Beautiful Light targets a December Steam early access launch

Deep Worlds' Beautiful Light is still tracking a December 2026 launch into Steam early access, where squads will be asked to secure artifacts while rival teams — and the monsters — hunt them down.

What kind of shooter is it

Beautiful Light is a tactical first-person extraction shooter built around six squads of three operators, each dropped into a hostile map to find and extract an artifact. The studio calls it PvPvPvE rather than PvPvE, and that extra letter is the selling point: a group of players can enter a raid as one of the anomalies, the alien-like creatures that patrol the environment, and turn on the human squads from the inside.

Artifacts, a forearm PDA and a slower pace

Objectives revolve around mythical artifacts, with only a limited number on each map. Holding one grants a team an advantage, which makes the holder the target for everyone else — a neat way to keep a raid moving without forcing the constant looting treadmill that wears out other extraction games. The most distinctive piece of kit is a forearm PDA, an in-fiction heads-up display that keeps health, navigation and world events in the player's eyeline instead of parked in a corner of the screen.

The shooting leans tactical. Operators can lean and peek around cover, and night vision devices, gas masks and tactical lights are tools to be chosen rather than cosmetic unlocks. After Gamescom, Deep Worlds said it was still finalising an exact date and weighing it against GTA 6's release, but the official Steam listing continues to show December 2026, and the launch is framed as early access rather than a finished game.

Our opinion

Extraction shooters have a retention problem that the genre keeps dressing up as a content problem. Servers wipe, loot resets, and the audience drifts to the next map. Letting players become the monster is a smarter hook than another biome, because it rewrites the social contract of a raid instead of the scenery, and it gives a squad something to talk about afterwards that is not a loot table.

The risk is balance, not ambition. Asymmetric modes live or die on whether the anomaly role feels like an opportunity or a punishment, and a December window that collides with GTA 6 would bury that experiment under a very large shadow. Committing to early access is the honest call; committing to December is the brave one.