Ubisoft’s short-lived battle royale shooter Hyper Scape is being revived by a passionate fan, but don’t expect the multiplayer to work anytime soon
Respawn and retry.
Hyper Scape feels like something that happened ages ago, but Ubisoft’s failed battle royale game was shut down in April 2022 after halting its content updates a year before that. The game itself wasn’t anything special, yet no small amount of FPS veterans praised its core traversal and movement mechanics. This is why a passionate fan is attempting to bring it back from the live-service graveyard.
On 16th February, Fiirce on X/Twitter revealed Hyper Scape working offline (with bots that serve as target practice) perfectly fine. That alone is an achievement, as the game’s core functionality was tied to Ubisoft’s server infrastructure, which was shut down back in 2022. The user underlines this is a very early effort running on a private server, with largely limited alpha access that must be requested and primarily targets players with “reverse engineering experience” that want to help out with the project. You can see the game running below:
Fiirce isn’t promising a working release of Hyper Scape anytime soon, as figuring out how to make at least the basic online features work could take “months or even years.” That said, it has been getting a lot of traction over at X/Twitter since the gameplay clip was posted, which could summon the required expertise quickly and get a proper reverse-engineering effort going soon.
In any case, there’s also the question of whether Ubisoft will step in and shut down the project as many publishers do when fans take over dead IPs to work on non-profit new games or revivals. Nobody’s expecting the powers that be to ever revisit Hyper Scape, so this shouldn’t bother them, but you never know if another publisher could swoop in and pick up the rights to do something. Remember Paragon: The Overprime?
This fan-led revival project joins the likes of the experiments some people are doing on Anthem shortly after its death. Live-service games are hard to maintain and make really sustainable, but when these endeavours become so common, you have to wonder if the failed IPs that litter the games industry should be made public instead of thrown into vaults.
Hyper Scape feels like something that happened ages ago, but Ubisoft’s failed battle royale game was shut down in April 2022 after halting its content updates a year before that. The game itself wasn’t anything special, yet no small amount of FPS veterans praised its core traversal and movement mechanics. This is why a passionate fan is attempting to bring it back from the live-service graveyard.
On 16th February, Fiirce on X/Twitter revealed Hyper Scape working offline (with bots that serve as target practice) perfectly fine. That alone is an achievement, as the game’s core functionality was tied to Ubisoft’s server infrastructure, which was shut down back in 2022. The user underlines this is a very early effort running on a private server, with largely limited alpha access that must be requested and primarily targets players with “reverse engineering experience” that want to help out with the project. You can see the game running below:
Fiirce isn’t promising a working release of Hyper Scape anytime soon, as figuring out how to make at least the basic online features work could take “months or even years.” That said, it has been getting a lot of traction over at X/Twitter since the gameplay clip was posted, which could summon the required expertise quickly and get a proper reverse-engineering effort going soon.
In any case, there’s also the question of whether Ubisoft will step in and shut down the project as many publishers do when fans take over dead IPs to work on non-profit new games or revivals. Nobody’s expecting the powers that be to ever revisit Hyper Scape, so this shouldn’t bother them, but you never know if another publisher could swoop in and pick up the rights to do something. Remember Paragon: The Overprime?
This fan-led revival project joins the likes of the experiments some people are doing on Anthem shortly after its death. Live-service games are hard to maintain and make really sustainable, but when these endeavours become so common, you have to wonder if the failed IPs that litter the games industry should be made public instead of thrown into vaults.