Everspace expands in Encounters, out late October
Everspace ever-expanding
It's only been a few months since the release of Everspace [official site], the extraordinarily pretty space dogfighting game with rogue'y bits. Resident RPS space-boffin Brendan thought it was quite nice, if a little light on juicy details to really get your teeth into. Being just a few months since it launched, it comes as a bit of a surprise that not only have they announced an expansion - Encounters - but it's due out later this month. Check out the impressively bombastic teaser trailer after the jump.
Told you it was pretty. Everspace's trailers have never held back on the explosion front, with giant orbital platforms, giant derelicts and asteroids fields making space feel like a dense and busy place rather than the endless void of nothingness interspersed with statistically insignificant dustings of matter that we know it to be.
Encounters adds a new playable craft - the Colonial Sentinel - a middleweight with a focus on electronic warfare capabilities and double the equipment slots of other fighters. You'll be stuffing these slots with the usual array of roguelike-expansion-type gubbins; New weapon types, new missiles, new gadgets, consumables and so on. Encounters also promises to bulk out Everspace's universe with new space station types to find, new enemy types to shoot at (or be shot by) and some extra quest-giving NPCs offering questlines parallel to the main story.
The announcement also mentions the possibility of visiting the Okkar homeworld, presumably for a huge fight. Somehow I doubt they'll be too friendly after shooting so many of them on the way there. As gorgeous as Everspace is, it somehow flew under my radar at release. Perhaps with the release of this new iteration, I'll give it a proper look. If nothing else, flying through massive derelict hulls at breakneck speed looks a lot of fun.
Everspace: Encounters is due out sometime around the end of October. The base game is available for Windows and Mac via Steam, Humble and GOG for £23/€28/$30.