DayZ Creator’s New Icarus Game Gets Delayed

Icarus, the game from the creator of DayZ which was once a free-to-play game before adopting a premium price, has been delayed. The developers announced the delay this week and said that the game would no longer be hitting its planned release date of August 11th. Instead, it’ll be released in November. A specific release date was not given, but the creators said that there will be multiple beta weekends starting next month to show off different parts of the game.

Over on the game’s Steam page, Icarus creator Dean Hall and the rest of the team shared a post explaining the reasoning behind the delay. The RocketWerkz developers said pushing the game’s release back will give them more time to give Icarus the love it needs and will also allow players to experience the game throughout a longer period of time via the extended beta options now planned.

“Our team is committed to providing the best experience for our players at launch,” the post said. “We’ve been keeping a close eye on the state of our development builds and have decided that we want to give Icarus more love by delaying the game, and improving upon our Beta process by spreading it across multiple weekends, with each having a specific focus. A plus side of this also means reducing Beta fatigue for our players.”

Now, a beta will be held starting August 28th with the beta returning in different forms for the next couple of weekends until the last one wraps things up on November 6th. Throughout those six weeks of betas, different biomes and features will be tested depending on which weekend you join the tests. For those who want to join, the only way into the beta is to pre-order the game ahead of time.

For those whose attention on Icarus lapsed and are now wondering why you’d have to pre-order a free-to-play game, you might’ve missed the announcement where the developers said the game would no longer be free. It’s adopted a price of $29.99 instead with the developers saying that price will allow them to continue working on the game “for years to come.”

“We gave ourselves time to carefully consider the pricing model for Icarus,” the developers said in June. “Our priority has always been to ensure a sustainable game of AAA quality for our players to enjoy across the years to come. Making Icarus available for purchase will allow us to confidently make regular in-game updates and develop our future DLC Chapters New Frontiers and Dangerous Horizons to the highest standard.”

Icarus now launches some time in November.