[Update]: Everspace 2 has now docked in Steam Early Access alongside some fairly positive reviews.

It would appear that Cyberpunk 2077's most recent delay has impacted far more than the ambitious RPG. In order to avoid competing with Cyberpunk 2077, Path of Exile's new expansion has been pushed back until January, and now Everspace 2's Early Access launch is following suit as well.

"Let’s get the cyber elephant out of the room right away: The Cyberpunk 2077 release has just been pushed back to December 10, which is a major blow to our planned EVERSPACE 2 Early Access release in mid-December," reads the developer update. "Not only will every media outlet and content creator cover the arguably most-anticipated AAA game in history throughout the entire holiday season (and not much else), we also know that there’s quite a bit of audience overlap within our community (and our team), so after a quick consultation with our marketing friends we’ve decided to push back the EVERSPACE 2 Early Access release to January."

It's not all bad news, however, as Everspace 2 devs have also decided to send out pre-release copies to all eligible backers far sooner than expected! Instead of waiting until mid-December, anyone who pledged for a digital copy will be able to dive into the closed beta on Monday, November 2nd. All of the keys will not be sent out instantaneously though, so don't be surprised if you have to wait up to 24 hours in order for your copy to arrive.

As you might expect given the pre-release status, this will be a proper beta. So if you're looking for a fully finished game you can just dive into and enjoy without any sort of problems, you might want to wait a couple of months. On the other hand, if you want to help the developers with some much-needed feedback, the closed beta will be a good place to do so as they will be keeping a close eye on the community's reception to Everspace 2.

You can read a little bit more about the beta, as well as Everspace 2 as a whole, over at Kickstarter.