Hyper Scape, Ubisoft’s battle royale, reveals console launch date

Ubisoft has announced that Hyper Scape, its futuristic free-to play battle royale game, will release in full on August 11th. That date is the first time the game will be playable on Xbox One and PlayStation 4 in any form.

Launch will kick off the game’s first season of content, which Ubisoft is calling “The First Principle.” Season 1 will bring a new gun, the Dragonfly, a new hack ability, Magnet, and a full 100-tier battle pass (available in both free and paid varieties), as well as lore about the world, limited-time game modes, and events. The first event Ubisoft has detailed will make all Melee attacks instantly lethal.

The game is currently in early testing on PC, with an open beta scheduled to wrap up on August 2nd. Cross-progression means that if you start playing now on PC and then hop to console, anything you unlock will carry over with you, as long as you use the same Ubisoft account. If you don’t have a gaming capable PC, you can still get a head start on leveling up your Battle Pass, however, since the Crowncast Twitch Extension lets you make progress just by watching streams of the game.

In fact, Ubisoft announced it will add an additional feature to the game’s extensive Twitch integration at launch. Viewers will be able to react to exciting moments by “using Bits to generate a visual effect that appears in a streamer’s game.” This joins the ability for viewers to vote on in-game events that can activated limited-time modifiers, like turning on low-gravity or enabling triple jumps for everyone in the match.

There’s more incentive to get in early, as well: Ubisoft will give 600 Bitcrowns, Hyper Scape‘s premium in-game currency, to anyone who plays a match or watches a Crowncast-enabled Twitch stream for at least one hour between now and the end of the open beta.

If you’re unfamiliar with Hyper Scape, Ubisoft’s foray into the battle royale reflects a somewhat streamlined approach to the genre, with a few key differences. Ninety-nine players drop into a map in customizable pods, and then roam around to weapons and ability pickups called Hacks to build their loadouts. Duplicates can be fused together to increase their effectiveness in combat. Rather than picking up attachments for your sniper rifle, for instance, you can make it more powerful just by finding additional sniper rifles, up to level four. Hacks range from straightforward, like healing, to a bit more bonkers, like being able to turn into a ball and bounce around the map.

Dying in Hyper Scape transforms you into a kind of digital ghost—invisible to other players, but still able to scout out and communicate with your team. You can also jump back into the action by meeting your teammates at respawn points, which are dropped when enemies die.

Since Hyper Scape is set in a futuristic virtual world, the approach to closing off areas of the map is also slightly different than the standard genre approach, as well. Its highly vertical, urban map of Neo-Arcadia will gradually derez section by section over the course of the match, eventually coalescing the fight around a single city block. And the game also presents an alternate win condition: In the final moments, you can either kill all your opponents or hold onto a crown that spawns into the map for a set amount of time without dying—something made extra challenging by the fact that picking it up reveals your position.

Hyper Scape launches its first season on August 11th on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Windows PC.