While Highguard hasn’t been outright cancelled yet, its rocky start — poor reviews, a dwindling player count, and developer layoffs — means it’s unlikely to have a promising future. But it isn’t the first live-service multiplayer game to suffer the same fate, and it won’t be the last. We all remember Concord, XDefiant, and Anthem, right?
Hyper Scape is another example. An Ubisoft-developed battle royale from August 2020, it had a promising start as one of the most-watched games on Twitch during its beta, but essentially fell off a cliff when the full release came around. The game’s critical reception wasn’t impressive either, with a Metacritic score in the mid-60s across its three platforms.
Criticisms largely stemmed from Hyper Scape’s inability to differentiate itself from its competitors. The map was considered to be uninspired, winning was dependent on too many seemingly random factors, and the overall presentation felt generic. By October 2020, Ubisoft announced a complete revamp of the game’s systems, but it was too little, too late.
Like we’re currently seeing with Highguard and its steady-ish sub-2,000 concurrent player count on Steam, though, Hyper Scape did have somewhat of an audience. It wasn’t a terrible game, at the very least. Now, some of the most dedicated fans of the almost-forgotten battle royale are working hard to restore it to its former glory.
The Hyper Scape Revival project aims to bring back the game exactly as players remember it. It’s being spearheaded by a fan who goes by the handle Fiirce on X. When they first revealed the project, they noted, “Singleplayer [sic] works for now, will be awhile before anything multiplayer works (could be months or even years). Early alpha/private for now.” Their post also includes an almost two-minute video showing the game working flawlessly.
Less than a day after posting that initial video, ex-Hyper Scape players nostalgic for the futuristic battle royale have offered their support in droves, and it’s even led to players resharing their old clips. The fan-led project has been warmly received, so far: “The world needs Hyper Scape back,” “it’s the best arcade FPS I have played in my entire life,” and “an amazing game that released at the wrong time,” wrote a number of former players who miss Ubisoft’s brief foray into the genre.
Fiirce followed it up by saying they’re “astounded” by the reaction and that they’ll be “working with the team as fast as I can to get things working.” Polygon has reached out to Fiirce for comment on this story, and will update if they reply.
The similarities between Hyper Scape and Highguard aren’t limited to the fact that they’re both FPS games that never got off the ground though. At its core, Highguard’s shooting mechanics are mostly sound. The extraneous elements let it down, and it isn’t difficult to find avid defenders of Wildlight Entertainment’s flop showing off intense firefights on social media. Mechanically, the game goes deep, with an incredibly high skill ceiling.
Hyper Scape was no different, with crisp combat and fast-paced movement tech that meant when it clicked, you were off to the races. There were moments of brilliance to be found; they were just few and far between, and the fact they relied upon players mastering the mechanics resulted in lots of “casual” players bouncing off the game.
However, to claim Hyper Scape was ahead of its time and that it would thrive in today’s environment feels like rose-tinted revisionism. It’s incredibly cool that there are so many passionate fans working together to restore the game to a playable state, but it also feels like a vocal minority. How many players will jump back into this reverse-engineered fan project, get their nostalgia fix for an hour or two, then take off again? An overwhelming majority, I reckon, because the Hyper Scape consensus six years ago wasn’t wrong.
