Summary
- Everspace 2's handcrafted levels offer consistently tight gameplay and easy navigation, leading players to puzzles and hidden loot through clever clues.
- The creative level design in handcrafted areas, such as an underwater space station, makes each location unique and exciting to reach.
- While players may eventually run out of new things to see, Everspace 2 prioritizes quality over quantity, aiming to provide a satisfying experience even after 100 hours of gameplay.
Everspace 2's developers at Rockfish Games faced an important decision when they decided to make Everspace's sequel an open-world space game: either procedurally generate an endless galaxy true to the vastness of space, or scale down to a smaller number of bespoke locations that are guaranteed to be interesting. Everspace 2 went with the latter and it appears to have benefited strongly from taking this route.
The Best War Games sat down with Rockfish Games CEO and co-founder Michael Schade to discuss how the team weighed the decision between procedural generation and handcrafted spaces, and he noted that there is a wide range of pros and cons to both approaches. When it came to Everspace 2, taking the time to put together a handcrafted universe led to more consistently tight gameplay, more easily navigable spaces, and an aesthetic quality in every location that might only occasionally show up in a procedurally generated setting.
Everspace 2's Handcrafted Areas Are Unique and Deliberate
One of the key benefits of handcrafted levels is that level designers get to do their jobs. Solid level design involves countless techniques for making an area both interesting to play and easy to navigate, and this is perhaps more apparent in space games than anywhere else due to their size and omnidirectional nature. Everspace 2 is riddled with puzzles and hidden loot, and it's clear that the level designers took care to lead players toward those locations through subtle clues. Blinking lights, a trail of wreckage, or the direction that a cave exit is facing might all lead players to the next point of interest in clever ways that a randomized arrangement simply can't.
We decided to only have a few planets, it’s going to be a restricted area, but it's handcrafted. Then you get the higher visual quality and at the same time, you can design the environment so that the gameplay really matters. You have landmarks, you have orientation, all these kinds of things.
Our creative director, for instance, is an architect, and there's one space station on Drake on the water planet that's half sunk in the water and he came up with the idea. “Instead of having a floating space station, how about it's a wreck and it's half underwater and then we have areas where if you go through the space station, you have to go underwater and then go out of the water?”
That makes it interesting. This is unique. There's only this one location, and this is our approach.
Another advantage of the handcrafted approach is that developers can get incredibly creative with level design. Schade pointed out a station on a water planet that has players occasionally going underwater as they travel through the partially submerged station, and it's unique ideas like this that make each new location exciting to reach. Although one draw of procedurally generated levels is wondering what strange thing might come next, that same feeling is still there in handcrafted games when the level design is interesting enough.
Everspace 2 Shoots for Quality Over Quantity
Schade pointed out that the downside to all this love and care is that eventually, players will run out of new things to see. In reality, only a very small subset of players end up seeing everything in the first place, so Rockfish figures it's best to go with quality over quantity. As often as games are praised for having incredibly massive worlds with multiple hundreds of hours of content, it's rare for players to have the time to appreciate all of it.
The downside is it is not endless. Once you've seen it all after 100 hours, you're pretty much done. But to be honest, if somebody plays Everspace 2 for 100 hours or so then we're very, very happy and there's a good indication that they might buy our next game. So we’re going to stick to that. Whatever we do, we won't have a game betting heavily on procedural generation. That won’t happen. That's not our jam.
That's not to say that Everspace 2 lacks content, however: players can easily burn 100 hours before having seen all there is to see and there's always plenty of fun to be had experimenting with new build ideas. Rockfish Games is also gearing up to release a paid expansion that should bring plenty of additional content for players who can't get enough looter shooter space action.
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OpenCritic Reviews
- Top Critic Avg: 83 /100 Critics Rec: 94%
- Released
- April 6, 2023
- ESRB
- t
- Developer(s)
- ROCKFISH Games
- Publisher(s)
- ROCKFISH Games
- Engine
- Unreal Engine 5
WHERE TO PLAY
EVERSPACE™ 2 is a fast-paced single-player spaceship shooter with worthwhile exploration in space and on planets, tons of loot, RPG elements, mining, and crafting. Experience a thoughtful sci-fi story, set in a vivid, handcrafted open world full of secrets, puzzles, and perils.
In the campaign, you will make some friends with their own story to tell. They will join you on side missions and provide certain benefits in the endgame, where vicious encounters and brutal challenges will stand between you and that next epic loot drop.
EMBARK ON AN EXCITING JOURNEY
Discover alien species, unveil mysteries, find hidden treasures, and defend your valuables against outlaw gangs. But don’t get cocky: there will be some high-risk/high-reward areas waiting for you where grabbing that ultra-special gear and getting out alive will require some serious piloting skills and all your talent for improvisation.
- Genre(s)
- Sci-Fi
