Today, Star Citizen announced it plans to release Star Citizen Alpha 3.5 this weekend to all backers. Star Citizen is a massively multiplayer online experience that empowers players to build a life in the stars while engaging in first-person shooter and vehicle battles, exploring massive celestial bodies, and discovering adventure in an ever-expanding sandbox galaxy. Players can join and play Star Citizen with a $45 starter ship, and numerous ships are available for purchase in-game with in-game currency.

Alpha 3.5 continues to deliver on Cloud Imperium’s promise to release new content on a quarterly release schedule for Star Citizen, and adds many new and exciting features to the game, including newly playable female characters, the city-planet ArcCorp and its two moons, an entirely re-worked flight model that differs in-atmosphere gravitational physics from space flight, new CIG Character Customization Technology that creates for endless character customization options, numerous new missions, ships and weapons for players to enjoy and dozens of quality of life and performance improvements.

“3.5 is one of our biggest updates so far. Aside from releasing a completely overhauled space and atmospheric flight model, we’re adding the dense urban planet ArcCorp, which we showed a prototype of at CitizenCon 2017, as well as delivering the revolutionary Gene Splicing system we developed with 3Lateral that allows you to blend features from various characters to create a unique character, not unlike how a person inherits and combines features of their parents. The advantage of this approach is you always get realistic looking players, not immersion breaking ‘monsters’ that sometimes can be created using more traditional techniques,” said Chris Roberts, CEO, Cloud Imperium. “But for me, the headline feature we’re adding is playable female characters. This has been a long time coming, and it was a huge undertaking. It involved creating an entirely new “rig” for female characters to make them physiologically distinct from the male characters, something most games don’t try to attempt for player characters. Once we finalized the female character, we had to retrofit our entire universe: ships, animations, clothing, armor, and weapons to make sure they all worked with the female character rig as well as the male rig.”

Here’s a look at Alpha 3.5’s huge new features:

• Playable Female Characters – at long last, Star Citizen adds playable female characters. Implementing playable females meant re-working nearly every interactable object in the game for use with an additional player model, from seating to carrying to shooting and piloting.

• ArcCorp – a sprawling urban planet covered by city space, ArcCorp features the new Area 18 Landing Zone, where players will find a neon lit cityscape teeming with life.

• New Flight Model – an all new in-game flight control system that applies to all ships in Star Citizen, incorporating a total overhaul to the entire flight experience and adds gravity to in-atmosphere planetary bodies. This New Flight Model is also applied to all AI controlled pilots in Star Citizen.

• CIG Character Customization Technology – An updated system for customizing your player character in the Persistent Universe, which includes new customization technology empowering players to select from up to three source heads and blend each of their various facial features into a fully customized character. This replaces Star Citizen’s previous 100-plus character permutations with a near-infinite pool of character customizations that is used for both player and NPC characters. All customizations are available for both male and the all-new female player character selections.

• FoIP + VoIP Improvements – New video streaming technology which allows players to participate in video comms calls no matter how far away they are in the Persistent Universe. Previously, as other players were “streamed out” from server clients, they would no longer be eligible as targets for a comms call. This update enables players to call anyone in the Star Citizen Persistent Universe through tech that evaluates your client and streams to the other party’s client as video data.

• New Environmental AI Bounty Hunting – AI bounty hunters will now attack players with bounties placed on their heads, and AI security forces will attack players with high crime stats.

• The MISC Reliant Series – with three new variants, including the Tana – a combal model, the Sen, designed for scientific research and the Mako, a “news van,” styled ship with multiple mounted cameras

• 300i rework – a newly re-worked and revitalized version of one of Star Citizen’s original ships, the 300i is Origin Jumpworks premiere luxury spacecraft that can hold its own across a multitude of situations like racing, dogfighting or just exploring the universe, in style.

• Anvil Hornet Heartseeker – a new Hornet variant with top of the line military spec components

• RSI Ursa Rover – a four wheeled Rover, this special commemorative edition was in celebration of “Stella Fortuna,” Star Citizen’s in-universe version of St. Patrick’s Day.

• Two new ship weapons including the Banu Singe Tachyon cannon and the Gallenson Tactical Systems’ GT-870 Tarantula series of ballistic cannons

• Two new FPS weapons including the Gemini’s S71 assault rifle and the Kastak Arms’ Coda ballistic pistol

• Projectile Manager – new tech that re-tools how the game handles fired projectiles, dramatically reducing CPU workload and improving performance during Star Citizen’s hectic air and land battles

• Star Marine Improvements – introduction of a new Elimination mode map, Demien Comms, and a re-worked Echo-11 map, with new layout and traversal options. In the Last Stand game mode, a new Control Point Mechanic has been added which adds and improves gameplay and adds readability.

• Arena Commander Improvements – improved UI updates that better communicate kills, deaths and scoring to the player.

To learn more about Star Citizen, visit www.robertspaceindustries.com. For more art from Alpha 3.5, visit https://www.dropbox.com/sh/wccqn33bzfmaqi7/AADGZxLiQN-bpvcuRHhoMaWua?dl=0.