After exploding onto the battle royale scene earlier this year, Hyper Scape has gone fairly quiet.
In an effort to make some big changes for Season 2, however, Ubisoft has released a new blog explaining a wealth of changes coming to its futuristic shooter.
Update: Crossplay Is Out Now!
Crossplay is out now on Hyper Scape. To access it, just update the game, load-in and you should be able to start automatically matchmaking with players on other console platforms!
PC Players, you may be out of luck as for now you won't be able to play with non-PC players through general matchmaking. Though it isn't all bad.
By adding your friends through Ubisoft Connect, players on any platform (PS4, Xbox One and PC) can add each other and form a squad to play as a group. This squad will then be placed in PC lobbies to keep things fair.
More details can be heard in this video below:
Hyper Scape Is Getting Big Changes and Crossplay In Season 2
Check out the season 2 trailer below:
In the very honest blog post, Ubisoft notes that "we were not able to achieve the high expectations we set for ourselves", before noting that the publisher is looking to restructure the development to be closer to the cell-based format of Rainbow Six Siege - itself a game that has gone from strength to strength after a tepid launch reception.
The team has noted five pillars to help improve the game, which you can see below:
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.
That's quite a laundry list of things to tweak, but the team seems confident in its ability to deliver.
"As you can see, all these pieces depend on each other to get where we want to go with Hyper Scape. We have started our work on these pillars, and plan to release more frequent updates in Season 2 than in Season 1," Ubisoft explained. "We will also communicate often to keep you up to date on our progress. As always, we cannot do this without your valuable feedback, so keep it coming!"