Bethesda’s Starfield might have dominated the headlines last year, but despite that and big updates to the likes of No Man’s Sky, Stellaris, and Star Citizen, Everspace 2 came out ahead as the best space game of 2023 for my money. With its speedy, satisfying space battles that strike that ideal balance between arcade satisfaction and more realistic physics, and a loot-hunting system in the style of RPGs like Diablo 4 that at times outpaces even Blizzard’s epic. Ahead of Everspace 2 Incursions, the big, free update set to launch in spring, developer Rockfish Games shows off “a major change” to how legendary equipment works, and how you’ll find some of your best items in the new update.
“Our upcoming update, Incursions, is bringing quite a few changes to Everspace 2 including a major change to legendary equipment along with how this gear can be found,” Rockfish Games writes. Following on from the reveal of powerful new Everspace 2 legendary upgrades coming in the Incursions update, which will also see the space game transition to Unreal Engine 5, Rockfish shows off two new gear types, radiant legendaries and reliquaries.
Radiant legendaries are a new class of legendary equipment that should enable veteran players to find “additional room for gear improvement” in the Everspace 2 Incursions endgame. These new items have “variable attributes that are roughly comparable to current legendaries,” Rockfish explains, “but can potentially be even more powerful.”
As a result, the current crop of legendary items currently available “will be weakened slightly compared to the ones available now.” However, Rockfish acknowledges that “veteran pilots have been stashing away legendaries to use in a variety of ship builds and we don’t want your hard work to be diminished.” Legendaries you already own, therefore, will be converted automatically into radiant legendaries when Incursions arrives, and will “remain roughly the same strength” as a result.
The second big addition is reliquaries. These are container items that can be found upon completing incursion events and are held in your cargo. They can be opened either by completing rifts or by investing Tears of the Mad and will guarantee a legendary item reward. More importantly, they’re “the only way to acquire radiant legendaries” (beyond those you’ll already have left over from before the update.”
Some reliquaries will offer a completely random reward, while other, rarer types will name the category of item that you’ll get up-front. If you find that you’re ending up with an excess of reliquaries, you can also dismantle the ones you don’t want to gain additional Tears of the mad to help you crack open the ones you’re actually interested in.
Perhaps most interestingly of all, however, there’s actually an additional benefit to these reliquaries. While you’ll have to clear a rift to open one, each reliquary carries a blessing that will benefit you while you’re inside said rift. These can boost the stats of your ship, increase the potential rewards you’ll get, modify your weapons, and even more besides. That’s an addition I’m very eager to see in action.
In closing, Rockfish notes that the way you’ll earn regular legendaries has changed. In Incursions, you’ll have more ways to find legendary equipment outside of rifts. New legendary signal decoders can be earned in incursion events that open up new, extra challenging high-risk areas. These can drop legendaries, legendary catalyst blueprints, and new crafting components. There will also now be a (very small) chance for legendaries to drop in rare and superior tier high-risk areas.
As for the eponymous incursions themselves, Rockfish remarks that we’ll “find out soon” exactly what these entail, so stay tuned for details on that ahead of the launch of the Everspace 2 Incursions update, along with a date when we have it.
For now, then, we’ve got all the best games like Diablo if you’re a sucker for seeking out loot, along with more of the best indie games on PC that you won’t want to miss out on.
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