via the gameplay demonstration that took place during CitizenCon, which you can check out below courtesy of Play4Games.

We see one of the capital ships briefly on display at a port, and then one of the procedural missions where the player has to examine a downed satellite.

In the demonstration they reveal that the fire is just kind of there for aesthetics, but in later builds they will make the fire mechanics a systematic mechanic, which will eventually zap oxygen from the nearby area much like a real fire, and it will do damage over time to the player-character and NPCs. The environmental hazards won’t just start and stop with fire, it will also include acid, lava, and other hazards.

Also, full locomotion within the environment featuring parkour-style movement systems will be fully implemented, which have been demonstrated as part of the weekly Around The Verse episodes.

You can check out more of the development of the game and the roadmap so far by visiting the official Star Citizen website.