Surviving Mars updates and DLC to continue with a new developer
With free and paid updates to arrive Monday
Surviving Mars is currently free on the Epic store. Now might be a good time to climb aboard a rocket to Mars, too: during this evening's Paradox Insider stream, the strategy publisher announced that development had resumed on new content for the game with a new development studio at the helm.
That new work begins to release this Monday with a free Tourism update and In-Dome Buildings DLC.
The tourism update is free and allows visitors to your colony to give their stay a Holiday Experience Rating, which players can improve by building new hotels, zero-G amusement parks, and constructing a safari route for Rovers to drive around.
The In-Dome Buildings pack meanwhile will cost £4. It was created in partnership with community modder Silva, and adds 8 new buildings to construct.
Delveopment on Surviving Mars updates is now being led by Abstraction, a Netherlands-based studio best known for working on ports and support for other company's games. They're currently also working with EA on performance optimisation for Mass Effect: Legendary Edition.
This isn't the first time Paradox have employed a new studio to continue long-term updates to an existing game. In 2019 they acquired Prison Architect from Introversion Software and handed development of further expansions to Double Eleven.
Surviving Mars has already been vastly improved by expansions, and Nate wrote in his Surviving Mars: Green Planet review that the DLC, which added the ability to terraform Mars, was the moment when the game really clicked for him.
Original Surviving Mars developers Haemimont, meanwhile, were the first studio signed by Elite Dangerous developer Frontier's third-party publishing initiative, back in 2019. There's been no announcement of what Haemimont are making, but they typically create management and strategy games.