Hyper Scape

~ the last words ~

In 2020 I was thirty-six and working, and the last shooter that had my full attention was Counter-Strike in an internet cafe in Turkey around 2003, where the audience was whoever was standing behind your chair. Hyper Scape was designed for the opposite arrangement, a game whose second screen mattered as much as the first. It was not aimed at me and it did not miss.

Ubisoft Montreal opened the PC beta on 12 July 2020 and released it properly on 11 August, free, on PC and both consoles. The setting was a virtual city called Neo-Arcadia, a hundred players dropping into a stack of white towers in the year 2054. Weapons and abilities came as pickups you could fuse with duplicates to upgrade, which kept the ground loot useful late in a match instead of turning it into litter.

Two design decisions were genuinely different. Dying did not remove you: you became an Echo, floating and useless but present, and a surviving teammate could bring you back. And the endgame was not last team standing. A crown appeared somewhere on the map and you either held it long enough or killed everyone still alive, which meant the final minute was a fight over an object rather than a slow squeeze inside a shrinking circle.

The third season shipped in March 2021 and was the last one. Ubisoft said on 27 January 2022 that development had ended and the servers would close, giving three months of notice for a game most people had stopped opening a year earlier.

~ the record ~

~ the twitch bet ~

Crowncast was the real product. It was a Twitch extension that connected a streamer's match to their chat, and it let viewers vote on events that then happened inside the game to everybody playing. Low gravity for the next ninety seconds because a few thousand people in a chat window decided so. Infinite ammo for the same reason.

As an idea it was legitimately new, and it came from reading the market correctly: by 2020 more people watched battle royales than played them, and no publisher had worked out how to put those people inside the match. Ubisoft's answer was to let the audience vote. It also fixed the launch strategy, since drops and streamer access made Hyper Scape briefly enormous on Twitch in July 2020.

~ what the numbers did next ~

A viewership launch inflates the first week and tells you almost nothing about the second. The people who arrived through drops were there for the drops, and the game underneath them had to hold an audience against Warzone, which had arrived that March and was already the default, and against Fortnite, which had been the default for two years.

The complaints were specific rather than vague. The gunplay felt loose and the time to kill ran long, and the vertical map rewarded constant movement in a way that made fights hard to read. Those are fixable problems in a game with a year of runway. Hyper Scape got one season of fixes and then Ubisoft looked at the retention numbers and stopped spending.

~ the day it died ~

On 28 April 2022 the servers went off and the game became unplayable, which is what free-to-play means in the end. There is no offline copy and no disc in a drawer to fall back on. Neo-Arcadia was rented the whole time.

What went with it was the only serious attempt anybody has made at letting an audience alter a live competitive match. The idea deserved a better host game, and since Hyper Scape failed on shooting mechanics rather than on the voting, nobody has been able to tell whether the crowd feature was any good. It got buried under a product that was not working for unrelated reasons.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »