Greetings, Pilots!

Time is relative, indeed. For us developers, it is flying because the next major milestone is always just around the corner. But for you all it probably feels like forever until you can get your hands on the next pre-release version of EVESPACE 2, right? Well, we’ve got some great news.

We have just updated the official EVERSPACE 2 pre-release build on Steam. Alpha backers can simply fire up Steam to receive their update. Beta backers (Early Adopter Edition reward tier and higher) will find their brand new Steam keys in their email inboxes. If you don’t see your key, please be patient as keys are sent out in batches. Also, make sure to check your spam folders!


Unfortunately, the new animated main menu background did not make it into the stable Beta build on Steam. We wanted to give an early look at this improvement with you here because it adds a sense of the deep exploration that all of you can look forward to when EVERSPACE 2 launches with the additional “Union System” and even more new stuff in Early Access this December.

So, what has changed since the previous production update, you might wonder? Well, apart from new content in the Ceto system that we want you to discover for yourselves, we made further UI/UX improvements based on the much-appreciated feedback from Alpha backers. We implemented cockpit view featuring fully functional instruments, improved the visual quality of several environmental assets and the overall performance of the build, and, of course, fixed a ton of bugs. More side missions, job variations and enemy types, points of interest, and puzzles have been added as well. Last but not least, Gero, our Sound Director, has been tweaking and adding sound effects and in-game music tracks. Basically, the Beta is a heavily revamped Alpha with a few content additions as well as more and better LOOT!

Now, anyone who feels bummed out because of not having access to the closed Beta, there are still a few days left to participate in a massive giveaway contest at the PC Gamer Forums with 5 (five) chances to win an EVERSPACE 2 pre-release Steam key; one of which will come with a slick Alienware gaming PC - yup, no joke!


You can win THIS — just head over to our dear friends at PC Gamer before the contest ends in a few DAYS!

There are quite a few entries already, but when has an EVERSPACE pilot ever let the odds get them down? In the case you are not a lucky star on this one, there will be another run with even better starting conditions - hm, where have we heard that before?

If you haven’t already checked it out, our Creative Director Uwe Wütherich, dropped a deep dive into EVERSPACE lore on The PC Gamer forums with a few tidbits about companions and the story of EVERSPACE 2. Give it a read! We’d love to hear what you think.


Spoiler Alert: The Okkar trader Tareen from the EVERSPACE - Encounters add-on will have an important come back in EVERSPACE 2. You'll find out more about his role as another companion in our narrative piece on PC Gamer.

Make sure to join today’s official Beta reveal stream on Twitch and YouTube, from 8:00 pm to 10:00 pm CEST / 2:00 pm to 4:00 pm EDT / 11:00 am to 1:00 pm PDT, where Erik will walk you through the overhauled story campaign in Ceto and give away 3 (three) more pre-release keys of EVERSPACE 2.

The hype is real, see you in the Beta... 🚀👀💥🙌
Michael and your dedicated ROCKFISH Games Team

Greetings, Pilots!

For any of you who might have been hiding under a rock in a galaxy far, far away, we would like to get the following major news onto your radar.

We are sticking to our promise of bringing EVERSPACE 2 to Steam first (duh!) and have officially announced Early Access in December 2020: A few minutes ago, we dropped a dopamine-rush gameplay trailer, followed by a snazzy dev commentary video by our infamous ace pilot, top streamer, and beloved community ambassador Erik Schrader, on IGN during the opening day of gamescom 2020.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIAIXXJYmV8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMWcd4kcgiE

You may have noticed that this production update is a bit shorter than usual, and there is a great reason for that: We’ve partnered with the awesome dudes and dudettes from PC Gamer for a massive ROCKFISH Games Studio Spotlight on the PC Gamer Forum, centered around an in-depth piece about the story and companions in EVERSPACE 2 as well as an AMA with some of our lead developers.

The spotlight will start on Monday, August 31, and we highly recommend that you register at the PC Gamer forum ASAP because you wouldn't want to miss out on some awesome loot dropping during the coming 30 days. Especially for those who have missed on getting into the imminent closed Beta program - hint, hint, nudge, nudge, wink, wink!

Ok, enough goofing around! Make sure to swing by tomorrow’s stream on Twitch and YouTube, from 8:00 pm to 10:00 pm CEST / 2:00 pm to 4:00 pm EDT / 11:00 am to 1:00 pm PDT, where Erik is probably gonna ignore my instructions once again and spoil some hot stuff for you, dang it!

The hype is real, see you in the space clouds... 🚀👀💥🤘🙀🙌
Michael and your dedicated ROCKFISH Games Team

Hey there, test pilots!

Today, we're happy to release a small update for the EVERSPACE 2 prototype/demo with a few settings that have been in high demand.

These are already present in the Alpha version of EVERSPACE 2, and although we had not planned on updating the prototype/demo at all, we figured that these would be relatively easy to retroactively add, as they do not affect the game code too much. Just don't expect any further updates - as you can imagine we're very busy working on the Beta and Early Access release.

Please see the complete list of changes below.

• Added option to disable motion blur
  
• Added option to disable chromatic aberration
  
• Added gamma slider

• Fixed invert pitch not working for mouse controls
  
• Fixed invert yaw not working for mouse controls

Have fun!
Michael and your dedicated ROCKFISH Games Team

Attention, Pilots!

Buckle up for a mesmerizing ride through the all-new star system Union, a bustling trading hub with humongous stations floating in vast space cloud formations, in our latest dev build!

Join us on Twitch, YouTube or the EVERSPACE 2 Steam store page from 8:00 pm to 10:00 pm CEST / 2:00 pm to 4:00 pm EDT / 11:00 am to 1:00 pm PDT where Erik, our community ambassador, will give you a taste of some of the new stuff that we have been working on. Did we mention there will be giveaways of pre-release keys, too?

The hype is real, see you in the space clouds... 🚀👀💥🤘🙀🙌
Michael and your dedicated ROCKFISH Games Team

What. A. Blast! The EVERSPACE 2 “alpha beat” has been our biggest marketing event ever in terms of media coverage and user engagement. IGN reported over one million live viewers on their streaming platforms during the block when EVERSPACE 2 was on, and while we don’t have any stats from PC Gamer, we can tell by comparing the number of Wishlist additions during those two days, the PC Gaming Show must have been absolutely bonkers.

Then there was also the amazing charity stream by Cohh Carnage, raising some mind-boggling $232K in funding for a great cause.




With over 14K viewers, EVERSPACE 2 was on the Twitch front page and drove a similar number of Wishlist additions compared to when EVERSPACE 2 was featured on the Steam front page during last year’s Gamescom - thanks a ton, Cohh!

If that wasn’t crazy enough already, when the EVERSPACE 2 Prototype launched as a free demo during the Steam Summer Game Festival, the number of Wishlist additions went through the roof, peaking at 13K+ Wishlist additions on the first day alone, putting us at 155K+ outstanding wishes in total, which makes us quite optimistic about the upcoming Steam Early Access release in December.


Erik’s weekly EVERSPACE 2 game dev and community stream also became the #1 Steam Game Festival Broadcast on that day, clocking 2.8K concurrent live viewers.

It’s not just the sheer volume of new Wishlist additions though! What has blown us away the most is how many space game enthusiasts actually played the free Steam demo: we have seen well over 90,000 downloads to date, with a 70% attach rate and median playtime of 14 minutes. The daring test pilots have left us a lot of positive feedback, and also some constructive criticism for us to take forward into the Early Access game.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYOAYabEycQ
Undeniably, marketing & PR was firing on all thrusters and exceeded our expectations by far. Now, those of you who don’t have access to the closed Alpha forum on Steam and didn’t have time to watch any of our game dev streams might wonder how the feedback from eligible backers has been so far. Well, let’s hear what Cohh had to say about the closed EVERSPACE 2 Alpha:

https://clips.twitch.tv/ManlyAmazingWalrusDendiFace
https://clips.twitch.tv/DirtyDeliciousLobsterBatChest
https://clips.twitch.tv/VainSuavePlumberOhMyDog

Needless to say, those clips are music to our ears, and browsing through tons of praise from Alpha backers on the closed EVERSPACE 2 Steam forum has also been super rewarding for us. However, constructive feedback on where we could make the game better is why we are doing all this primarily. Here are a few examples of improvements and additions that we have already implemented based on community feedback so far:

The arcade-y flight physics featuring inertia dampeners are a core pillar of the EVERSPACE franchise. However, quite a few pilots have been criticizing a lack of immersion even though they understand that EVERSPACE 2 is not meant to be a classic space flight sim. To fix this, we not only allow die-hard space sim enthusiasts to disable inertia dampeners, we even implemented a visual effect for lateral thrusters on all player ships.



Having additional Display Options was probably the biggest wish from test pilots, so we prioritized quite a bunch of features that we had on our list anyway.


While we were at it, we also added “Toggle Boost” in Gamepad Options.

Of course, we are not only working on topics that were brought up by the community. We also constantly re-evaluate our own design decisions and try out new things. For instance, we felt that the game menu, the Ship Dealer screen, and perk system could be more streamlined so we made some further UI/UX changes:

Based on internal feedback, we redesigned the navigation and usability of the different tab menus. You can now navigate within a screen using specific keys, which is much faster than using WASD to emulate arrow key navigation or clicking on buttons. Due to this significant change, the root button navigation and its home screen no longer exist, and you are right at the hangar when docked. Another advantage of the new design is that you can now launch into space without having to make the detour via the home menu.


The icon bar on top has also disappeared, and we’re now working with labels for better clarity. We’re still undecided about this change as we really liked the look of sub menu icons and localizing labels into French and German might become an issue - zut alors and verflixt nochmal!

Another community request and something that has been on our list is the possibility to track investment requirements of any perk at the touch of a button: You can now have a small tracking icon for items in your inventory, so you can see which resources can be used to upgrade selected perks and by what degree such requirements are met.


Dr. Delia Wendo, the third companion you will meet during your journey, introduces another set of perks affecting Nanobots, Energy Orbs, and something else (mysterious!) that you can invest in. Basically, think of her being a doctor for the well-being of your spaceship.

Other than these, we are working away on finalizing the Alpha and heading towards the closed Beta release, scheduled for September. This includes balancing (always balancing!), bug fixing (always bugs to squash!), adding more polish to System 01 aka Ceto, among other things.

While we are working on bringing all Alpha content and features to Beta level, we have also been busy creating new content for Union, the second star system in EVERSPACE 2.

As some of you know from our weekly streams, Ceto serves to introduce pilots to the basic gameplay mechanics and set the tone for the story campaign. It already offers quite some freedom of how to progress through the first ten or so hours of the game, but Union is where the game world of EVERSPACE 2 really opens up.


Our vision of a bustling mega trading station within a massive formation of space clouds.

With trading playing a bigger role in Union, smuggling opportunities arise. Whether you are involved in transporting illegal goods or looting a freighter, criminal acts against the local authority will result in the Okkar jumping in and handling the situation as they see fit. Gear yourself up for a hard fight as the Okkar might chase after you if you manage to jump away. Or maybe you deliberately provoked them so that your wanted level increases. The Okkar will eventually send in their biggest battleships for you to challenge.


...still work in progress, but we think you can feel it already.

Lore-wise, this system is controlled by all sorts of freelancers who are organized in various sub-factions and individuals specialized in interstellar trading. Union is the bustling hub of Cluster-34 with numerous space stations, trade routes, and even a vibrant port city. It is also an area of rising conflict between different factions clashing in their attempts to shape the future of the DMZ (demilitarized zone). Adam will get caught in these struggles while trying to figure out his own role in it all. New side missions await, new challenges and lots of new secrets just wait to be discovered.

If you are as excited about Union as we are, make sure to join today’s stream on Twitch and YouTube, from 8:00 pm to 10:00 pm CEST / 2:00 pm to 4:00 pm EDT / 11:00 am to 1:00 pm PDT where Erik will give you a taste of some of the new stuff that we have been working on. Did we mention there will be giveaways of pre-release keys, too?

The hype is real, see you in the space clouds... 🚀👀💥🤘🙀🙌
Michael and your dedicated ROCKFISH Games Team

Greetings, Pilots!

After the closed EVERSPACE 2 Alpha was rolled out to eligible Kickstarter backers just a few days ago, our community ambassador and ace pilot Erik Schrader aka @Giraffasaur will take the latest version for another spin to show you a few more missions, discuss the first round of community feedback and share some gorgeous fanart as well as a few things that we are currently working on.

We also got good news for avid test pilots who missed the deadline for getting into the closed Alpha and Beta program as we will giveaway three EVERSPACE 2 pre-release Steam keys during today's stream on:

https://twitch.tv/rockfishgames
https://youtube.com/rockfishgames
https://mixer.com/rockfishgames

In case you cannot make it today, don't you worry: we will continue running this kind of events every Friday, 8:00 pm to 10:00 pm CET / 2:00 pm to 4:00 pm ET / 11:00 am to 1:00 pm PT.

See you in space 🚀👀🍀
Michael and your dedicated ROCKFISH Games Team

After some back and forth with a few of our most important media partners, the roadmap for the EVERSPACE 2 Closed Alpha release finally stands - WOOHOO! While our team is still working hard on some final touches, you can start getting excited about the awesome online events that we have lined-up.

Before we get into details of the roadmap, let us share a high-level overview of the already included features: the Closed Alpha will give eligible backers access to approximately 10 hours of gameplay including a story beat and free exploration, culminating in the first star system’s boss fight. In addition to new Ship Devices and Ultimate Abilities, you will be able to explore the all-new pilot and companion perk system.


While pilot perks are level-based, companion perks can be unlocked through various resources you gather along your journey.


Through main storyline content, scripted side missions, and various jobs, you will be able to reach the Closed Alpha cap of level 10. New ships, NPCs, and equipment have also been added for you to discover as you explore even more regions in space, planetary locations, and cave systems in the game’s first solar system.


There are lots of handcrafted locations to discover in the first solar system; some won’t even be on your radar until you stumble across them.


The Closed Alpha is English-only, with plans to localize in French, Italian, German, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Polish, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Japanese, and Korean at full release. Quality narrative cutscenes and text-to-speech mission dialogues will serve as placeholders until Steam Early Access.

In a few hours from now, Erik, our dedicated Community Ambassador, will have the pleasure of kicking things off with a tasty sip of that First Flush backer reward with the revamped tutorial and one or two missions of the main campaign. Same place and time as always later today. The stream will be featured on the Mixer front page, so please give everybody on Mixer a warm welcome to our great community.

Later today, around 11:30 pm CEST / 5:30 pm EDT / 2:30 pm PDT, we will have a big appearance on IGN dropping our first(!) Alpha gameplay trailer, followed by a 15 min interview, hosted by Brian Altanao aka @AgentBizzle, at IGN’s Summer Of Gaming with some Alpha gameplay footage spliced in.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYJ3t9PT6bg


On Saturday, June 13 at 9:30 pm CEST / 3:30 EDT / 6:30 pm PDT, you’ll be able to watch a 30 min hands-on demo of the Alpha with Erik on The Escapist Indie Showcase before the official Alpha Gameplay Trailer will drop on PC Gamer during the PC Gaming Show at 8:58 pm CEST / 2:58 pm EDT / 11:58 am PDT sharp. Keep your eyes peeled for yet another teaser that will drop on https://twitter.com/everspace_game right after we had our gig on IGN, later tonight.

After all that teasing, Alpha pilots should be well-prepared to find their pre-release Steam key in their inbox (make sure to check your spam folders!) Monday evening CEST / afternoon EDT / morning PDT, on June 15.

Now, if some non-Alpha pilots are having second thoughts and would like to upgrade their pledge, shoot us an email to info@rockfishgames.com, and we’ll see what we can do for you. Mind you, as soon as we have rolled out the Alpha keys, doors will be shut for buying into the Alpha and Beta program due to Valve’s Terms of Service for Steam.

We also have good news for all those who missed backing the game or could not afford it for one or another reason: There will be several giveaways over the summer, made possible by some of our media partners. We are excited to announce that top streamer and EVERSPACE superfan Cohh Carnage will kick-off our EVERSPACE 2 giveaway campaign with 10 pre-release keys during his upcoming charity stream on this Twitch channel on Monday, June 15, starting at CEST 2:00 pm / 8:00 am EDT / 5:00 am PDT.

Also on Monday, our German-speaking pilots can look forward to a 60 min live interview on GameStar with our a-gazillion-tasks-juggling project manager Caspar, hosted by Christian Schneider aka @GrummelFritz, starting at 8:00 pm CEST.

Now, there is only one thing left to do: Join us for today’s Alpha reveal stream on Twitch, YouTube, and Mixer from 8:00 pm to 10:00 pm CEST / 2:00 pm to 4:00 pm EDT / 11:00 am to 1:00 pm PDT!

The hype is real, see you in space... 🚀👀💥🤘🙀🙌
Michael and your dedicated ROCKFISH Games Team

Keep your 👀 peeled for the official EVERSPACE 2 Alpha gameplay trailer at PC Gaming Show on PC Gamer, June 13 🚀💥

Also, the closed Alpha will be starting very soon! So, last chance for sending us an email to info@rockfishgames.com to get involved before program doors will be shut for any further test pilots until Early Acces in December 2020.

Fly safe!
Michael & dedicated ROCKFISH Games Team

As we promised a much bigger game world in EVERSPACE 2, we have been hard at work producing a lot of new concept art pieces. Some of you have already seen them in our weekly dev & community streams on Fridays, but we’d like to share them here, too, so none of you fine space pilots miss out on anything.


The Outlaw Viper fires corrosion missiles from afar. When closing in on its target, it switches to drone behavior and folds out its armor to fire with a battery of scatterguns while orbiting around its prey - snakey!


Armed to its teeth and heavily plated, the Outlaw Dreadnought is the Frigate-style capital ship of the Outlaws. Because of its massive armor, it is almost impossible to destroy it from afar. Pilots need to dodge its high-frequency output of barrel bombs and horrifying plasma thrower turrets to find a weak spot, fly inside and take it out with a critical hit deep down in its belly and get out without being caught in the nuclear blast.


The Colonial Light Cruiser is a true masterpiece of high-tech in sci-fi warfare: It is equipped with rapid-firing rail gun turrets that do not overheat as well as EMP bombs with an enormous blast range. Thanks to its fighter hangar, the capability of making several consecutive long-range hyper jumps, and sneaking up on its target in almost undetectable stealth mode, it is perfectly suited for taking on expansive spec ops missions.


The Carrier is the pride of the G&B Fleet. To compensate for its low mobility, it not only features a super durable hull underneath massive plating, but a small fleet of fighters and drones can also launch from openings in the hull on each side to keep attackers at bay. Those hangars also serve for mining and supply vessels to land. Consequently, security measures and defense systems are extremely sophisticated to prevent any introducers from sabotaging the carrier’s supralight energy coils and its plasma turbines.

As you already know from a previous production update here on Steam, all player ships in EVERSPACE 2 are based on a modular component system that allows for a large number of different combinations of hulls, wings, sterns / rear engines, cockpits, and attachments.



To prevent having just a bunch of generic-looking player ships, we spent a lot of time and effort in defining distinctive design rules for main and sub ship classes, as well as for all the ship components, so you can easily tell which sub-class a certain ship model belongs to.



But that’s not all! Thanks to our new texturing and modeling techniques, using floaters, decals, and emissive materials, you will also feast your eyes on much higher per-pixel details on the exterior and interior ship surfaces in addition to customizing your vessel by choosing primary, secondary and tertiary colors, which will impact the color of your ship’s glowy bits, too. We have even more ideas for further customization features and will share more when they are fleshed out.



Devices in the original EVERSPACE were items that would drop as loot from various sources and could be installed into your ship's device slots. They came in two flavors, active and passive. While active devices needed to be activated in order to apply their effect, passive devices would provide permanent stat bonuses or other benefits while they were installed.

The similarity to skills you know from traditional RPGs has not escaped us, of course. That's why we want to take this idea further in EVERSPACE 2 and have decided to link the devices directly to the player progression. That means that once found, devices will remain unlocked and can be accessed and installed at will. Passive devices were replaced by the equipment items you install into your ship, such as platings, energy core, etc.


New Devices and Device Modes offer a variety of combination possibilities and synergy effects for pilots who want to get the most out of their spaceship.

A further novelty over the predecessor are the so-called Device Modes. These are passive extensions that alter the function of a device to varying degrees. A maximum of three modes can be unlocked per device and only one of them can be active at a time. To unlock device modes, you will need special tokens that can be obtained, for example, through level-ups or as a reward for missions. The idea behind Device Modes is to allow you to tailor your build to your taste through complex synergies with other devices, perks, items, etc.

For example, there is a new device called Annihilator Virus that infects targets with a system virus that spreads to nearby enemies and causes a massive explosion once the timer ends. One of its device modes causes it to deal increased damage for every debuff active on the target. Now, if you use your EMP Generator right before the virus explosion, the target will receive extra damage for the EMP debuff. The EMP Generator, on the other hand, has a device mode that causes affected targets to lose shield hitpoints over time. Since this is another debuff, the explosion will deal even more damage.

This is the kind of decision-making we're aiming to promote with these systems, and we would love to hear your thoughts about it on our Discord server, our EVERSPACE forum, or in the comments below.

Being able to explore new and strange planets has always been one of the biggest dreams for many space game enthusiasts. In space simulations, where exploration for hundreds or even thousands of hours is the main pillar of the game, there is no way around procedural world generation, and we’ve already seen some great examples for this concept. However, there are some fundamental downsides to it.

For starters, working with high-quality, pre-baked global illumination solutions in procedurally-generated environments is not possible, especially if the game world is truly seamless. Secondly, game designers have much less control over gameplay and environmental design in procedurally-generated game worlds, which only gets worse when trying to implement a proper story campaign, featuring cutscenes and scripted events. In fact, we spent a lot of effort and time managing randomization and player frustration in the original EVERSPACE.

Since we dropped the roguelike formula in favor of a persistent open world with fixed handcrafted locations in EVERSPACE 2, we can now take the overall experience to a whole new level, especially on planetary locations as you can see in this planet exploration GIF (too large to upload here).

However, having handcrafted planetary locations with super hi-res height maps, high-quality illumination solutions, large set pieces featuring lots of surface details as well as lots of interesting activities going on in the sky and on the ground, comes at a price: They not only take a lot of time and effort to create, they are also very memory-heavy.

To manage your expectations: We really want to prioritize those features mentioned above. What it means though is that we're not able to implement a large number of explorable planets, rather, we're focusing on a few that are most important to the story and the overall game experience. Also, there is no way around the fact that these sections will impact load times by a few extra seconds but hey, we like to think seamless atmospheric descending is totally overrated anyway.

So, if you want to see more of the all-new planet locations in-game as well as Ship Devices and Device Modes in action don’t miss today’s dev & community stream on Twitch, YouTube and Mixer from 8:00 pm to 10:00 pm CEST / 2:00 pm to 4:00 pm EDT.

See you online,
Michael and your dedicated ROCKFISH Games Team

It sounds like right out of a sci-fi horror movie: An aggressive virus is spreading around the globe, causing great uncertainties, severe supply chain issues and cancellations of big international events pretty much everywhere. Unsurprisingly, all our GDC meetings with major platform holders and potential console co-publishing partners have been canceled, too. We are now setting up conference calls or meetings at upcoming events. Right now, we are prepared for everything and are hoping for the best. In short: We have to deal with a lot of uncertainties regarding business development, external game production as well as marketing and PR.

Another issue is that some AAA blockbuster titles will hit our initial Steam Early Access release date: The hotly-anticipated open-world sci-fi shooter RPG Cyberpunk 2077 was recently pushed back to September, plus the brand new sci-fi looter shooter RPG Outriders from Square Enix has just been announced to release the same month, too. Obviously, there is quite an overlap between those audiences and ours, so we have decided it wouldn't be wise to directly compete against two sci-fi shooter RPG juggernauts, leaving not much room for any other sci-fi shooter coming out at the same time.

Considering all those new challenges, we had to make a tough decision about postponing the EVERSPACE 2 launch on Steam Early Access, now aiming for early December this year. Consequently, we’re also pushing the closed Alpha back to the end of May and the closed Beta to August. We will reach out to backers with creative rewards towards the end of this year.

Even if this is just a strategic decision to mitigate commercial risks when major market conditions change, we are fully aware that some of you won’t be too happy about this, but we hope for your understanding. Thankfully, we’re in a financially comfortable position, so the project itself is not at risk, and we are developing the game internally as planned. This extra time also means we’ll have more content for you to enjoy in the closed Alpha, Beta, and Early Access builds.

Okay, now that we've got that news off our mental stack, let’s finally talk about some new awesome stuff in EVERSPACE 2.

Fast-paced combat in open space as well as inside of interior locations will remain the main pillar of the EVERSPACE franchise, so location awareness in 3D space as well as strafing quickly in any direction is key to survival. This is a reason why playing in 3rd person view is advantageous. However, we know from the predecessor, there is also an avid group of space pilots who put game immersion above everything else so we’re spending quite some effort on designing detailed cockpits with fully functional instruments for each player ship subclass. Let’s have a look:


Early concept art of light fighter cockpit interiors focusing on maximal FOV and minimal obstruction by display panels.


With its focus on forward-oriented combat at high speed, cockpit interiors of the medium fighter class resemble the layout with centralized instruments in military jet fighters of the 21st century.


At the price of a partially constrained view, ships of the heavy fighter class will feature sturdy cockpit interiors equipped with large displays, making pilots feel always comfy and not lose control even when taking a few frontal hits...


3D modeling of the Interceptor cockpit.

You can see in the early concept art above that each cockpit interior is based on the exterior geometry of each subclass, so when swapping views the transition between exterior and interior looks accurate. The distinctive cockpit designs will also make you immediately aware of which subclass you are currently piloting.

As the cockpit system is modular, it even allows us to display certain parts of the geometry based on the ship’s tier, class or subclass. So are the positions of the display panels, whereas the interior materials will be based on the color scheme of the ship.
Similar to the original EVERSPACE, we'll have special effects displayed on the cockpit's windshield based on the status of the ship, like the current damage and shield level. We also plan to display vital information on the cockpit displays so that you can even play without any HUD elements for the ultimate immersion of space piloting.

Now, before some of you ask: We still haven’t decided if we will support VR at some point. All we can say is that based on the experience from the predecessor, supporting VR is a ton of work for many reasons (like overhauling the UI, rebalancing the game, optimizing to demanding VR specifications) for a total addressable market of presumably close to 35 million on PC and console.

At first sight, that number doesn’t look too shabby. However, the technical requirements for VR, as well as significant fragmentation issues and major marketing challenges, have to be factored in.

To elaborate a bit further, optimizing for PSVR on a regular PS4 all the way to the brand new Valve Index with its proprietary VR controllers takes even more effort than porting a typical PC game designed for mouse + keyboard input to also run console with proper gamepad controls from last-gen to current-gen and even to the next-gen.

On the marketing side of things, we have seen non-VR players who ignore or hesitate to buy games with a VR tag. While on the other hand, quite a lot of VR players miss or have trouble altering graphic settings in games with optional VR support, resulting in negative reviews and complaints about performance issues in VR, which of course hurt overall sales. Last but not least, it would actually be hard to justify to our entire community if we spent a lot of development resources exclusively on a feature for a comparatively small group of players.

Therefore, we decided to look at VR as a separate platform that requires a solid business case to make it worthwhile to support. Long story short, EVERSPACE 2 for VR is currently not on our list, but who knows what kind of deal might happen in the future…?

As you have probably seen in our vlog about player ships, we also spent a lot of time and effort on making sure that our modular design approach does not lead to a pool of generic-looking ships. Our mantra is that every model has to look slick and distinctive but also fit in its subclass. While we were very pleased with the community feedback on our ship designs so far, we felt the original bi-wing design of the Assault Fighter was underwhelming if not a bit awkward, so we decided to come up with a redesign.


Aero spikes on spaceship engines? Yes, please!

Apart from that, the redesigned Assault Fighter is our new favorite player ship, and we would love to hear your feedback in the comments below or on Discord.

What’s a looter shooter without a devastating superpower attack that you can unleash to gain back the upper hand when under great pressure...? Exactly! Think of your class-based Super in Destiny or Ultimate in Anthem, Overwatch or any MOBA.


The ULT ability “Static Overload” temporarily turns the Sentinel’s primary weapons into lightning guns, firing arcing electricity at enemies and everything around them - annihilate by electrocution, that is.

For those who are new to this, here is how it’ll work in EVERSPACE 2: Ultimates (ULTs) are special ship abilities that can be activated to unleash a mighty offensive or defensive power. They need to be charged by shooting down enemies, or, later in the game after the right perk has been unlocked, they can also be charged by other means, e.g. by collecting energy orb remains or getting hit by lightning.

Each Ultimate is tied to a specific ship subclass, designed to exploit its full potential. For example, a certain heavy subclass might have an energy shield that reflects incoming shots back to the attackers, while one of the light subclasses unleashes a power that allows the ship to quickly teleport between targets, leaving behind a shredding energy trail, corrosive mines or web fields.

Sounds very exciting, right? Well, if you want to see more of the new cockpit interiors, how the Assault Fighter blockout looks in-game, and also get a taste of the Sentinel’s Ultimate electrocuting waves of enemies, join today’s dev stream on Twitch, YouTube and Mixer from 8:00 pm to 10:00 pm CEST / 2:00 pm to 4:00 pm EDT.

See you online,
Michael and your dedicated ROCKFISH Games Team