V1.0 Out On PC | Looking Back | What’s New in 1.0 | Outlook | Scope Changes
What Comes Next?
We’ve made no secret that there will be more EVERSPACE 2. We’ve got big plans, but for now, let’s talk about the year ahead.
First up, now that 1.0 is in the hands of all you PC players, our immediate focus is to ensure there are no reports of critical or game-breaking bugs. In the event there are any, or we see a slew of fixes we can make in a short timeframe, we’ll release a patch to take care of the problem.
Beyond any immediate hotfix needs (the game is in a great state, so we don’t anticipate a need for a hotfix, but EVERSPACE 2 is a very complex game, after all), we’ll be turning our sights to release on Xbox Series X/S and PlayStation 5. We don’t have a release date to share just yet, but we are on track for launch on these platforms this summer.
We’ve partnered with Maximum Games to produce a physical edition for both platforms, which will come in a Steelbook case along with a small artbook and digital soundtrack download.
As development progresses on the console edition, we’ll be planning out the contents of EVERSPACE 2’s major free update and what will be in our first paid expansion.
Major update 1 will bring any additional voiced languages we produce for the console edition to PC and new gear, bug fixes, and more customization options. The team is busy planning this out, and we’ll be sure to share more on this ahead of time.
The German government has been very generous with its new grant program focused on supporting the video game industry in our country. Back in January, we shared that we were given 1.65 million Euros to help produce the first major expansion for EVERSPACE 2, and we plan to match that with our own funds. While our creative team isn’t yet ready to share what this new adventure will be, safe to say this will not be a small expansion.
Scope Changes
Now, with all those great additions, we also need to talk about features that didn’t make it into the final game. This might ruffle some feathers, but this is always part of a multi-year-long development where things can change due to unforeseeable technical issues, budget constraints, or changes in the creative vision.
While EVERSPACE 2 became a much bigger game than we initially anticipated, there are still things we would have loved to have more of or be included at all, like more item sets, more catalysts, cockpit customization, and difficulty settings affecting not just stats.
While additional item sets and catalysts are planned for the free major update later this year, we decided to add the option to change the tint of the cockpit windows and engine trails as well as put a pilot model body in the pilot seat even though we now might get complaints that the character is not animated—but it looks much better when taking screenshots, so we think that’s a significant plus overall. The visual impact of the external effects is far greater than we could have done with mere cockpit customization.
In the original EVERSPACE, we had difficulty settings that went way beyond tweaking enemy hit points and damage output, so we wanted to have that in the sequel, too. However, since we dropped the linear roguelike formula for an open-world action RPG approach with looter-shooter mechanics and nine player ship classes instead of three, game balancing became by an order of magnitude more complex, so we had to cut a few corners here. However, we’re very happy with the end result, so not a loss, at least in our book.
However, the biggest change is that the Leviathan and the Dreadnought that we teased with concept art will not come with the free update but the paid expansion in the second half of 2024. Both have been rough ideas at the beginning that turned out to be really hard to implement in a meaningful way without having a proper storyline in place and also come with proper boss mechanics and/or worthwhile replayability. In other words, instead of adding just two very expensive set pieces to an already meaty base game, we rather turn them into iconic endgame activities in the paid expansion that we’ll be working on for at least another year (it’s also the only way to make those part of the German government grant covering 40% of the development cost of the paid expansion as their rules say we must not have started with development of what’s going to be part of the new product).
The latest change is that we won’t have native Linux support even though we’ve committed to that many times. We did spend quite a lot of time and effort on a native Linux build. Still, it turned out that due to the broken and incomplete nature of the Vulkan implementation in Unreal Engine 4, our graphically complex game runs at 50% - 80% performance compared to simply running the DX12 Windows version in Proton. At the same time, some features like SSGI cause frequent crashes due to video RAM leaks.
After talking to our friends at Epic Games, there’s little hope that these issues will be fixed in UE4 since all their focus is now on UE5. As probably everyone will understand, fixing source code of the engine ourselves is completely out of question for us—even if we had the development resources, it would make future updates even more cumbersome as we’d have to build a custom engine while maintaining two separate code bases (a painful lesson we had to learn from native Linux support in the first EVERSPACE).
However, we’re still working on optimizing the experience using Proton for Linux pilots nonetheless. Any backers who pledged on the PC version not being happy with this solution can request a full refund on Kickstarter, no questions asked (refunded keys will be revoked). Native Mac OS support is next on our list, followed by Steam Deck optimization.
Last but not least, we also have a few features that the community begged us to have in the game over and over again, but we turned those down for various technical and/or game design reasons; until we didn’t, and now they are in the v1.0 release: the aforementioned pilot body in the cockpit, naming saves (on PC), and the possibility to continue old saves even though we cannot offer technical support and pilots would miss out on certain content/features that have been added between the Early Access launch and now—use at your own risk, you have been warned!
![[Fe]LiX](/data/avatars/l/1/1990.jpg?1686334151){kind=avatar}
Ma in due parole di cosa si tratta, una specie di Elite Dangerous un pò più arcade (e single player)?
