Dean Hall's Sci-fi Session-based Survival Game Icarus Launches This Week

DayZ creator Dean Hall's Icarus is almost ready for launch. The session-based survival game takes place on a 64 square-kilometer map and was first shown off at E3 2020, where it was billed as a free-to-play game. That changed earlier this year, but development continued, with a series of story videos and betas that will culminate in a full launch on December 3 for players in the U.S and Europe, and December 4 for the Asia-Pacific region.

Described as "humanity's greatest mistake," the planet Icarus is home to untold wealth for those brave enough to venture onto its surface and try to extract it. Players can remain on the planet for as long as they like, building their outposts and completing missions, and returning to the orbital station at intervals to resupply and prepare for even more challenging missions.

In a blog post from yesterday, Hall re-iterated that the seven betas served not only their stated purpose of testing the game -- originally scheduled for an August 11 launch -- but "were also commercially successful," which means that RocketWerkz has "the financial certainty to keep growing Icarus and deliver on our planned DLC." Hey, at least he's honest about what we've said all along was a major -- if not the primary -- reason for betas these days (ahem).

What are those DLCs? Hall said that they'll be called New Horizons and Dangerous Frontiers, and that they'll be released next year for no extra cost.

As for what you can expect in this week's launch, there's a separate post describing all that, and it includes some features beta players have yet to experience, like Outposts and Tier 4 and Exotic Matter tech. Players who pre-order will receive a 10% bonus to XP for the first three days, to help compensate beta players who had their progress wiped, and you can buy the game at a 10% discount through its first week.