Two years ago, Everspace 2 officially entered Early Access, which gave players an early look into the series’s new space exploring approach. With the game’s 1.0 launch now here, there’s plenty to discuss before we blast off into the unknown for the first time.
At PAX East last month, we spoke with Erik Schrader, community ambassador for Rockfish Games, about how Everspace 2 has changed since it hit Early Access, the challenges in switching from a roguelike to an open map, and much more.
MMORPG.com: 1.0 has been a long time coming, I remember writing a preview for the Early Access build in 2021. How excited is the team to finally get that 1.0 build out?
Erik Schrader: It's a double-edged sword, really. We've been given so many new opportunities by going through the Early Access progress, and getting all this amazing feedback from our community. However, we don't want to hit the realm of "scope creep." So, a lot of our vision for the game has been finalized, we've pullied it in and refined it, and it's all of its coming to fruition. Some ideas did have get put to the wayside to get to the state we are in now. We're looking forward to releasing it, but we are missing a couple of things where we think, man, if we had just a little more time, we could have done this. Overall, yeah, we're ready to push the button.
How has the game progressed since the first foray into Early Access two years ago?
This game has transformed so much over the years. If I would have seen two years ago the state the game is in now, I would have been mind-blown. We have just expanded on everything, from ship designs and classes and diversity of equipment, to how device upgrades make an actual impact, how commodities can now be traded and sold in a meaningful way, and more. Even though we're not a proper space sim--that's never been our focus--but with all of these systems coming together, and over 120 handcrafted locations to explore, it is wild.
When you have something like outer space – obviously there is a real galaxy that you can pull inspiration from but if you can basically build whatever you want – is it at all overwhelming the kind of creative freedom you have in building something as vast as outer space in your own way?
I don't think so, I think it's actually the opposite. There's this element of "you can go anywhere and do what you want," but we also have that control of creating the limitations of just how far that goes, right? Instead of it restricting us, we can say "this is what we want to use, "and this is where we're going to draw the line."
By doing 120 handcrafted locations, we can make them all within six solar systems, and then we can make those solar systems feel alive and vibrant with meaningful exploration. Instead of thinking, "because it's vast space, we have to have 1000 star systems and 50 billion alien races," we don't have to do that. We can set those boundaries, and it feels good because we know where we want it to start, and we know where we want it to stop.
In mentioning all of these different worlds and having control over them, I have to ask: there's a very notable example in No Man's Sky which offered similar promises of space exploration and different unique worlds. How important was it for the team to avoid falling into the same pitfalls, and what sort of stopgaps were put in place to avoid it?
No Man's Sky, I would actually argue, isn't a "space" game. I say this because while it does a beautiful job of exploring worlds, creating bases, managing settlements and starships and exosuits, and all of these other elements, the only "space" part is traveling, going from one planet to another. If you've played No Man's Sky, the combat in outer space is basically holding the back button and pressing fire until they die. That's it. It's very basic. So is it a space game? Because you're doing so much on the worlds' surfaces…I'm not sure.
Here, this is a "space" game, because you are in space, in a spaceship, the entire time. It's an arcade-style shooter where you're pulling loot to your ship, building yourself up, and blowing other stuff up.
Let's get into the narrative around Everspace 2. At a high level, what is this game about? What are you doing? What is, for lack of a better term, the elevator pitch?
So this is a direct continuation of the story of Everspace 1, it's a direct sequel. Minor spoilers: you're a clone. However, your cycle is broken. If you die, you're done for good, you're not going to be reborn as a new clone. That was a feature of the first Everspace's roguelike mechanics; when you died, you just became a new clone and the story continued from there. Here, in the persistent, open-world environment and all of these locations, you are forming your own destiny. You're learning about relationships, and what it means to be a person with a life to live, since you're only, technically, about two years old, with memories that are fragmented of a previous life.
Those who are affected by motion sickness will most likely have trouble getting into this game. Has the team tried to mitigate that, and if so how? What other accessibility options are available?
So I want to be blunt out of the gate: what we're designing here, more or less, is a "twitch shooter. If someone who has bad motion sickness is trying to play our game, I think they're choosing the wrong game right out of the gate.
That being said, we do have a number of accessibility features to soften that blow. Personally, the first time I loaded the game, I went to settings and turned off camera shake and motion blur. We have those options here. We also have a variety of colorblindness options that you can choose from; if you have like red/green or orange/blue color deficit, we have settings for that. We actually had someone who's colorblind come play the game, and he was mentioning how it's really hard for him to see. We asked if he had tried these settings, and when he adjusted he said "wow, this is perfect."
When you're developing a game that's more open as opposed to the roguelike element, how does the mindset change? What sort of challenges did the team find itself facing that were different from before?
Procedural generation in Everspace 1 was vital, it was the entirety of the game. We wanted to be emergent; every time you played, you got a little something different. Different weaponry, a different ship, and you have to think on the fly and improvise. That's the challenge; chasing the high score until the end of the run, and if you lose? Okay, just try again. If we go super basic, it's like freakin' Pac Man, right? You want to try and get the highest score and find the best routes…well, maybe that's too basic.
But now with Everspace 2, we're presented with an entirely new challenge. As I mentioned, we have over 120 handcrafted locations; that is not a small number. That takes time. However, we did not want a persistent game world this time, where you're going to these various locations that are just randomly generated, because that would create points of interest that have zero meaning. When you see something handcrafted, the level design is telling you, "hey, player, there's something over here, can you find it?" That's what allows us to have almost 90 to 100 hours of gameplay throughout all of these locations across the game, even though the story will be finished up probably in about 30 to 40 hours.
Does the team have more fun in this scenario where they have more creative output? It may take more time, but they're able to be a little more unique in what they make.
I think it goes both ways, depending on who you ask. Some people really love that and want to make more, some people don't and say "no, let's finish the game."
We've got brilliant minds on the team, they are dedicated to the cause. We do wear a lot of hats, and we exchange them sometimes. I can't tell you one person worked on only one level; we all came together to make it possible. Through that, we want to make sure that they're all meaningful environments, and we want them to be fun. If we have another idea we ask "can we put that in?" If yes, great. If not, we'll do something else.
