I’ve always liked Diablo. In the “play-through-the-campaign-once” kind of dirty casual that I am when it comes to long-lasting min-max games. I like loot, which makes the monsters fall over faster when I press buttons. I like when they leave more loot after pressing the button and the next monsters fall over even faster. And I like the mangy, sickly atmosphere of the first, second and probably fourth Diablo (even though I haven’t played its beta yet). But somehow the ephemeral ephemerality of the gear in this sort of game always got me a bit.
In the end, it probably boils down to this for me: The strong focus on build optimization always makes me feel a little like I’m at work. Basically, I just don’t have the patience for everything that has too much to do with numbers, and from a certain point that you should exceed if the carnage is to demand something, that’s always the case with Diablo. Or at least felt that way to me. Then it was usually the end between me and this technically and creatively often masterful monster massacre. Admittedly, often not without nostalgia. This is solely due to my personal preference and it is perfectly okay. You can’t love all games.
It’s not like there aren’t a lot of alternatives. In the past years and months in Early Access I realized that Everspace 2 by Rockfish from Hamburg is basically exactly what would happen if someone made a new Diablo just for me. And the game is finally coming out in its final form at the end of next week, which I’m really looking forward to.
On the face of it, “a Diablo just for me” means it’s almost nothing like Diablo, I have to admit. You don’t control a warrior anymore, you control a spaceship that you fly through open star systems, like in Freespace or something. Between the missions there are motion comic movies that tell a light space opera and of course you do all this completely alone. But the spirit of Diablo does haunt the skeletons of shattered capital ships and hollowed-out asteroids, filling these sectors with the legacy of a great war. Active spells and skills are now equipment on the ship itself, and passive abilities are represented by the specializations of your followers who remain in the base, which you increase for resources. Depending on how you upgrade and equip, your plane will do different things better or worse.
New armor takes the form of fresh ships. Handcrafted story and side quests will take you past randomly generated events and accumulations of enemies, which you regularly check for loot and other rewards much more persistently than you actually intended. Time and time again you completely forget what the story is about because you enjoy the trappings so much and the hunger for levels and new equipment becomes immeasurable. Yes, Rockfish really took the good stuff from the classic loot game and applied it perfectly to a space game.
I’ll admit I struggled a bit with Everspace 2 at first. As an old Wing Commander kid, I didn’t hold onto the mouse-and-keyboard controls that this title clearly best suits, nor the six degrees of freedom beforehand in the movement for insanely attractive. At that time, Star Wars and Co. drummed it into us that spaceships also move in space like airplanes. That’s nonsense, of course, because you hardly have to worry about aerodynamic processes in a vacuum. But it simply shaped our image of what space combat should look like. This often amounts to circle strafing, except that the “circle” is a ball that you move around the inside of.
It took a while, but when I really got into Early Access for the first time, it clicked at some point and I’m now able to do incredibly elegant maneuvers in this way. Also because Rockfish’s space never seems to be empty. There is always enough scrap or rubble floating through the room, and other things that you like to dance around during your own laser show or integrate tactically smart into your moves. Today I wouldn’t want to play Everspace 2 any other way than with a mouse and WASD along all imaginable axes, even though I’m of course looking forward to the Steam Deck adjustment, which is to follow at the same time as the console versions in the summer.
Of course, I’m aware that an Everspace 2 probably won’t keep even its hardest fans in the final version for hundreds or thousands of hours like a Diablo 4. The respectable 30 hours that Rockfish planned for the campaign alone and through side quests and jobs should be significantly increased again, but are already quite substantial. Above all, I don’t have the feeling that Everspace 2, when the time comes, will say goodbye to me with the same melancholy mentioned above that I almost always feel with Diablo. It stems primarily from the feeling of having left so much unfinished, yes, having missed something.
A game that will no doubt eventually draw a clear line of its own that signals to me: “It’s okay, if you go, it was nice to be with you!” As I said before: Just made for me.
Developer: Rockfish Games Publishers: Rockfish – Platforms: PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series S/X – release: PC on March 06, 2023, console releases Summer 2023 – Genre: Space shooter, RPG – Price (RRP): just under 50 euros, included in the Xbox Game Pass
