Steam Early Access version planned for summer 2020
It’s a pleasant surprise to hear that Hardspace: Shipbreaker is coming to PlayStation 4 and Xbox One after its Steam Early Access run starts this summer. In the sci-fi sim game, you play as a salvager who’s working to pay off a debt by strategically slicing off valuable parts from spaceships with a laser cutter.
It’s such a cool concept for a game. I haven’t seen anything quite like it before on this scale.
Blackbird Interactive (Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak) has big plans for Hardspace: Shipbreaker, but in the beginning, for Early Access, the simulation game will have two types of ships to crack open, a sandbox mode, and the first act of the story campaign, which should take around 15 hours to beat. The finished campaign will have more mission variety and could end up being 40 hours long. It’ll be a beefy game.
“We have a rough plan for a year of development beginning in May 2020,” the studio said of the Early Access PC version. “However, game development is a long, difficult, and massively fun process that can easily extend beyond plans once you involve the excellent ideas of a big community. We’ll decide down the line exactly how much game we consider to be the 1.0 version, but we’d rather stay in Early Access for as long as needed than come out early to hit an imaginary window we’ve set for ourselves.”
I’m curious how this game might run on consoles considering all of the crazy physics-driven mayhem.
On that note – and given the roadmap leading up to version 1.0 – I won’t be surprised if Hardspace ends up drifting onto PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X. Microsoft is perfectly fine with work-in-progress Game Preview builds on Xbox One, but Sony doesn’t have its own Early Access equivalent on PS4. We’ll see!
