Everspace 2 has managed to blow past its Kickstarter goal in the final 48 hours, even surpassing its first stretch goal to add new mechanics to the exploratory space shooter.
Since being announced, the game has been met with a fair bit of enthusiasm from fans and newcomers. A big part of that hype comes from the excitement over various improvements made to the base game’s formula and core concepts. Rockfish has pumped out various updates, giving gamers a peek into the world that the team is building. It not only looks beautiful, but the expanded scope helps out a ton with selling the product. In total, the sequel raised €503,478 during its fundraising period, giving the team plenty of runway to work with ahead of the release of the full game. Great news for all involved.
Michael Schade, CEO and co-founder of Rockfish Games announced the goal being met this past weekend, with an e-mail blast going out around the internet, and with the development team taking a well-deserved victory lap while they’re at it. Here’s what the developers had to say on this development:
Thanks to our successful campaign we can now develop our full vision of Everspace 2 together with our community as a completely independent studio.
This is also a clear signal towards other indies that despite the current circumstances, success is still possible thanks to a convincing prototype as well as open and authentic communication with your fans.
The full update regarding funding is available on the Kickstarter page. According to current plans, the game is scheduled to finish up and release in 2021. Steam Early Access version will arrive ahead of that date, and is currently slated to drop in September 2020. This will give players the chance to test out the game and see if they like it ahead of launch. The game has versions for PC, Mac and Linux planned, as well as variants for the Xbox One and PS4.
Players will get to control more than 100 starships as they cruise around the system looking for things to do. There’s already tons of missions to undertake and factions to battle against, but Rockfish is aiming for something more. Among the faction politics and pirate bands though, Rockfish has hid a few surprises. One of these is a new stretch goal called Rift Challenges. These randomly spawned events will act as wave-based survival missions that reward special loot at different levels of progress.
And speaking of loot, the game uses a revised and improved looting and gearing system that allows players to have much finer control over the character of their ship, in addition to all of the specialization options offered by the sheer volume of different vessels.
