Frequently asked questions

Yes. Echoes Beyond is free to play at launch — no box price and no subscription.

The account is free today as well, and it is a real one: create your commander, found a charter, forge an emblem, and take a place in the early-access queue. The galaxy itself opens in waves, one grant at a time — the commander is yours from the moment you register.

The one thing money buys is cosmetic: optional credits for the forge, which make pictures for your own empire — an emblem, a ship portrait — and never an advantage. Nothing on sale makes a fleet stronger or a mine faster.

No. Echoes Beyond runs entirely in your web browser — no download, no install, no client patcher. If your machine runs a modern browser, it runs the game.

Echoes Beyond is a 4X strategy MMO: explore, expand, exploit, exterminate. You command an empire of up to twenty-five star systems inside one persistent galaxy of two million, shared by every player at once — building mines and shipyards, researching lost technologies, and sending fleets down real hyperlanes while the server simulates it all around the clock.

The long answer has its own page.

In spirit, yes — Echoes Beyond stands in the lineage of OGame, Hades’ Star and Stellaris: persistent empire-building, real-time fleet missions, and battle reports worth reading over coffee.

The biggest differences: your colony is a whole star system rather than a single planet, everyone plays in one shared galaxy instead of numbered universes, and every formula is printed in the tooltip instead of on a fan wiki. Here is the full comparison for OGame veterans.

Not yet. This website reads fine on a phone, but the game itself is built for a desktop browser — the command surfaces are dense, and touch support is still on the roadmap. Plan on a desktop or laptop for now.

As little as fifteen minutes a day. The galaxy simulates itself while you are away, so a short session — adjust the build queues, start the next research, send out a scout — is real progress. A long evening pays too: claim a whole cluster, rebuild a capital from scratch, drive a tech line to its cap. Neither pace is penalised.

Your empire keeps running. Mines keep producing, research completes, and fleets finish their journeys on the server clock whether you are watching or not — you come back to reports, not to a paused save.

The flip side is part of the design: there are no offline shields. When war reaches the galaxy, absence will be something you plan around, never something to hide behind.

Yes — the combat simulator is open to everyone, no account needed. It runs the exact engine the game fights with: compose two fleets from all seventeen hulls and twelve defense structures, then watch the battle resolve round by round. The codex — the game’s full manual, written from the build in internal testing — is public too.

The commander is real today too: registration is open and free — found your charter, forge your emblem, claim your callsign, and take a place in the early-access queue. It is not the galaxy yet; that one opens in waves.

There is no date — it opens when it is ready, and then in waves rather than all at once. What is open today is the door: create your commander, found a charter, forge an emblem, and ask for a place in the next wave from your console.

Would you rather not hold an account yet? The email list below still gets exactly one message when the galaxy opens, and the roadmap is still the closest thing to a countdown.