The battle royale genre has moved from strength to strength these past few years, and has seen all the major publishers in the industry trying to claim a slice of the pie with their own take on the popular style of game. Recently, Ubisoft threw their own sci-fi-styled hat into the ring with Hyper Scape, which went into beta in July, and then launched in full just a month later.
Its launch, however, didn’t exactly go number. No matter what mtric you go by – whether that’s audience reception, critical reception, Twitch numbers, or anything else – the game has faded away into the background rather quickly- and its developers agree that things could have gone much better.
In a new update, Ubisoft said with Hyper Scape, they “were not able to achieve the high expectations we set for ourselves with our full release.” Going forward, they want to turn the shooter into a game “everyone can play and enjoy”, and as such, have identified five key improvements that they want to make, from making the game more accessible to adding more game modes to enabling cross-play and more. Read about those below, in their own words:
- COMBAT COMFORT We always intended for Hyper Scape to have a high skill ceiling, but it is clear from our data that the floor is also too high. This results in a difficult experience for new players. Currently, it is too hard to aim, track and consistently damage players and eliminate them, especially on consoles.
- ONBOARDING The game does not currently provide enough time and opportunities for new players to learn and succeed. We need to protect newcomers and provide training activities to help them become proficient with the game.
- GAME MODES Our core game mode, Crown Rush, can be quite unforgiving, so we want to provide players with a variety of formats in terms of activity and match size. This will start with introducing respawn systems in the game and “deathmatch” style game modes. We are also rethinking how we manage limited time modes and the player base split that is required to support multiple modes at once.
- PLAYER GOALS Currently, there are not enough medium and long-term goals for players to stick around in the Hyper Scape. We are introducing first version of our Player Ranking system in Season 2, and we will bring more progression systems and match-to-match flow improvements as well.
- CROSS PLAY While Cross Play has always been intended for the game, we want to add it earlier than planned to help address the current issues of lobby size.
Regardless of how invested (or not) you may be in Hyper Scape and how it does, it’s good to see a developer recognizing their game’s flaws so quickly and then actually being able to work on them. Here’s hoping this actually leads to some meaningful improvements in the not-too-distant future.
Hyper Scape is available on PS4, Xbox One, and PC. You can read our review of the game through here.
