Rockfish Game's roguelike Everspace was an instant classic thanks to its addicting gameplay and stunning visuals, yet its ambitious open-world sequel Everspace 2 has still managed to soar beyond expectations. Packing roughly 100 hours of action-packed looter shooter gameplay across a gorgeous open galaxy, Everspace 2 channels everything fun about games like Destiny and Diablo while keeping its space controls cozily accessible to anyone who has played a first-person shooter.
The Best War Games sat down with Rockfish Games CEO and co-founder Michael Schade to take a deep dive into the game's development process, design pillars, and key inspirations. Schade spoke about how the idea for a space looter shooter came about, how various mechanics like puzzles, boss fights, and level scaling were approached, and he also spoke about the game's plans such as its Unreal Engine 5 upgrade and its upcoming major expansion. This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Everspace 2: Beginners Tips and Tricks
Everspace 2 has a lot of systems and features, and combat can be quite challenging, so this guide will provide some tips and tricks for new players.
Q: Although Everspace 2 is a fundamentally different game from the original roguelike Everspace, were there any concepts that you still wanted to try and bring over into the sequel?
Schade: Good first question! So why did we do a “non-sequel?” After all, Everspace 1 was a success and then we’re dumping the core gameplay loop and everybody’s wondering, “Why are you doing that?”
So when we were done with Everspace 1 we also had the Encounters expansion and we crawled through something like 30,000 comments on social media and got the feedback. It's basically regarding the game design: the biggest complaint was, “Oh, it's a roguelike, I would rather have something open-world like Freelancer-style.” And even many people who loved Everspace 1 said, “Oh, that's an unusual roguelike. I didn't expect it. I like it. I usually hate roguelikes, but I would rather have it be an open-world space RPG.”
We didn't have the budget to create the open-world space adventure we’d originally dreamt of back then when we did Everspace 1. We had just rebooted the studio, did our first Kickstarter, and then the total development budget in the end was like five million euros. You don't do an open-world at least AA-quality space game for 5 million. So that's that.
Because we had some money in the bank after the success of our first title, we could work on a prototype and then the second Kickstarter to see if there's really enough appetite for an open-world space RPG or space combat game. The team came up with the idea to have this Diablo core loop with this endless hunt for better gear and legendaries and whatnot. To be brutally honest, I wasn't too convinced back then, but they had a good sense.
When the second Kickstarter was a success, we thought, “We have something here” and we went for it. Then our Early Access launch was a big success in January 2021. We were number one globally, even higher than Cyberpunk 2077 which just came out and had its issues, but also higher than Rust, I think. People said, “Whoa, what is this, where's this coming from?” So they immediately started writing about it and then we kept on going.
We have the feeling that we should keep something in there like that “one more run” feeling from Everspace 1, this immediacy of space action. So our promise is you start the game and within a minute or less, you have a big explosion on your screen. We always wanted that. I think this is the strongest core pillar of the Everspace series or franchise if you want to call it that.
The Everspace games are very intuitive, you can pick them up and play, and it's shooter controls on PC. This is why it's more accessible than a hardcore space sim where typically you need to have HOTAS or HOSAS set up. It plays more like a first-person shooter but in space and we kept that.
We still wanted players to be able to go into areas where there are new things every time, and this is why we came up with these signals when you fly through hyperspace. That's a different game scene, so to speak, and then you have these signals that pop up. Those locations are procedurally generated using pre-calculated global illumination. This is why it doesn't look procedurally generated because the lighting is not real-time and also uses the props from handcrafted locations so it’s a mix.
In terms of “Do we miss anything from Everspace 1?” I think there are still a few weapons that the fans of Everspace 1 are keen to see in Everspace 2, but we're working on a few more updates so there will be more. I don't want to promise that everything is going to be there, but we're working on more content coming this year.
Q: Speaking of that Diablo-style core loop, how did you approach the concept of “builds” and “classes” in a game composed entirely of spaceships?
Schade: That's a big one, of course, and funnily enough, our combat designer is also our lead artist. So Marco, who's the guy behind all these pretty backdrops, visual effects, planetary locations, and whatnot, also designs all the weapons, all the stats, and the ultimate abilities for the nine ship classes that we have.
This is a really, really big feature, and honestly, without doing Early Access, we wouldn't be able to have made such a big game with the kind of quality that we have. In two years and three months, we sold 250,000 copies during Early Access, and then you get feedback from let's say 10% of the audience, and then again, 1% are those super hardcore players that come up with the craziest builds.
In the end, we put I think about 20 top pilots under NDA and they get the latest version and test it and they're still testing today, they're still finding bugs and still find things that are completely overpowered. Then we either fix it, or sometimes we say “Why not have super overpowered builds? Sometimes the game should just be fun, right?”
So long story short, we're a fairly small team. We're just 25 people. And a lot of people think “So how do you make such a big game with only 25 people?” And it's a combination of factors. The team has been working together for more than 20 years, always on space combat games. So that helps a lot. But it's really Early Access working with a community. In other interviews, I’ve said, “I would never do a game without doing Early Access.”
Q: Can you recall any interesting builds that those players discovered that really surprised the team?
Schade: I don't have a perfect example off the top of my head, but with the Vindicator class where you have these drones that are flying around, I think there were some very funky things that could happen since they can get stuck in geometry because we have the 3D pathfinding.
We're using Unreal Engine 4 – the vanilla version, so nothing special – so the 3D pathfinding is code that we developed in-house, and then we not only have open space but you can also go underground. For that, our technical director put a lot of effort into making sure that drones don't get stuck and have the right collision detection in 3D space.
Making space combat games technology-wise is really challenging because we have these humongous distances and you need to make sure that hitscan weapons still hit from a 10-kilometer distance. At the same time, if you want to fly into a cave, you will need to be able to maneuver in the sub-one-meter space.
Even with Unreal Engine 4, you have float, the number space is not precise enough to capture the space in numbers that we have to cover. With Unreal Engine 5 they have double float so for our next title, it won't be an issue anymore, but for this one, it was. This is why we have two scenes. We have one scene when you're in open space and one scene when you are on a planet, and then there's another in Supralight – what we call the interstellar travel. It's a completely different scene, and this is why we can cover these distances. Then once you get into the combat, we throw everything away and load the new scene. This is also the reason why we still have these very, very short loading screens.
This was a more technical answer to that. It's a complex thing with all the 3D collision and whatnot.
So I think one of the funniest bugs that we have there is this outlaw destroyer capital ship. If the physics gets a nudge in the wrong direction, it starts dancing in space and collides with asteroids and everybody is having a laugh. We still don’t have this fully under control. It's madness in space.
Q: As we’re talking about Unreal Engine, Everspace 2 is upgrading to Unreal Engine 5. What are some of your goals with this upgrade? Are there certain things you’re excited about with the new technology?
Schade: We're migrating to Unreal Engine 5 primarily to future-proof the game because we want to have at least one more free update that's coming in spring, and then we have a major expansion coming at the end of this year or maybe early next year. We have to see our goals – you know how it is with release dates, but we're aiming for winter 2024.
And at the same time, Epic Games doesn't work on Unreal Engine 4 anymore. There are still some issues like the issues with HDR support are still “experimental” – that's what they call it. So it's not working perfectly and we would love to fix that and a few other things.
If you look further down the line, there might be new consoles coming out, and they won't support it with Unreal Engine 4. So this is the primary reason why we’re migrating to Unreal Engine 5. I know that people get excited about Lumen and Nanite and Chaos, but it's very, very unlikely that we will have these kinds of new features in Everspace 2.
Firstly, the game was not made for that. We would have to come up with new systems that really make sense to use these new features. Secondly, in terms of performance, you can imagine if you use these new features, then you might lose quite a lot of users who are able to play the game, then we migrate to Unreal Engine 5, and obviously, they would hate that because they already paid for the game. So even if we would want to use these new features, if the performance would take a major hit, we cannot do that.
We have to make sure that even if we're migrating to Unreal Engine 5, the performance is at least very close to what it was before and ideally even better. We have to see.
We shared how many bugs we're still working on and that was just an excerpt there. There's some more crazy things that are broken. Save games, for instance: save games didn't work anymore. We had to come up with a new solution. It’s a long story, but it has to do with how we handle save games. It's not that Unreal Engine 4 and 5 save games are not compatible, but the way we designed it to make sure that we saved the whole status within these humongous locations in space we were like “Oh, damn, our save game approach doesn't work anymore.” So we had to come up with a solution for that. It's a lot of work.
Q: If I recall correctly, one of the issues with shipping a native Linux version of Everspace 2 had to do with Unreal Engine 4. Will the migration to 5 resolve that, or is it still too early to say?
Schade: That's a good question. We get this from the fans saying, “I want to have a native build. I don't care about Proton and whatnot.”
To be honest, it's unlikely because it's not a really straightforward path, and it's not just the engine. Typically you will run into issues with playback with videos, then shaders have to be built differently, then Vulkan is a whole different kind of thing.
And let's be honest, Linux is just one or two percent market share, if not less. For a small team, we simply don't have the capacity. We're super happy with Proton and we have a lot of Linux fans, even hardcore Linux fans, who are very happy. At the end of the day, our promise is not to make native Linux software, our promise was that the game runs on a Linux system, and it does. So I understand that there are some hardcore fans out there who might say, “You promised a native Linux build in your Kickstarter and if you don't deliver that, you lied to us!”
Technically, if you really take verbatim what we said, okay, you can make a point. But at the end of the day, we're a game developer, and we are not a native Linux software developer. If you're not happy with that, we offered everybody in the Kickstarter campaign and said “Hey, if Proton is not good for you, here's your refund.” But we're not going to bend over backward to make a native software for Linux. That's a commercial disaster for us. We're not doing that.
Q: Everspace 2 features boss fights, which is somewhat unusual in space combat games. How do you approach boss design in space?
Schade: From the get-go, we wanted to have these epic space fights and not just have a big bullet sponge. You can fly into certain things with the drone technique and whatnot. I can share that with the paid expansion, there will be some really crazy stuff in terms of boss fights, and very new mechanics.
The thing is there are great space games out there like Elite: Dangerous and Star Citizen. At some point, Star Citizen will be ready. Maybe never. I don't know. It's a big thing, right? People are getting excited. We're really rooting for Chris Roberts and his team. They supported us in our first Kickstarter, actually. Chris Roberts made a shout-out to his community to support our Kickstarter, and then 2000 backers from the Star Citizen community came over and backed us. So we were very grateful.
Everspace 2: How to Set Up a HOTAS
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That said, it’s a niche genre, so if you make a space game, you will need to find your own approach, you need to have your own identity, you need to have something that you stand for. The one thing is again, the accessibility: it's very action-focused, but this can get boring quickly if it's just over and over again. You need to have your highs, right? This is why we decided in each task system, there should be at least one big boss battle, and obviously, that goes along with the storyline.
In hindsight, we wish we would have had more time for that. I think we could do even better, but we're pleased with the result. It's really these pinnacle moments like “Oh, man, I don't know how to defeat that boss.” We didn't want to go as crazy as in a soulslike, because, again, you already have the maneuvering in 3D space which is for a lot of people, a huge challenge. At the same time, we want to broaden the audience, but we cannot go too hardcore. If we open up the approach by having intuitive controls with first-person shooter controls to make it a more accessible space game and then at the same time we throw very complex mechanics towards the player, we think that would have backfired. So this is why we didn't go too crazy with the boss fights.
But now with the expansion, if somebody likes that and wants more of that, if you want to go a bit more crazy, then the expansion will have at least two major things that I think will knock your socks off.
Q: Another thing that stands out in Everspace 2 is its puzzle mechanics which are a contemplative and peaceful change of pace. How do you approach puzzle designs that can span these massive spaces?
Schade: Yeah, puzzles and space. Not everybody's a fan. If we browse the feedback on Steam, “Too many puzzles” comes up quite a few times. To be fair, we agree.
When we did Early Access, we launched the game with two star systems out of a total of six. And then the second one is for the end of the story. So there were six explorable star systems and we had to add enough content to make it worthwhile to keep playing the game until the next beat comes out and that was typically in a three to four months cadence. This is why there are unexpectedly a lot of puzzles in there.
The downside is at some point, having the same mechanic over and over again gets tedious and gets boring – we get that. But this is the reason why there are so many more puzzles than you would have expected.
On the other hand, there are a lot of people who really liked the puzzles. As you said, it's very contemplative and it's a nice break to not combat all the time. If you have a game that's good for 50, 70, or up to 100 hours if you want to do a full completion run, you need to change things and have something else. This is why we like to have the puzzles in there.
Also, our team of developers is very diverse in what they like. We have people who are super hardcore Diablo and first-person shooter fans, then our creative director is a big fan of the Uncharted series and so am I. So we like the shooting and then here's a different chapter or POV in the game where you have to solve those puzzles. Other people like our UI and UX programmer loves platformers, so he's also into puzzles as well.
Sometimes you sit in front of a puzzle and you have no clue what's going on, but in space, you have more possibilities, 3D orientation, pushing buttons, taking one thing like the energy sphere over to an energy socket, and finding out what's going on. We really love that stuff. And yes, there will be more puzzles in the expansion, but we put more thought into these new puzzles.
Toni – our level designer who designs those puzzles – has a lot of fun with it. We asked him, “How do you deal with the puzzles? How do you do that?” As you would expect, you do them in reverse. So you start with the solution, then you take things out and make it more complex and you hide stuff. This is how he's doing that. Sometimes even the teams are like “Toni, where's this one thing? Where's this cube?” And he’ll say, “Yeah, you're close, you'll find it. It's not broken. Keep searching.”
And again, “keep searching” is important in a space game. Space combat is one big pillar, the other big pillar is exploration. This is why we went for handcrafted locations where in every nook and cranny there's something to discover. You don't have to go for combat all the time in Everspace 2. We wanted to make exploration worthwhile. Not just hunting question marks, or 1000 planets, or a billion planets. With all that, at some point, you're like, “It’s not gonna change much.”
By having these puzzles, we also had these locked containers. There's a reward even if you cannot use that weapon, you can still sell it, or dismantle it and use it for upgrading. So there are a lot of systems in Everspace 2 that I'd say are interwoven and make it worthwhile. Once you do the puzzles, you get a lot of new loot and then you can go on to something else. That's what we really liked and that's something that we want to keep on pushing.
Q: Everspace 2 is essentially a looter shooter in space. How do you look to the looter shooter genre as a whole for inspiration?
Schade: Our core team came up with this “Diablo in space” approach. Diablo meets Freelancer. I only played Diablo once and I got butchered by The Butcher back in the 90s and then I stopped playing Diablo. But they played all the time, all the versions: two, three, and now four. They said there were some really cool mechanics in there. Obviously, we didn't want to copycat that, so we had to come up with our own ideas.
At the same time, I got into Destiny 2 when it was added to PS Plus in 2019, I think. I sunk in more than 2000 hours in Destiny 2 like, “Ah, this is how it works. Oh, man.” At my peak, I was playing Destiny every night for like two or three hours. I even got a few friends that carried me through a raid to the boss until 4am and it was like, “Man, I'm actually way too old for that.” I'm turning 55 now, and a year ago I was still playing raids with mates that could have been my sons. I had so much fun and was like, “Man, this is awesome and now I get it.”
Before that, I didn't have the experience for myself. So I had to trust my team and they made the right call here but then I got it as well. I could talk on the same level with them and say “Hey, in Destiny they have these kinds of classes. This is how they're doing this. This is how they treat armor, this is how they work with the exotics.” So all of a sudden, I caught up in competence and talking about game design in a looter shooter.
So thanks to Destiny and thanks to Bungie I knew what the team was talking about and I knew what I was talking about when I talked to the team. “Hey, how should we do this? How about more cloaking? You know the void classes in Destiny? That's awesome, right? It's still a shooter, but you can sneak around and I love that. How about that?”
This is really how we approached it. And our UI artist also was a Destiny fan from day one and this is why you do see some similarities in our UI compared to this. It works.
Everspace 2’s UI is very intuitive coming from Destiny, I can see the inspiration there.
Schade: Truth be told, when we run campaigns on YouTube, obviously, we target our competitors and Destiny 2 is among them and it’s one of the best-performing audiences for us, which is insane. Sometimes we see people in Destiny 2’s community say, “Hey Bungie, look, we want to have space combat like in Everspace. Can we have that?” I'm not sure if this is ever gonna happen, but no complaints.
So we're very happy about Destiny. I still enjoy playing it myself and every now and then I say, “Hey, this is a great raid. This is a great strike. Look at the mechanics. Can we borrow from that?” Obviously, it's a different thing if you run around in a character or if you fly around in a spaceship, and also our ultimates are not designed the same way as the supers in Destiny. But sometimes you see certain things and think “Hey, that's a cool idea. How about we use this trick a little bit, and then it could be the next nice ultimate for the new spaceships that will come with the expansion later this year?”
Q: Level scaling is a tricky subject in games with open-world RPG mechanics. Some players like it when they can return to low-level areas and “stomp” them, while other players prefer a consistent challenge everywhere. How do you approach that balance in Everspace 2?
Schade: Frankly speaking, this was probably the biggest change request from the community. On the other hand, the other side of the community said, “No, keep it as it is!”
So at the beginning, we had scaling enemies across the board and the entire world for that exact same reason. If you have a looter shooter, you want to make sure that no matter what kind of enemy unit you're defeating, the loot drops are worthwhile, and also it remains a challenge. On the other hand, you have the RPG power fantasy fans, and they want to steamroll over low-level enemies like crazy.
In the end, this came with the last free update during Early Access and we overhauled the system. We try to have the best of both worlds, which is always challenging, but I think we got it right. We locked the enemies when you are within one star system. So you're in the first star system, and then you level up and you get stronger and stronger and stronger, and the enemies won't keep leveling with you. But if you move on to another star system, one that has a higher level cap generally, and you also reach a certain plot point, then there's a radio call, and so we made it part of the lore. Your onboard AI, HIVE, says, “Hey, the enemies in Ceto just got an upgrade. They're now better. Be careful if you go back.”
Of course, a few people said, “Oh, man, I really love this. It's always challenging.” But I think they accept that there was just too much of an audience who said “No, I want to have this power fantasy.” And the guys who are into power fantasy, I think they can accept that. They appreciate that when they go back, they're still stronger. It's not like the enemies will level above you, but they close up to you. So you can go back, you still can kick them, the loot is still worthwhile, but the better loot is found in star systems that have a higher level than you.
The discussion internally I think took us three months. The team was almost split in half about it, and that alone tells you enough about how divisive that topic is. It can go either way and it was really hard to tell.
Plus, if you make a major change, all of a sudden all the voices are raised that were happy previously. So when something is off, you mostly only hear the people who complain about it. But if you listen to them and you change that, then what might happen is that you wake a sleeping dog and people who had been happy with the previous system are now upset. So we have to be very, very cautious.
This is one of the downsides of Early Access. You are really tempted to follow maybe a vocal minority and you don't know that. You can end up in a worse situation because if you then have to flip-flop, then you're dead. But we didn't have to. So in the end, I think the vast majority is happy, so we're in a good place.
That’s a tough one because as a gamer, I find it difficult to decide which side of the fence I land on with level scaling. It’s a different preference from game to game.
Schade: Exactly, that’s true. I'm slightly in the power fantasy camp, but I hate fighting enemies that have just no loot and it's not worth it. That sucks.
Destiny has it to a certain degree as well. With every season, there's the power grind, you know, “Dang power grind, power grind, power grind…” But what do you want to do, right? You want to play the game, and there has to be a motivation. Of course you do the power grind.
I think Bungie did a clever thing with their champions. They’re introducing tougher strikes and master strikes where we have kind of the same enemy, but there’s either more of them, or they have a new capability and that makes it harder. I think this is a good way.
And again, we’re only 25 people. Sometimes I wish we had like one or two combat mechanic designers from Bungie working here or something, but this is an endless discussion. I see the lighting in Destiny and I’m like “This is awesome!” Then Marco says, “You know, they have an entire team just for lighting.” I say “Yeah, I know. But still, look at that!” And he says, “Yeah, I know, I know. How many hours do you think my day has?”
I’ve been flying the Vindicator which, to me, feels almost like a fantasy Necromancer with how it creates a fleet of drones out of destroyed enemies.
Schade: Yeah! That’s where we took it from.
Q: Were you looking at a lot of fantasy archetypes when it comes to the various ship themes?
Schade: It's various things. Everspace 1 had a few things like the gunship had the turret, we still have that, and then the interceptor has this weapon overdrive and we still have that. So we made sure that there is some legacy carrying over from Everspace 1 to Everspace 2.
Back then we had four ship classes, and now we have nine in total. Obviously, we have to take inspiration from other places. Again, Diablo is the biggest inspiration source for these kinds of gameplay mechanics and ultimates. But again, I tried to bring in Destiny every now and then. We haven't looked at Outriders, but I can totally see there might be something there.
Long story short, there are so many sources you can draw inspiration from. You just have to make sure that it's not a copycat and that you come up with your own interpretation so people understand, “Okay, that's kind of similar, but it's different.” I think you still have to do that just out of respect for other people's work, but also to create something that is unique, that's new, that feels fresh.
There were a lot of debates internally in the team. Sometimes the words are really flying at the studio like “No, we should do it this way!” “No, this way!” And then it really depends on who has the most energy to fight for his ideas.
Everspace 2: How to Unlock Companion Perks (& The Best Perks to Unlock First)
Everspace 2 has two perk systems allowing players to unlock various beneficial effects, and this guide will explain Companion Perks.
Every now and then I feel I should step in and say, “Guys, I think we should do this. If we do this, then we sell more copies, and at the end of the day, I appreciate your passion, but keeping the lights on is important and we cannot go too crazy. We have to ship the game at some point.”
To be honest, 2023 was a very, very competitive year and we are grateful that we didn't have to let anybody go. We kept all our staff. It’s also a strategy of our studio: we don't ramp up and ramp down, we keep people and we’d rather make sure that we have enough to do and make sure that we don't have too many people and to be more conservative in hiring. We don't have publishers, we don't have any investors on board, so everything is cashflow financed, and then with bigger deals with Microsoft and others. So we have to be very mindful about growth.
And that is also a reason – I mean, space game fans want everything, right? – Capital ships, getting out of our ships. Like, yeah, there will be another game. We don't have the budget for that. We are not AAA. Then obviously Starfield came out and then people said, “This is what people want!” And we’re like “Yeah, we know.”
Q: So when are we going to have space legs in Everspace?
Schade: [Laughs] Exactly. So we talked about space legs. The thing with space legs is if you get out of your spaceship, you are so much closer to all the props in your environment, yet you have to model on a different scale. If you fly around the spaceship, you get away with modeling in meters to centimeters. But as soon as you step out, you have to go down to millimeters. That means at least 10 times more level of detail. That makes it very, very expensive, and then also, the game becomes much bigger. The texture sizes increase like crazy.
And the next thing I always say is, “Well if you implement a first-person shooter in your space game, it better be as good as Destiny or Call of Duty and whatnot.” And that's not what we are. Because if you have one of the best space combat games – I think with Everspace that's the case – then people would expect that our gunplay when you walk around on planets has to be at least as good. And we’re like 25 people. So yeah, getting out of your spaceship on foot I don't see that happening anytime soon. Of course, we have ideas that we add more things into the mix for our next title, whatever that might be. But yeah, we have a lot of ideas.
Q: On that subject, I was speaking to another space game developer who felt that space legs were an immersion problem because the player is going from sitting in a cockpit and piloting a ship to “remote controlling a person.” What are your thoughts on that?
Schade: On the other hand, No Man's Sky proved that there's appetite. To be honest, I also think this is why Starfield has so much more exploration on the planets because they had to look at No Man's Sky. So props to Hello Games that they came up with it. Prior to that I always said, “Who wants to land on a freaking planet? Imagine creating an entire planet and then designing thousands of planets, billions of planets, it's all going to be all the same or not meaningful at all.”
This is why we went the other way. 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. I understand that some people say, “Space is endless, the vastness. I want to have thousands and more planets to explore.” I get the promise and it works for Elite: Dangerous, it works for No Man's Sky, it works for Starfield, but then you have to go the procedural generation route and we said, “No, we will go for less is more. ‘Quality over quantity’ and have a more meaningful experience.”
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.
Coming from a lot of space games that rely heavily on procedural generation, it is nice to play a space game where everything is more or less put there for a reason.
Schade: The tech demo from Chris Roberts’ team, Star Engine, This 20-minute demo on YouTube is super impressive tech. It's crazy. You come from open space, you see the planet through the clouds, go down and see the city. And I'm like, “Boy, who designs what's happening in that city down there to make that meaningful?” And I realize “Okay, they may have 1000 people.” Again, we are 25.
Let's say for our next title, we are 35. That's more the range, right? So what can you do with 35 people and developers, and maybe with external, let's say 50? That's the biggest I could see right now. To be honest, that determines what kind of game we're making next, and it's going to be handcrafted again.
Also, I think once you have gained a reputation for really good space games based on handcrafted locations, and a strong story, side missions – your typical open-world action RPG approach but in space – I think this is it and we shouldn't rock the boat too much. So we have to make sure that we deliver what our fans expect. 70-80% is what we've seen before, and then you surprise with 20-30% innovation.
Q: With looter shooters and Diablo-style action RPGs, a lot of people remark that “the game doesn’t truly start until endgame.” How do you approach that kind of attitude in Everspace 2?
Schade: That's a good one. We wanted to have an endgame, but we also knew this was for, I don't know, maybe 10% of our audience at best. On the other hand, those 10% keep the game alive and keep the Discord discussion alive, they post screenshots, and they're hungry for more. Those are our top testers. We need to have something for them.
At the same time, we collect data – you can opt out – and we recently looked at what the drop-off is and the drop-off from one story mission to another one is about 10%. That’s kind of what you expect, but we have 22 main missions, and then if you have 21 times 10% less, 10% less, 10% less, well then you end up with a very small number who actually played through the entire story, which is crazy because the story takes like 30 hours to complete.
So there's a lot of content that the majority of the players will never see, but I think this is the fate of a lot of big games where you have to have a certain amount of content to market it and that people expect, but not really everybody's playing it through. They just get bored or something else is coming up that’s hotter – the new kid on the block – and then you drop your favorite space game for another hot space game.
We certainly saw that with Starfield coming out. We had our daily numbers and then Starfield came out and “Boom!” I see the dip. We kind of dropped and after Starfield wasn’t so new anymore then we had our sales and it went up and obviously, we are using Starfield in our marketing.
One of my best campaigns was, “Google Search ‘Starfield on PS5.’” Well, there is no Starfield on PS5. Then Everspace 2 popped up. So I think that was my most successful campaign.
And of course, it's a much smaller game, it has a different focus, but here’s your “big space game” on PlayStation.
Personally, I would probably go for Everspace 2 over Starfield if I'm strictly looking for space combat.
Schade: They're very different. I played Starfield and for the first two days I was really excited like, “Oh, man, this is like Fallout in space! Awesome, I love it!” And I opened every door and collected all this shit. And then of course I was constantly encumbered. This is too much. Then obviously, the space travel. I had my expectations from making my own space game, and somehow, there's more immediacy in our travel experience because we don't have fast travel like Starfield. I understand why they have it, but the problem is it takes away the sensation of space travel.
And then, to be honest, I lost it at some point. We still have some of our team members who love it, especially the spaceship designer. We do have our spaceship modules, but they're like, “Oh, man, you can build your spaceship from scratch.” And it feels like they spent most of the time in the shipbuilder just coming up with new builds. There are definitely some fantastic things, but I also think that Starfield just turned out to be a different game than what most people expected it to be. Oftentimes, you can make a great game, but if people expect something else, it still can be an issue. I think this is what we see with Starfield right now.
There was just no way it could live up to the years and years of hype.
Schade: And honestly, if you’re Bethesda and you say, “Oh, we're making a space game,” then expectations are out the window. How do you win that, right? As opposed to “Oh, we’re a small German studio indie team. We're making a space game.” Then they're like, “Okay, give it a chance and see how it goes. If it's fun, it's good. If not, then who cares, right?” We don't make that many headlines.
If you're a small team you have to go for the less is more approach. Otherwise, you will have a failure because we cannot compete with the big budgets. There's no way. Even Everspace 2 – I shared this in other talks so I can share this happily here – is a 15 million euro development budget for the base game alone. This is one of the biggest games coming out of Germany because we don't have many AAA studios here. For a small team without a publisher and without investors, this is enormous for us and is by far the biggest game we've ever made. Still, if you compare it to the big production Star Citizen stuff here, it's tiny, right?
Q: Is there anything about the upcoming expansion that you’re able to share?
Schade: I'm so excited for what's coming. I would love to share everything but I think Lee, our PR director, would hate me to the end of time.
We teased a space Leviathan during the base game already, and that is something that didn't make it into the base game simply because it's such a special and monumental asset that if you just put it in there and you fly around and you just discover it and you can scan it, that would be lame. Leviathan is part of that next thing.
Then we have the Dreadnought, which is a humongous battleship. It was also supposed to be an enemy that appeared in Everspace 2, but was cut due to scope. We also felt that this deserved better treatment than just one more space combat boss battle. Both are going to be centerpieces of the expansion, but that's not all.
There's also a completely new storyline, and when I look at the budget and how much we're doing, the development budget for this expansion is 4 million euros. So it's about one-third of the entire game. So there's a lot of stuff coming.
There's even some procedurally generated stuff still using pre-baked global illumination and whatnot so it looks awesome. There are things that you can do over and over again, but the difference? That’s as far as I can go.
Obviously, new star system(s)? Maybe plural? Let's see how that goes. We're making great progress, and we're gonna share something around summer. It will be the first time that we showed something in public.
Before that, there's the spring update, which is going to be a free update and we've already shared that there's going to be a whole slew of new legendaries and some really crazy ones so it's more like the exotics in Destiny 2 than just new gear with better stats. They have really crazy features.
The team overhauled the endgame. We teased this in one of our last live dev streams that there will be incursions happening all over the map, so there will be a reason or motivation to go back to other systems that you already visited and there is a new kind of event taking place and that's going to be an endgame mechanic.
So yeah, more endgame, more legendary loot, more awesome stuff.
Q: Any final thoughts you’d like to share before we finish up?
Schade: 2023 was super rough and hard. It's really sad to see people being let go at studios around the world, so everybody who's not in that place is very fortunate. This is what we are, and we’re very grateful. And also, being an independent studio, every day we make these decisions, just the team and leadership and then our fans, and this is priceless. We're literally independent: we don't have anybody who tells us what to do. And as long as we can do that, man, I’ll have the time of my life. I love this.
Going through the forums with the feedback even if it's critical feedback as long as it's fair and has substance is really, really rewarding. Sometimes you can turn your biggest critics into ambassadors and into fans because you listened to them and they had a good solution, good suggestion, or a valid complaint. That's very, very fulfilling. The entire team feeds like that. We're having a blast. It's fantastic.
Thanks to all our fans for supporting us and sometimes being critics.
Keep it coming.
[END]
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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
- Genre(s)
- Sci-Fi
