Strike Suit Zero developers announce Fractured Space, a free-to-play tactical combat game

The origins of new indie studio Edge Case Games are a bit confusing. Its website says its the team that developed Strike Suit Zero, completely intact, now operating under a new name, since Born Ready Games "was set up with the sole intention of bringing Strike Suit Zero to fruition." But it also implies that Born Ready continues, adding, "We are two companies working together with common history and DNA." Whatever the details, the easy-to-follow version is this: The Strike Suit Zero guys have announced their new project, a tactical combat game called Fractured Space.

Fractured Space will feature massive capital ships engaging in team-based, five-on-five online combat. There will be various manufacturers and classes of ships, and they can be further customized through the use of "Galactic Coin" earned in battle, meaning that every engagement will be different.

"Above all else we want to transmit a sense of scale to the player—the feeling of participating in a massive space battle inside their own titanic capital ship, blasting apart enemy ships and working together with other players to achieve a common objective," Edge Case CEO James Brooksby said in a statement.

There aren't a lot of details at this point but it sounds quite similar to Dreadought, the game currently in the works at Spec Ops: The Line studio Yager Development. That game features fleets-based capital ship combat as well, but where its action (all we've seen of it so far, anyway) is atmospheric, with ships that "hover," the promise of "massive space battles" in Fractured Space suggests that it will actually take place out in the void.

Edge Case says it's committed to an "open development ethic" for the game, meaning that it will share assets and plans, and accept input from the community, as it goes. It will launch on Early Access later this year before going into full release in 2015 as a free-to-play game, with various perks being reserved for Early Access "founders." In the meantime, you can find out more about what they've got cooking at fracturedspace.com.