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| Everspace 2 |
I liked the first Everspace. I would go as far as to say that it could be closest to modern Elite. This is because I think Elite ought to be seen as a fun 3D action RPG game and not a serious space simulator.
The sequel, Everspace 2, has a more open universe than the linear, path selection system in the original. At least relatively. I'll be very clear, you won't be able to fly seamlessly through space, orbits and planetary atmospheres and admire a clockwork universe from different angles like in Elite: Dangerous or even Frontier. Neither are you going to be building installations like in No Man's Sky. And it might just be all for the better.
To put it in classic RPG terms, the hyperspace would be the World Map, but with optional rather than mandatory encounters. The player can travel between different locations in the hyperspace, either by navigating the semi-2D "plane" or by leaving it to the autopilot.
Locations such as planetary orbits or surface sites are more like towns or dungeons, with dangerous opponents, shops and loot. You can only properly exit such a location via a hyperspace jump.
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| Zooming in on the system maps. |
There's also a very linear story, and you won't get to define your character. You still play the clone persona from the first game, Adam Roslin (groan), but this premise is not used for infinite lives. So the play has ceased to be a "rogue-like in space".
It's not necessary to follow the story all the time, you can go exploring the ubiquitous asteroid fields and wrecks, pick up alternate missions or jobs, buy and sell cargo, shoot outlaws and so on. As the universe opens up little by little, you can visit more locations of your choice.
At the beginning I tried to avoid any additional missions, as I pursued the main storyline aggressively. Later, this begins to backfire as the player and equipment level is not equal to the tasks set in the missions.
Similarly, I've become so bored with crafting in games I avoided this side for the longest time. Fortunately, there's no need for a boring grind, as it's possible to take up on the various earlier missions at a later stage. Truth be told quite a lot of extra missions need to be taken up to stay ahead of the curve. The crafting is not a huge chore really.
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| Just like everything, planet surfaces are limited area locations. |
Only about after 8 hours I started to feel confident I would go through with the main quest. And this was mostly because I already had familiarity with the Everspace ship controls. You can/need glide, yaw, pitch, roll, elevate, descend, boost, cruise... swap between two primary and two secondary weapon systems.
And it took even more time before I understood I can craft the components needed for updating the Perks, and that I can also modify and improve the weapons and ship sub-systems. So I don't have to wait for a suitably leveled item to arrive randomly.
I had become accustomed in using the two warfare systems, EMP and Boost, to help fight my battles, so I forgot there's half a dozen other such systems. Granted, most of them are not as generally useful.
The EMP shuts down most of the enemy ships in near range for a little while, whereas Boost allows the player to escape the skirmish to the other side of the playfield. In some situations the enemies can be "jousted" one by one using this technique repeatedly, a way to kill foes above your paygrade.
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| One of the tinkering screens. |
And I'd completely ignored the ULT panic weapon system which activates from the "g" key.
It's possible that as now more battles are story-embedded set pieces, they aren't always as fun as in Everspace 1. It does become better as the ship becomes more capable and there are more things to experiment in in combat. The clever action RPG curve ensures the ship becomes gradually more and more "playable", and this is what keeps the player hooked.
So, ultimately, Everspace 2 is a better game than the original in all respects. The more open universe is a good idea and a great improvement over the first game. The size and scale has been well considered, as all locations have a name and some personality. A game like this doesn't need millions of procedurally generated star systems.
The hyperspace journey offers opt-ins for unknown events, distress calls and so on. Turn off the autopilot, choose the location and turn the autopilot on again. This could be seen as a tiny nod to the alternate routes in Everspace 1, and makes those boring hyperspace journeys more exciting.
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| An alternate ship type, out of many. I stuck with the default. |
The more open universe is not all perfection.
In a strange way, the original 8-bit Elite universe worked precisely because the star systems were almost featureless. It didn't really matter where your ship was. You'd just keep hyperspacing to the next promising system, or jump between two profitable systems. Everspace 1 approximated this experience.
Now you need to hop back and forth as the missions require it. Jump to the system with the Gate, make the journey through the Gate, jump to the mission system(s)... add to this a mission structure where you set out to do a thing, it requires another thing or a favour, and then it all cascades back and in the worst case you need to do all the jump backwards to get your reward.
But Everspace 2 has a few tricks up its sleeve, and just about when you start to get really pissed by all the jumping around, shortcuts arrive.
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| A cockpit view is possible, but not very practical. |
I considered delaying this blog post until I've completed the game, but after 45+ hours I have to say it is still some ways off. The first game took 60 hours from me after all. I'll just add to this post if something important happens.
The working of Proton/Steam on Linux can be taken nearly granted these days, so there's little point in describing whether the game works in the environment or not. At least I never experienced a crash or any dodgy behaviour, with sessions ranging from 30 minutes to about 2 hours.
Everspace 2 gives the option to use either Directx 11 or 12, I'm not sure but 12 might have been a little more laggy for the mouse input. The good old 1660Ti performed well enough in 1920x1200x60hz.
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| Everspace 2 on RTX 4060 |
However, I switched over to an RTX 4060 GPU. I had some positive experiences with Control so I wondered whether Everspace 2 could look any different?
The short answer is no. Of course the action became generally smoother, because it's a faster card.
I also felt there was no problem with DirectX 12, so I switched over there. This opened the Lumen illumination option. Lumen probably reverted to software, causing the game to drop framerate. It did change lighting just enough to be able to say it does something, but not enough to justify finding out whether it could be made to work faster.
Whether the DLSS 4.02. upscaler/frame generation does anything, is also difficult to say, at least it looked to remove vsync where it previously worked.
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| Locations like these tend to hit the framerate. |
FSR 3.1.3 just appeared to slow down.
XeSS 1.3.1 interestingly enough was smooth, and with balance on "performance" it introduced some visual artefacts, more apparent in motion. It is some kind of upscaling, but anything that's static or predictable appears in the native resolution without any artefacts, so I'm not exactly sure what the heuristics are. To me it looks better than using a directly scaled lower resolution.
Any frame generation is unlikely to help much as the display is limited to 60hz.
