Years After Its Shutdown, A Fan Is Resurrecting Ubisoft's Battle Royale

Ubisoft’s failed battle royale game Hyper Scape is the subject of a new revival project from a passionate fan. The developer, who goes by Fiirce on X/Twitter, revealed on February 16th that the game was working offline. This is a notable achievement, as the game's core systems were connected to Ubisoft's server infrastructure, which was taken down in 2022.

The game was officially shut down in April 2022 after Ubisoft had already halted content updates the year prior. Some first-person shooter players had praised the game's traversal and movement mechanics. The original shutdown announcement came a little over 18 months after the game first launched in August 2020. Its debut was met with a lukewarm reception. Less than three months after its release, Ubisoft announced it was starting a major overhaul to help the 100-player battle royale experience reach its full potential. Despite this, development stalled.

The game’s final season of content, Season 3, arrived in March 2021. According to the official website, the game was only updated once more, to Version 3.1 in April 2021. The game’s own Twitter account stopped promoting the title in May of that year. Given these events, the news that Ubisoft was formally ending the project was not an enormous surprise. I see the fan's effort to untangle the game from its defunct server dependency as a significant first step.

In a post on its website, the publisher announced the end of the game's development.

"We have made the difficult decision to end development of Hyper Scape and shut the game down as of April 28th. We set out to create a vertical, close-quarters, and fast-paced shooter experience and we are extremely grateful to our community for joining us on our journey. We will be taking key learnings from this game into future products."

— Ubisoft

"To the Hyper Scape community, thank you for your passion and dedication to the world of Neo Arcadia both inside and outside of the game. Your devotion to the game we built will always be cherished."

— Ubisoft

The current revival is a very early effort. It runs on a private server with bots that serve as target practice. Access is provided through a largely limited alpha that must be requested. The project primarily targets players who have "reverse engineering experience" and wish to help with development. Fiirce is not promising a working release of Hyper Scape in the near future.

Figuring out how to make basic online features function could take "months or even years." I do believe the attention the project has received on X/Twitter since the gameplay clip was posted could attract the needed expertise to get a proper reverse-engineering effort moving forward. There is also the question of whether Ubisoft will intervene and shut down the project. Publishers often take this step when fans take over dead intellectual properties to work on non-profit revivals. Since it is not expected for Ubisoft to ever revisit Hyper Scape, the project may not bother them. This fan-led revival joins other experiments, such as those people are conducting on the game Anthem following its cancellation.