Join The Club
As the old saying goes: In space, no one can hear you have a pleasant time with a small cohort of your pals. Unless you have in-game voice chat. Or Discord. Or I guess you could just call each other. Do people still call each other in the space age?
Well, you can find out in Starseeker: Astroneer Expeditions, which just popped its head up at the PC Gaming Show to show off some co-op planetary exploration and remind us of its imminent early access release date.
Starseeker is, as you might already have deduced, System Era's followup to the really quite good Astroneer, its spacey exploration and crafting game that itself hit early access all the way back in—God help us—2016 (it came out properly in 2019). Starseeker seems a bit more chaotic, from what I've seen, and centres around an upgradable hub space station you can upgrade and hang out on with your pals before undertaking missions on various planets.
When you're down on those planets, you'll be fighting aliens and foraging/pillaging for loot. In true Astroneer style, you'll also be deforming the absolute heck out of the terrain—shaping planets like putty to ease your way across them or to plunder their depths for treasures.
Personally, I want to know how long it would take a full team of four players to completely erase a planet from existence like some kind of artisan-labour Death Star, but that doesn't come up in the trailer. Weird.
I guess I won't have to wait long to find out. Starseeker: Astroneer Expeditions hits Steam June 11 in early access. "Although it is hard to give a solid date, based on the goals we have, we estimate that the campaign will last around 1 year. We want to work sustainably while leaving enough time to respond to player feedback," says System Era. Well, that and I assume someone has to figure out this whole 'how long to delete a planet' thing?
