The ROCKFISH Games team continues to work from their home offices on EVERSPACE™ 2, which is scheduled to launch early access on Steam in December 2020. In addition to insights into the game world, which has been significantly expanded compared to its predecessor, the Hamburg-based team is giving the EVERSPACE community a first taste of planet areas, as well as further details about player ships and devices.
As described in detail in an earlier production update, all player ships in EVERSPACE™ 2 are based on a modular component system, which allows a large number of different ship models consisting of hulls, wings, stern/stern engines, cockpits, and attachments. In order to avoid having only one set of generic-looking player ships, the team has spent significant time and effort to define specific design rules for main and sub ship classes and their ship components, so that a player can immediately identify which class or subclass a ship model belongs to.
Thanks to new texturing and modelling techniques, players can also enjoy much higher pro-pixel detail on the outer and inner surfaces of the ships. In addition, each player ship can be individually designed using a primary, secondary, and tertiary color, which also influences the color of ship light elements.
Devices in the original EVERSPACE™ were modules with active or passive effects, which could be looted from various enemies and installed into your own ship. While active devices had to be activated selectively, installed passive devices offered permanent status bonuses and other advantages. There are certain similarities to character skills that are common in traditional RPGs and ROCKFISH Games have refined this idea further in EVERSPACE™ 2 by linking devices directly to player progress. Once devices are found, they remain unlocked and can be installed as desired. Passive devices from the original game, on the other hand, are being replaced by equipment such as armor and energy cores.
Newly added to EVERSPACE™ are Device Modes, which can be used to configure devices in different ways. A maximum of three modes can be enabled per Device, but only one can be activated at a time. This allows players to customize their ship according to their taste and playstyle through complex synergies between devices, modes, and equipment. To unlock modes, special tokens are required, which can be collected by leveling up or as rewards for missions.
Exploring new and strange planets has been one of the biggest dreams of many space game fans. In space simulations, where exploration for hundreds or even thousands of hours is a main pillar of the game, there is no way around procedural world generation. However, procedural generation can have a negative impact on gameplay and environmental design as well as on the implementation of a story campaign with cutscenes and scripted events. In order to provide the best gaming experience and to give each location relevance, EVERSPACE™ 2 will only have a small number of hand-designed planet locations which can be perfectly staged for players to explore down to the smallest detail.
On May 1st, the ROCKFISH Games team will show all-new planet locations in-game as well as Ship Devices and Device Modes in action on Twitch, YouTube, and Mixer from 8:00 pm to 10:00 pm CEST / 2:00 pm to 4:00 pm EDT.
About ROCKFISH Games GmbH
ROCKFISH Games is an independent games studio based in Hamburg, Germany which specializes in high-quality 3D action video games for PC and console, based on Unreal Engine 4. It was founded by mobile games veterans Michael Schade and Christian Lohr, who have been joint entrepreneurs in the 3D graphics space for over 25 years. As founders and managers of Fishlabs Entertainment, they spearheaded 3D mobile gaming for almost a decade before they took on a new adventure with ROCKFISH Games. Meanwhile, the team consists of 20 full-time employees, mostly coming from the dev team of the wildly popular original Galaxy on Fire mobile games series.
