Today was the first episode of Happy Hour by CIG. Whether or not it will replace RTV is unknown, but will feature live gameplay with some Q&A in between.

The show today featured live gameplay of Star Marine on build 2.6.0 which is currently on live servers. Joined by them today was streamer Myre who originated from DayZ and found out about Star Citizen through hearing about people talk about it in game. Also on the show was Todd Papy, Design Director at Foundry 42 Frankfurt and Producer, Alex Marschal from Frankfurt as well. The show mainly consisted of trash talking, banter, and general conversation, but also included some Q&A which I've highlighted below, enjoy!

2.6.1. is currently being worked on, they'll be coming out with a schedule like we saw for 2.6.0 sometime in the next week or two.

[Is there a backstory to the Demien level?] The backstory was that this station was taken by pirates in system that had been overrun and a massacre happened where blood was splattered all over the walls and the Marines were sent to clean the system up. Eventually they will be adding those blood effects to the level.

[Blood in Zero-G] It will exist, but there are things that take priority first over other features.

As features come out they’ll either take things from Star Marine to the PU and vice versa.

[Gadgets] They will be adding gadgets, but one of the important things is adding reviving as they can then turn off spawning. With Gadgets Todd talked about wanting to make them more modular. An example being taking EMP and putting it on a grenade or attaching it to a drone, and giving players freedom to customise their gadgets as they please.

[Game modes] Todd would love to add an asymmetrical mode that adds vehicles and ships to make a hybrid between Star Marine and Arena Commander.

[Ballistic Sniper Rifle] It’s in the works. They’re designing different ammo types so that firing a different type of round makes a difference in what armour you encounter or how you decide to suit up and defend yourself.

[The Difference Heavy armour will make in SM] Todd has to get it approved first from Chris, but they way they want armour to work is light armour is fast and mobile on ground, whereas heavy armour is slow and cumbersome. In EVA it’s the opposite because the heavy armour can equip better thrusters due to the extra power the suit can generate, and as such the light armour is slower in EVA because it doesn’t have the same capability. Medium armour is the jack of all trades essentially.

[Feedback from SM has been that it’s quite fast, thoughts?] They agree because certain features are missing like Stamina which affects breathing and oxygen. Limb damage penalties are coming as well such as blurry vision or recoil increase from damage to your arms. The knockdowns, revives are other features as well which will go a long way to slowing gameplay down as they’ll take out respawns when revives are implemented in SM.

Different armours, Light, Medium, Heavy will affect gameplay as well.

They fixed an issue where the armour soaked up too much damage which will go into 2.6.1.

[REC for SM] They’re working on implementing that just the way it does in AC. Eventually they’ll have REC only be available in SM/AC and UEC will be for the PU

[How do the new ranks work?] It’s just by score for now.

[AI in Star Marine] It’s something they’ve talked about and have it be more of a way to test things that the internal team may not be able to see, but it’s not ready for primetime yet.

[Will there ever be a spectator camera for private matches for tournaments?] It’s a good idea, but they haven’t really talked about that as they’re focused on other features currently.

[How does Radar work currently?] It doesn’t work to its full potential yet, there’s much more tuning involved to getting it to where they want it to be.

[Is there a story behind Marines VS Outlaws?] It started out as what they wanted Marines and Outlaws to look like in Star Citizen.

Down the road, players will be able to fully customize their armour how they want it to look and feel. They would love players to be able have colour customisation on armour in SM, but that’s far down the line and their focus is on features at the moment.