Cretaceous! Primal Carnage: Extinction Announced

Good news, dinosaur fans! Soon you'll be able to murder dinosaurs or murder people who want to murder dinosaurs, depending on quite how you feel about ancient reptiles reborn in the modern era, better than ever. Primal Carnage was already one of the finer dinosaur multiplayer FPSs around, and next month will bring Primal Carnage: Extinction - a sequel that's really a remake.

Bad news, Primal Carnage owners! The long-promised "recode" that was supposed to be a free update has become a separate game. The devs do plan to offer y'all a discount on it, at least.

As well as being prettier, Extinction has new maps, Steam-tradeable cosmetic bits (yes, including hats), and should be less buggy and run better too. It'll be missing an old mode or two at launch, but more will follow. Folks on the game's forums have compiled an exhaustive list of changes. It reads like a patch changelog, because that's what it was.

Creators Lukewarm Media planned to "rebuild the game from the ground up", ditching the old code with its problems and limitations while updating or remaking maps and graphics. They referred to it as "Primal Carnage 2.0" or the "recode". Until the announcement of Extinction on Monday, it was supposed to be a free update. Its makers Circle 5 Studios and Pub Games, who've since taken over from Lukewarm, have other plans.

Dev team member 'Apoc' explained in a forum post on Monday:

Because an entirely new company has taken the helm on development of Primal Carnage (and the entire game has been rebuilt from the ground up) its been decided that we're going to be launching this as a new game in conjunction with [a PlayStation 4 port]. Also, because it's a new company, it must be on a new Steam App ID as well.

I can understand that the rebuild has been a huge amount of work, and frankly I'm surprised it's a task Lukewarm even started, but it's mighty cheeky to have kept up the illusion that it'd be free. Presumably they were waiting for a go-ahead on announcing the PS4 version. Still, at least they won't charge players full price for Extinction. "We hope to give all existing Primal Carnage owners an even bigger discount than [50%]," artist Richard Williams said in a Steam forum post.

Primal Carnage: Genesis, the single-player spin-off announced in 2013, is on indefinite hold, by the way. "We just don't have the resources to make such an ambitious game," Williams said.