The developers of Besiege have done two very important things recently. First, they accused their playerbase of building “Malevolent Machines”, which is true. The second thing is that they plan to jettison those machines from this world, beyond far-earth orbit.
The Steam page for the latest Besiege expansion DLC describes how your dastardly dynamo will become a pox on world far beyond our own, venturing into the ‘Broken Beyond’. They write:
“Put your engineering talents to the test as you master space flight, navigating gravitational fields, avoiding asteroids and other challenges using a suite of exciting new blocks.”
Naturally, the developers at Spiderling Studios have also released a teaser trailer for the coming update. In it, the construction of a massive rocket is set to wonderful classical music, showing the process of blastoff and reaching the final frontier.
The trailer does not show a release date, but does offer a release window: Q2 of this year.
As for the DLC’s contents, you’ve got:
- A campaign of space themed levels
- A suite of new space themed blocks
- A new sandbox environment
- New physics mechanics
Or so the Steam page claims. Perhaps you’ll also face an eternal purgatory drifting aimlessly between nebulae as consequence for building your obscene automaton. Or maybe not. We’ll see!
Why Is Besiege Letting A Trebuchet Conquer The Stars?
The Project Lead for the expansion, Daniel Schmidt, discussed an oddity with the game’s visual design in a press release. Besiege wears its medieval inspirations on its sleeve, and that’s not going away in The Broken Beyond.
Things will still be built from wood, forged iron, and tasteful amounts of cloth, despite… well, the harsh and unforgiving vacuum of space. And that is very much by design.
“There’s a good saturation of great space games on the market,” Schmidt says, “but we wanted to create something different. With Besiege originally being a medieval building game it was exciting to explore that aesthetic in space, drawing inspiration from the likes of DaVinci, Jules Verne, and even Space-Orks to forge our creative direction for the expansion.”
At some point, once you’ve strapped enough rockets to something, can you even call it a siege engine anymore? The artistic direction for Besiege: The Broken Beyond wants to argue that yes, anything is a siege engine if you’re Orky enough.
Considering the spelling of ‘Orks’ in the above quote almost certainly referring to the Warhammer 40k ones, logic like that seems about right.
“At Spiderling,” Schmidt continues, “we sometimes bite off more than we can chew, but we love the process of learning and turning a wacky idea into something real. The team always outdoes themselves, and seeing this come to life has been crazy!”
At the very least, low-gravity environments have proven to be especially fertile ground for physics games like Besiege. Whether or not the insanity of the aesthetics is up your alley, an expansion like this is following firmly-established genre trends in terms of gameplay. Ripping apart that enemy starship will likely be a blast, no matter what.
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