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Hardspace: Shipbreaker has made shift timers optionalShiftbreaker
Shiftbreaker
Superb spaceship slicing simHardspace: Shipbreakerhas added a new difficulty option to career mode, with shift timers disabled.
The existing career mode cuts you off and forces you back to base every 15 minutes, making things too stressful and intrusive for some. You can now take all the time you want with a wreck instead. They’ve also made the puzzling decision to give you an infinite oxygen supply for this mode. This is all additive, so players who like the thrill of yanking out a nuclear reactor and blasting it to safety in the dying ten seconds of a shift can still blow themselves up on company time.
Watch on YouTube
Watch on YouTube
In principle, I think the shift timers are a good thing. As Imentionedbefore, they tempt you to rush things, and thus make mistakes. But 15 minutes is too tight, and I’d prefer a sliding scale for their duration. Perhaps you could even move that in-game, and have your player character choose how long a shift will be before starting each one (and consequently how much you’d be charged for tools, room and board). And without a shift timer OR the need to periodically top up on oxygen, it’s entirely possible that I will lose entire days to this game before I even notice.
But hey, people like different things. The shift timers were the first thing I expected conversations about. They’re actually much less invasive and stressful than they sound, but even so, they are divisive, and I suspect the ability to play without them will tempt many fence-sitters to dive in.
Developers Blackbird Interactive acknowledged their mixed reception ina news post, saying: “For our players that have requested the option to play in a more ‘chill & zen-like’ manner, we have just implemented a new ‘Open Shift’ difficulty option for our Campaign mode where you can work WITHOUT a shift timer and unlimited oxygen”.
Whinge moan fuss. The new Open Shift mode has its own leaderboard, which perhaps explains why this has been added as a distinct mode, rather than a more complicated custom setup. I confess that I didn’t even realise there were leaderboards until reading that, and I doubt I’ll ever bother with them. But there’s nothing stopping me from just playing it like I was before, and it’s surely a good sign that the devs are willing to make a major change to the design based on feedback.
You can playHardspace: Shipbreakernowvia Steam Early Accessfor £22/€25/$25. The full release is an estimated year off, but Blackbird stress that early access will last “for as long as needed”.
