EVERSPACE 2 developer ROCKFISH Games, being headquartered in Hamburg, couldn’t very well pass up on the Cologne-based Gamescom, especially since they’ve got the Titans DLC coming up soon. Due to launch on September 16 across all platforms (PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series S|X) for a price tag of $15, this is the first story DLC for the space combat game that was fully released in 2023.
I caught up with ROCKFISH Games CEO and Co-Founder Michael Schade and Communications Manager Lee Guille to learn more about EVERSPACE 2: Titans and to discuss various aspects of the industry, from their experience upgrading to Unreal Engine 5 to Game Pass and Early Access.
Can you give us an overview of the upcoming DLC?
Lee Guille: Sure. EVERSPACE 2: Titans is our first story and gameplay DLC. This is going to be approximately an 8-hour experience with two different storylines. One features the Dreadnought, where players will chase this capital ship, which they will attack multiple times as they progress through the storyline. The second part is Leviathan. In the base game, we teased this creature many times with these bones found in planetary and orbital locations, so we have a new storyline that involves tracking down this creature and then getting swallowed.
This is also going to play into the ongoing storyline with the Redeemers, these cultists that exist in one part of space. You’re going to be chasing down sightings of this creature alongside a new character. You’ll have to blow up some of these cloud grades or creatures, which are one of the creature types that the Leviathan feeds on.
The idea here is to get yourself covered in this gross musk that the Redeemers are also harvesting, so during these experiences, you’ll be fighting them off, too. There’s meant to be quite a few of them out there so that every time you have an encounter with them, it’s going to be different. The innards are procedurally generated. These biological environments are something that our players have never seen before. We’ve always been very space, very tech, very ruins-heavy. With the Leviathan, you’re going to be flying inside. Each time is going to be different because it’s a series of combat encounters, puzzle rooms, etc.
The first time you go through, it’s a bit of a guided encounter through the story where you’ll be fighting parasites, sometimes these drones left behind by the Redeemer cultists, and all sorts of other scary creatures down there. The objective is to go down, find lots of loot on the way, but also harvest a pearl that is at the end of the Leviathan. This kind of encounter is really appealing to players because they’ll be able to do it different ways at different times and also find new resources and loot, so craftables, new consumables, new resources and all sorts of cool stuff. This puzzle here, for example, is you have to find the perfect shot and then take out all the living strands to be able to to open the door.
Do you fight any enemies inside them?
Lee Guille: Absolutely. you’ll be encountering all sorts of things. In addition to more mechanical enemies like the Redeemer drones, there’s parasites, they’re these armored barnacle-type creatures. Then there are these worms that players have seen before that sort of stick a tongue out, grab your ship, and then drag it in. As you venture inside, you’ll find these imperfect pearls which will have different types of loot inside that’s all randomized. Also, when you’re outside of the tutorial experience, you have an agitation bar, so it pushes the players to move through the Leviathan experience quickly and also shoot accurately because if you’re hitting everything, the Leviathan will want to vomit you up, and if that happens you have to begin again.
Are these two storylines connected in any way?
Lee Guille: They’re actually separate. At no point will you have the Leviathan fighting Dreadnought, although that would be super cool. I did ask the team if we could do it, and they said no, maybe in the future. Probably not.
They’re like two different episodes. Both of these occur midway through the main storyline of EVERSPACE 2, so it’s not postgame content; it’s midgame content. Players who have finished the game can go back and find the storyline, start them, play through them, or start a new story and go from there.
How much is EVERSPACE 2 Titans going to cost players?
Lee Guille: The DLC will cost $15. We are sensitive to the costs of players around the world. We typically use the Steam recommended prices, but we also do manual shifts. This is all coming out on September 16, so it’s very soon.
I believe that the game was recently upgraded to Unreal Engine 5. Was it hard to do that?
Michael Schade: Yeah, it took us about six months or so. If you do such a major step from one engine to another, a lot of things break. Everything is fixable, of course, but you have to go into it. On the plus side, we didn’t expect that Lumen is pretty much flipping a switch, changing some parameters, and it works right out of the box. That was great and it definitely looks better, especially if you have these bouncing light effects, so that was a big plus.
We saw a performance hit, so we had to go back into the performance optimization, some things that otherwise we might not have done. Now, we are pretty much where we left off, although not on all systems. It’s just that the way Unreal Engine 5 handles these things is slightly different than Unreal Engine 4. This is why you see a performance hit. But other than that, the strategy was, since we have so much more content coming to EVERSPACE 2 down the line and possibly new platforms are coming. That’s why we said we want the game on the latest engine to make it future-proof.
Lee Guille: To speak to Lumen for a moment, we did work very closely with the Unreal Epic team to try and make sure that everything could work. Initially, our team said nah, Lumen’s too hard, but as Michael said, it was just the flick of a switch and then going back and making sure that everything looks good again. The team has optimization at the top of their minds. It’s very important to them, and we realized, as Michael said, we had a bit of a performance hit. So we’re continuing to update, and hopefully, when Titans comes out, we will have an update that will help out some of our players across all the platforms.
Michael Schade: That being said, we don’t have that many complaints about slightly lesser performance, to be honest. The vast majority of our users understand why we made the change. They’d rather take more content than worry about maybe 10% less performance. We actually had a pretty long blog post on the game’s website about this whole porting process, the things that it broke, and how we fixed them. But overall, we’re really pleased about how it went, and it’s also preparation for whatever you do afterward. You make yourself familiar with the new tech; that’s always a good thing.
You said there was a performance hit when you brought EVERSPACE 2 to Unreal Engine 5. Was it more noticeable on certain platforms? Is it more of an issue on consoles?
Michael Schade: It’s more on weaker systems. I just talked to the people from Engine Software who did the console ports for us, and they said that there are certain things that allow better visuals, but they come at a price. That shows, in particular, on the systems on the lower end of the hardware spectrum. If you have a mid-to-high-end PC, then you don’t see it. In fact, on some systems, we saw even better performance. If you crank up all the effects with Unreal Engine 5, it runs better than on Unreal Engine 4.
Perhaps it scales better to powerful hardware. Anyway, Lumen also offers the option to augment quality by taking advantage of hardware ray tracing. Is that something you might enable?
Michael Schade: The thing is, we tested hardware ray tracing when the game was on Unreal Engine 4 and found it didn’t do much for us because if you fly through space and something reflects on the spaceship, you don’t really see if it’s super accurate or using screen space global illumination, and the reflections are so convincing. We rather take the cheaper, less performance-heavy technology.
It still looks amazing. I think it would be different if you have a first-person shooter where you walk inside of a building; then, you can tell if these reflections are really accurate if there’s a water surface. But we don’t have this in many places, so this is one of the reasons why we don’t use ray tracing. And then the other is, since we’re using volumetric fog for gameplay (we’re hiding things in the fog), at least back then, ray tracing didn’t work in conjunction with volumetric clouds.
You plan to do more DLCs for EVERSPACE 2 after Titans, right?
Michael Schade: Yeah, there’s one more coming out for this one next year. We will share more info in 2025.
Lee Guille: I think the only thing we can say right now is that it’s going to be more story-driven and much, much bigger than what Titans is.
Michael Schade: We did say there would be new star systems and stories. We will also add a new player ship and a new campaign.
EVERSPACE 2: Titans is more about side content, as I understand it. Will the next big story DLC move the campaign forward?
Michael Schade: Could be. I can’t say now.
Lee Guille: Yep, if we share too much, our creative director will skin me alive because he pays the bill. But Titans is also going to introduce new set items, new consumables, more legendaries, and a couple of new types of weapons. There’s a lot of hints in there, a lot of Easter eggs to some of ROCKFISH’s past, so I think that longtime fans of the EVERSPACE series and other space games are going to enjoy this.
EVERSPACE 2 has been on Game Pass for a while, right? There is a bit of a debate in that some developers are pro-Game Pass, while others are not so favorable on the subscription service. What was your experience with it?
Michael Schade: We love Game Pass. It helped us achieve one of our best years ever and it really allowed us, because of the way Game Pass works (if you’re in Game Preview, you get a chunk of money for game preview, and then we get some kind of money for a 1.0), the first chunk really allowed us in combination with revenue from Steam and other platforms to continue working on the base game for another year and make a better game. Game Pass is good for everybody. Even people on PlayStation got a better game because of our deal with Microsoft.
So you don’t think it hurt full-game sales in your case?
Michael Schade: This is what you get the money for, right? It’s not like it sits in a subscription and you sell the same amount of copies as if it’s not. But this is why Microsoft pays you, and we were very happy with the deal. It was fantastic. If Microsoft is interested in future content, we’re very open to having a continued discussion. In fact, I analyzed when EVERSPACE 2 went on Game Pass for PC. We didn’t see a decline in Steam sales. This is what those developers are worried about, but we don’t see any sign of slowing down sales; it’s rather the opposite. Because of the extra visibility from Game Pass, more people picked it up on Steam, and we saw a spike in sales.
Lee Guille: I do want to echo what Michael said there about visibility. It would be very hard to get that same level of marketing because the Xbox team was fantastic in showing the game, making sure that we were represented on their platforms and just making whole new fans of EVERSPACE.
It’s a win-win.
Michael Schade: Yeah.
Lee Guille: In our situation, absolutely.
Michael Schade: For us, it’s a perfect combination. Early access first with our early adopters who want to be part of the journey and help us make the best game we can possibly do. We make some money off that, substantially, actually, and then we add Game Pass, and on PlayStation, we just sell the game with the classic model. So it works. It is very different, but they work together, it’s not like those business models cannibalize each other.
EVERSPACE 2 was in early access for quite a while, as you just noted. Of course, you said there will be more DLCs after Titans, but eventually, you will make another game. Do you plan to keep using the early access model, or would you rather go with a full launch immediately?
Michael Schade: Well, I’ve been on record saying I will never do a game without going through early access. We’re so happy with this model because, honestly, locking yourself in for five years (this is how long it takes to make a really high-end AA game), you just don’t know if you are making the right game and what the fans say about it. The financial component is one thing, but the most important part of early access for us is whether we are making the right game. Is the community excited about it, are there any things that we really need to address and need to change? With EVERSPACE 2, there are a couple of things that we changed for the better because of community feedback, and this helped us have a really solid 1.0 release because, after being tested for more than two years by some 200K pilots, you get the feedback you need.
You mentioned other systems coming in the future. One of these is a Nintendo platform. Are you potentially looking to port EVERSPACE 2 to the so-called Switch 2?
Michael Schade: We will absolutely look at it. I wish we knew more. It’s so hard to get any info.
It shouldn’t be long now, I reckon.
Michael Schade: Yeah, we’re waiting to hear more about it. Talking with the companies that specialize in porting, even they don’t have the specs, so it’s all a mystery to us so far. If the hardware is powerful enough, we’re definitely interested, but we have to wait and see.
Is EVERSPACE 2 verified for the Steam Deck?
Michael Schade: It is not, and I think there are only one or two things that are holding us back. One is that the UI, it’s not scalable, and it’s really hard for us, because it is such a complex UI. At this point, we might end up in a state where we support the Steam Deck, but it’s never going to be verified because reworking the UI would be a huge pain point and might not be worth the hassle. So far, people are happy with how it is, but to get that verified button for such a complex game… If we had designed it from the very beginning, it would have been different, but obviously, when we were making EVERSPACE 2, there was no sign of Steam Deck, and we had to support 720P. It was not in the cards. Now, going back is really hard, so I don’t want to make any promises.
What do you think about this trend of PC handhelds? Beyond the Steam Deck, several big manufacturers have entered the market lately.
Michael Schade: We love it. My previous studio was a mobile gaming studio. We also made games on mobile, and we love that. We also see other devices, such as the PlayStation Portal, that you just hang out with because your family is playing something else or watching something else on the big screen and you still want to enjoy your game.
I think that’s a good use case. The Steam Deck and the Switch are doing great, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see more handhelds on both consoles and PCs.
Do you think the game is a good fit for the handheld experience?
Michael Schade: I think it is because, given our background of making addicting space games on mobile devices, we have a very accessible space combat. Our promise is that when you pick up the game, within a minute, you have an explosion on the screen. The controls are also designed to bring it closer to a shooter experience rather than a space simulator experience. So yeah, I think it’s a great fit.
Lee Guille: To double up on that, there are more than a hundred handcrafted locations in EVERSPACE 2 and most of those more sidey ones you can play through and explore everything in about 20 minutes to half an hour, so it’s a great pick up and play type of game.
Thank you for your time.
