Ubisoft’s battle royale game, Hyper Scape, exited beta on August 2 and will release its first season on August 11, debuting on the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One alongside PC.
Season 1, titled “The First Principle,” will bring with it a new weapon and hack, new game modes, and expanded features for its Twitch plug-in Crowncast, and will delve deeper into the lore of the game.
The new weapon and hack are named “the Dragonfly” and “Magnet,” respectively. Twitch viewers can enable a new in-game event via Crowncast that makes melee attacks lethal for a short period of time and now adds the ability to offer “Kudos” to gameplay moments utilizing Bits that generate visual effects during the match.
With the beta ended on August 2, any cosmetics acquired through the in-game store or battle pass will transfer to the full release and can be brought over to console as the game supports cross-progression. For those not on PC and wishing to acquire the beta’s items, battle pass progression can be accrued simply by watching streams of the game.
Hyper Scape sets itself apart from other battle royales by having much faster rounds, with characters able to zip across rooftops with rapid parkour skills. Players are brought together by disappearing zones rather than an encroaching circle, and can pick up duplicates of weapons and abilities known as hacks to upgrade their equipped loadout. Ubisoft and Twitch also teamed up to bring the aforementioned Crowncast to the streaming platform, providing a plug-in that allows viewers to interact with the game they’re watching and steer the course of the match.
For all its Twitch interactivity, however, Hyper Scape‘s beta has suffered from low viewership. It made a big splash at the start of the month when Ubisoft partnered with streamers to promote the game, but at the time of writing, it sits at just 2,500 viewers. That’s a far cry from the hundreds of thousands watching both Fortnite and Call of Duty: Warzone, and is still dwarfed by other battle royales such as Apex Legends and PUBG.
Hopefully bringing the game to consoles will expand its viewership to a size that makes it competitive on the platform. Making Hyper Scape a hit is not Ubisoft’s biggest problem, however. It is currently embroiled in an ever-developing harassment scandal that has seen the company go through multiple high-level employee departures. It will be interesting to see if and how these internal issues affect the release of the game.
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