Hyper Scape
Late to the party, Ubisoft’s first battle royale shooter fights for attention
PC, PS4, Xbox One
Developer/publisher Ubisoft (Montreal)
Format PC, PS4, Xbox One
Origin Canada
Release Summer
How wonderfully French of Ubisoft to nonchalantly roll up halfway through 2020 with a battle royale shooter. Yes – long after most of the other big studios have had their fun with the hottest genre of 2017, Ubi Montreal has finally arrived with its own offering. On paper, this free-to-play effort makes total sense: Ubisoft’s expertise in liveservice games is not to be sniffed at. Nor, indeed, is Montreal’s pool of design talent, which gave rise to Rainbow Six Siege, one of the best tactical shooters in recent memory.
It’s a combination that seems set up for success. So why is Hyper Scape only just happening now? For senior producer Graeme Jennings, it comes down to the studio’s desire to craft a fresh and compelling take on a genre that’s “very different for us”, as well as deliver it in a sustainable fashion. “I think in terms of timing, we wanted to build a real high-quality product that players would enjoy, start to play and stay in – you know, be brought into because the core gameplay was great and fun, and then kept in because we had an amazing story on top,” he explains. “And I don’t just want to launch a great game, I want to make sure our quality of service is top-notch. So we really bring it now because it’s ready to be there.”
The infrastructure is thanks in part to the Siege team, which has been a useful source not only of knowledge, but of foundational tech.
“We started the technology from the Rainbow Six engine,” Jennings says. “It’s been changed a lot obviously, because they have five versus five [players], and a 100-by-100 metre fully destructible environment, whereas we have 100 players in a one-by-one kilometre allurban environment. But the core tech from them stood up: the way the servers work, the core things around matchmaking. So we started from that tech base and then expanded it.”
We can’t deny that Hyper Scape is perfectly functional. (It won’t be winning any beauty contests; this is the ugliest Ubisoft game we’ve seen in some time, its stylised approach hoping to mimic Fortnite but falling short thanks to a murky, flat colour palette.) We steer our drop pod after our two squadmates and down into a sprawl of semi-futuristic rooftops; next comes the looting phase, as a nearby sector of the virtual city begins to fizzle away into black triangles ( Hyper Scape’s version of the battle royale ‘ring of death’). An experimental burst of fire from the rifle we’ve just picked up, however, tells us that there’s no Siege family resemblance to be found in gunfeel.
Fortunately, there’s another element to looting: hacks. These abilities – up to two at a time – can be slotted into your inventory to give you an edge in firefights. They’re certainly useful, even if most of them are well-trodden ground: a teleport dash, an area-of-effect
healing pulse, a wall to cut off your opponents’ advances. The standout is the enjoyably titled “Ball”, which lets you transform into a gigantic sphere to roll and bounce your way out of trouble – or into it, if you’re feeling confident.
How gung-ho you’re willing to be will probably depend on how many times you’ve managed to “fuse” your weapons or hacks. This is Hyper Scape’s best idea, a progression structure borrowed from MOBAs that, like the dissolving sectors, keeps you engaged with your surroundings. In other battle royales, you generally find your preferred loadout and then run past 90 per cent of the remaining loot scattered across the map. Hyper Scape makes it all useful. Find a duplicate weapon or hack for one that you’re holding, and you can combine the two to make a higher-level version. Do this four times, and you’ll have the most powerful version of it possible. The drawback here is that this, from what we can see, simply means
Viewers will be able to join their favourite streamer’s match at the press of a button
higher damage output or a reduced cooldown: there’s no real change to the look or function of the weapon or hack, which feels like a missed opportunity to reward progression.
When you do succumb to a player with a fully pumped-up shotgun, there’s still a way back. Upon death, you turn into an invisible, invincible Echo – which can be a boon, as you’re able to scout situations for your stillliving squadmates. Your ultimate aim, however, is to hunt down, and be revived at, a beacon. The kicker is that these only appear in spots where a foe has snuffed it. It raises the pressure on whoever’s left standing; unless they fancy risking their lives running to a revive spot that’s over 600 metres away, they’re going to have to get busy popping heads. The comeback opportunities this creates can be thrilling – we take great satisfaction in going 1v3 against a squad, and then using the resulting beacons to call back our friends from the virtual void.
Ubisoft Montreal’s hope is that a captive audience will, too. The chosen buzzphrase is
“game as a spectacle” – a large part of Hyper Space’s proposal is a close relationship with Twitch, to the point where viewers of the streaming platform can affect what they’re watching. The audience can vote on any number of game modifier event cards, all of which fundamentally change the pace of the match for a brief period even if they don’t exactly quicken the pulse, from low gravity to infinite ammo, fast cooldowns and (not far) beyond.
It’s not a brand-new concept: The Darwin Project – whose team is, coincidentally, also based in Montreal – used Spectator Interactions and a specific Show Director role to give viewers control over rounds. “We’d built the prototypes, the core content and the idea before The Darwin Project had come out,” Jennings reveals, “so that was something that kind of reaffirmed our idea.” Hyper Space, however, promises some clever additions to the spectator role: not only will viewers able to join their favourite streamer’s match with just the press of a button, but you’re able to level up a battle pass simply by watching matches on Twitch, unlocking rewards that you can use in-game. “You’re watching to be entertained, or you’re watching to learn – on top of that, you can advance your battle pass. We wanted a seamless link between the viewer and the streamer together, so you can enjoy Hyper Scape whether you’re at home, you’re on the bus, at work, or at your grandma’s house – we really wanted to just tie those things together.”
It’s perhaps the most assured, wellthought-out response to the increasingly obvious reality that there are just as many people who like to watch these kinds of competitive games, played on Twitch by personalities with far superior reaction times, as those who want to play them for themselves – and that there’s a crucial pathway between the two that, given the least resistance possible, could propel a game to superstardom. It’s clear Ubisoft Montreal is very much targeting that outcome in designing for drama, and there are a few elements of Hyper Scape that will no doubt make for some tense Twitch clips. But as the many other battle royales that have fallen by the wayside will attest, there’s nothing to watch if there’s no one playing. In this instance, we have a feeling this might be too little, too late.