DayZ creator announces Icarus, a new survival game

DayZ creator Dean "Rocket" Hall today announced Icarus, a free-to-play cooperative multiplayer survival game where you're not in it for the long haul. Players will drop onto alien worlds to scavenge, minebuild, craft, fight, and survive, same as usual - then need to evacuate before they miss their opportunity and the character is lost forever. Huh!

So, you can guess most of what Icarus is from that trailer if you've played a survival game. It does familiar things. Just not for long. Progress comes from your character more than your base, as you're trying to get out with resources you can use to craft new tech up on your space station, then bring that into your next deployment. And time is the only factor that can permanently kill you. Sure, you can run out of oxygen, but someone might revive you. Sure, you can get injured fighting critters, but someone could heal you. But miss your evac window? That's it, that character is gone forever.

"If you think about your first hour in DayZ, your first hour in Minecraft, really what we're trying to do is capture that and then basically build a game where you can do that over a long period of time, and you can progress through the survival experience," Hall explained during the announcement on the PC Gaming Show today. "So it was really getting back to the roots of what a survival game is and what makes those moments that you get in them really intense and emotional."

That's a pretty interesting take on survival. The period before I attain luxury is the part I most enjoy in survival games, though I don't know if I'd get tired of doing it over and over.

Icarus is coming to Steam probably next year. No word yet on what they'll hope people will pay for in this free-to-play game, which could be key. See its website for more.

Hall created the original DayZ mod, then was with Bohemia for the early days of turning it into a standalone game. He left in 2014 to start his own studio, RocketWerkz. Brian Hicks, the former creative director of DayZ standalone, has actually joined RocketWerkz as executive producer of Icarus.

Whatever you call it, hit our E3 2020 tag for more from this summer's blast of gaming announcements, trailers, and miscellaneous marketing. Check out the PC games at the PlayStation 5 show, everything at the PC Gaming Show, and all the trailers from the Xbox showcase, for starters.