Over the summer, Ubisoft launched the latest free to play battle royale title — Hyper Scape — and while the publisher was initially thrilled with the response, the game ultimately failed to meet expectations.
Earlier this week, Ubisoft sent out an update regarding Hyper Scape, where they acknowledged that they weren’t able to meet the “high expectations” of their players, and promised to improve the overall experience for existing and new players alike. You can check out their statement below.
“Three months ago, we released Hyper Scape to the world. We were thrilled with the response, as millions gave our take on battle royale a try, telling us specifically how much they love the movement and fast pace of the game. While July’s launch and Open Beta on PC were successful, we were not able to achieve the high expectations we set for ourselves with our full release on console that followed in August. We also know we didn’t fully meet the high expectations of our players, so we are taking action. We have more work to do to get there, but our team is fully committed to the challenge.”
The publisher also said that they’ll be restructuring its development team into a cell-based format, similar to what they did with Rainbox Six Siege, where each development cell will be focused on one of the following five major pillars.
- 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 the 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.
Even if Ubisoft is able to fix these issues, there’s no guarantee that it’ll end up being on the same level as something like Fortnite, Call of Duty: Warzone, or Apex Legends. But, at least they’re giving it a shot, which is better than just leaving something to die.
The second season for Hyper Scape is currently scheduled to begin on October 6.