Icarus

Icarus gets a DLSS 3 performance boost

Icarus — Mon, 18 Sep 2023 07:46:37 +0000

Icarus has always been a good-looking but deadly environment, but now it will kill you faster.

Working with our friends at NVIDIA we have upgraded Icarus to support DLSS 3.0. The result was a 2.6X on average increase in performance enabling max setting, ray-traced gameplay on many GeForce RTX 40 Series systems.

If you are running Icarus in Direct X 12 mode and have a GeForce RTX 40 Series GPU, turn on Frame Generation in the Graphics Settings to take advantage of the improved frame rate.

NVIDIA DLSS 3 is the next revolution in neural graphics. Combining DLSS Super Resolution, all-new DLSS Frame Generation, and NVIDIA Reflex, running on the new hardware capabilities of GeForce RTX 40 Series GPUs, DLSS speeds up frame rates while still providing image quality similar to native resolution.

Benchmarking in NVIDIA’s labs found a that DLSS 3 boosted Icarus’ performance by 2.6X on average.

Icarus already uses NVIDIA Reflex which improves games’ input responsiveness and latency, and is a key part of DLSS 3, and was the first game to utilize RTXGI Infinite Scrolling Volumes to apply Global Illumination in an open-world game environment.

For the best Icarus experience we recommend you always update to the latest NVIDIA drivers.

Get Icarus and the Icarus: New Frontiers expansion on Steam now.

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New Frontiers: Available now

Icarus — Thu, 24 Aug 2023 04:59:13 +0000

AUCKLAND, New Zealand — 24 August, 2023 — Icarus: New Frontiers, the relaunch of the popular survival game developed by RocketWerkz, is available now on Steam. New Frontiers is a major expansion set in Prometheus, a merciless new region where terraforming has failed and hostile alien lifeforms abound. Players are challenged to solve a sinister mystery while establishing a base in the open world and fighting simply to survive.

“This is our original vision for the game,” says gamerunner Dean Hall. “By combining the mission-based gameplay with a huge open world and the aliens that the community has been asking for, New Frontiers is a tense and thrilling survival experience.”

In the New Frontiers expansion players enter Prometheus, a region of Icarus where the terraforming process failed and left the raw alien landscape and life intact but not unaltered. Previously this heavily-restricted zone was declared too dangerous for prospecting but will now be opened to seasoned contractors.

The terraforming process drastically impacted the local wildlife, terribly mutating them into Dreadwings, Lava Hunters, Needlers, Dracs and Drifters. Each hostile new biome features extreme weather events such as ash storms in volcanic regions and acid rain in swamplands.

New mission logic will allow players to launch any mission from their permanent Open World base, including six new narrative missions that unveil a dark mystery to be solved on the planet’s surface.

Other major updates to the game since launch include changing the mission timer from realworld to in-game time, ridable mounts, dedicated servers, farming, fishing, optimizations and much more.

For more information, visit the Steam page at https://store.steampowered.com/app/1648532/Icarus_New_Frontiers/.

Watch the three live-action lore documentaries:

Icarus: No Rescue https://youtu.be/aZyd1e51YMo

Icarus: Fatal Sky https://youtu.be/aZyd1e51YMo

Icarus: The Seeker: https://youtu.be/cnQ0WyEdn6g

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Icarus with NVIDIA Reflex

Icarus — Tue, 12 Jul 2022 03:49:17 +0000

Our partnership with NVIDIA has been integral to Icarus’ development, and we’re excited to bring NVIDIA Reflex to the game. NVIDIA Reflex improves games’ responsiveness to inputs, reducing latency and delivering a better experience for all our players using NVIDIA.

When enabled in ICARUS, NVIDIA Reflex reduces system latency by up to 49%, giving you the edge over the hostile creatures resisting your exploitation of their planet.

Have a look at the comparison analysis from NVIDIA’s lab, showing the improvement in latency with NVIDIA Reflex enabled.

NVIDIA Reflex joins NVIDIA DLSS and RTX Global Illumination which are already available in Icarus, giving players with GeForce GPUs an even better experience.

For the best NVIDIA experience we recommend you always update to the latest NVIDIA drivers.

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Styx Map & Missions Pack DLC

Icarus — Fri, 03 Jun 2022 01:53:19 +0000

As a thank you to our players and fans, RocketWerkz has made its new DLC Map ‘Styx’ available.

This new 64km² map doubles the size of Icarus’ playable area. With it come new missions, new creatures and fresh regions of Icarus to explore.

What to expect:

An entire new 64 square km map
16 new missions
New creatures including crocodiles, Komodo Dragons, Kea parrots with more to come
The entire map unlocked and able to be explored including locations such as The Wall, Ring Lake and The Great River
Missions that effect the map and unlock shortcuts to new areas

This new territory is centered around a long braided river which prospectors named Styx, after one of the rivers of the underworld.

The Styx territory been locked down for several years after an ‘incident’ between the UDA and a group from the African Coastal States. Rumors have circulated ever since, but both parties remain tight lipped. Spanning forested, arid and arctic biomes, there are reports of unnatural growth rates and mutations in the planet’s wildlife.

Now the Lagos Unit has suddenly changed their stance, declaring the previously uninhabitable area as safe for prospecting. Of course, they’ll still take a cut of whatever you find. Proceed with caution and forget what you think you already know about Icarus.

The Styx Map Pack is free for everyone who has bought the game so far and is included in the Icarus base game Prospect Select Screen. No additional download is required.

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RocketWerkz premiere short film “Icarus: Fatal Sky”

Icarus — Wed, 01 Dec 2021 03:36:02 +0000

Watch the 20-minute documentary ahead of Icarus’ launch this weekend

RocketWerkz has released an epic twenty-minute long documentary-style short film “Icarus: Fatal Sky,” blending live action and game footage to welcome players to the universe of its sci-fi survival game Icarus.

Icarus launches on Steam this Friday 3 December at 2pm PST or 10pm UTC.

You can watch “Icarus: Fatal Sky” on YouTube here.

Developed by DayZ creator Dean Hall’s studio RocketWerkz, Icarus takes a session-based approach to survival games. Players take limited-time drops onto a terraform-damaged planet in search of rare exotic matter, which fuels advanced tech, as they progress through the game’s gritty sci-fi universe.

Shot in a tense documentary style with live actors, “Icarus: Fatal Sky” tells the story of a prospecting team that didn’t make it back. When an ill-fated First Cohort expedition saw most of a team killed by an ‘unexpected’ Force 12 storm, a scandal erupted with consequences and conspiracy claims back home on Earth. The team’s search for exotic matter pushed them to their limits as they surveyed Icarus’ terraformed surface, but who was ultimately to blame? “Fatal Sky” unpicks the stories, science and counter-claims surrounding this tragedy, revealing new truths about an event that shook the world.

“The drive to survive, a Survival game, requires a delicate approach so we avoided fantasy sci-fi,” says Icarus’ gamerunner Dean Hall. “We wanted to create a mature, grounded reality for Icarus’ universe. The kinship that comes from taking on the unknown, the tension, the decisions, are as much core elements of playing a survival game as in the real world, and that’s also what went down in Fatal Sky.”

“The Fatal Sky documentary isn’t a trailer, rather it’s a piece of companion media that puts players into the right frame of mind for a survival game. Much like in real life survival situations, the decisions you make in a survival game have consequences. The events you face, and your decisions based on them, form the journey our players make far beyond simple storylines outside the genre..”

In April RocketWerkz released a similar live action eight-minute documentary called “Icarus: No Rescue” which was critically well-received.

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RocketWerkz’s Icarus Launch Date and Recommended Specs Confirmed

Icarus — Mon, 29 Nov 2021 02:33:13 +0000

Dean ‘DayZ’ Hall’s new survival game launches on Steam on 4 December

RocketWerkz’s session-based sci-fi survival game Icarus is confirmed to launch on Steam on 4 December (UTC).

Originally scheduled to launch in August, Icarus instead opened a series of Beta Weekends for players who pre-ordered the game. The beta became Steam’s top-selling game during its first beta weekend and has had over 200,000 pre-orders and beta test players. The game has resided among Steam’s Top 10 Most Wishlisted games since August 2021.

“After three months of beta testing and feedback from one of the most engaged gamer communities I’ve ever seen, Icarus is ready for launch,” says gamerunner Dean Hall.

“We believe the key to making a great survival game is listening to community feedback and being able to rapidly iterate. We deliberately built our architecture so we could add new items, missions, biomes, talents and balance changes each beta weekend and that’s something we plan to continue after launch too. Icarus will be a living, evolving game.”

Icarus is a session-based survival game for up to eight co-op players where players drop onto the broken terraformed planet of Icarus. Initially equipped with nothing, players drop to the planet for missions lasting from hours to weeks, before returning to orbit to progress their character and tech for the next drop.

Developer RocketWerkz has also confirmed the recommended specs to experience Icarus’ beautiful but deadly environments.

The recommended PC specs to play Icarus are:

OS: Windows 10 (64-bit versions)
Processor: Intel i7-9700
Memory: 32 GB RAM
Graphics: NVIDIA RTX 3060ti
DirectX: Version 11
Network: Broadband Internet connection
Storage: 70 GB available space

The minimum specs are:

OS: Windows 10 (64-bit versions)
Processor: Intel i5 8400
Memory: 16 GB RAM
Graphics: Nvidia GTX 1060 6GB
DirectX: Version 11
Network: Broadband Internet connection
Storage: 70 GB available space

Built in Unreal Engine 4, Icarus features handcrafted maps, three biomes, online multiplayer, two tech trees, character attribute system, weather events and destructible buildings in a near-future setting. At launch it will be available in English, German, French, Russian, Brazilian Portuguese, Latin American Spanish, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Japanese and Korean.

Icarus is available to pre-order on Steam, with one last Beta Weekend on 20-21 November before its 4 December launch. For more details on what’s new in this Beta Weekend check out https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1149460/view/4873452660821736273

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How our Beta Weekends work

rwsluser — Sat, 18 Sep 2021 03:31:54 +0000

Everyone who has pre-ordered Icarus on Steam will gain access to our Beta Weekends, which happen every second weekend. In between these weekends you won’t be able to access the game. To play, look for the Icarus Beta app in your Steam Library (this is different to the Icarus app which will unlock for our full launch).

When are the Beta Weekends?

They’re every two weekends and unlock new content each time:

28-29 August – Forest
11-12 September – Storms
25-26 September – Arctic
9-10 October – Mission
23-24 October – Desert
6-7 November – Mission
20-21 November – Community

We’ve structured our Beta Weekends to add more content each time so you can give us clear feedback on each new feature. Once each Beta Weekend is over, we listen to community feedback and do our best to work on any critical fixes before the next Beta Weekend or before our full launch!

Some features will be added at our full launch, after our beta period has finished. Exotic Matter, the mysterious elements that caused Icarus’ terraforming to fail, won’t be available for you to mine until launch but when you do they’ll earn valuable items in the orbital workshop. Outposts, ideal for uninterrupted base building, will also only be available to play after launch.

What time do they start?

Pacific Daylight Time (PDT) 5pm Friday through to 10pm Sunday

Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) 12am Saturday through to 5am Monday

New Zealand Time (NZT) 12noon Saturday through to 5pm Monday

If you try to play Icarus outside these times, you’ll see a message explaining that you cannot connect to our servers – in which case, wait and come back for the next scheduled Beta Weekend.

For real-time updates and when you can play, please follow our Twitter here.

Prospects

The prospects you can play will last for the duration of each Beta Weekend.

If you are successful in your prospects and use your dropship to head back to the orbital station, your character’s progress will be kept across each Beta Weekend. This includes your tech and talent tree unlocks, but does not include your planetary inventory. Surviving is easier said than done, so be careful! However, there might be some character wipes during the beta or before launch. Remember though, everyone who has pre-ordered Icarus will receive at 10% XP boost for the launch week so your progress will be faster.

If your character permanently dies, cannot be revived, or you decide to leave your prospect entirely at any point — you can begin another, fresh prospect from the orbital station.

If you want to quit the game mid-way through a prospect, but wish to resume the same prospect later, you can! Just access the in-game menu and quit. When you launch Icarus again, pick that same character and you will be taken back to that prospect.

Characters

There are three character slots available for you to fill! The character level cap and Tech Tree tiers will gradually increase throughout the Beta period.

We’re granting you the opportunity to play around with different talents across different characters during our Beta Weekends! Depending on how you wish to experience Icarus, we would recommend that you spend the first weekend levelling up one character first so you can get into a good rhythm and up your chances of survival.

You cannot share the same Prospect between your three characters. Only one can play a prospect at a time.

Teaming up with other Prospectors

While there are benefits to playing Icarus alone – like becoming a well-rounded and independent prospector – you can also play with your friends!

Currently you can add prospectors to your game session via Steam’s Friend List interface. Please bear (no pun intended!) with us as we look into more avenues surrounding this.

Join our Discord here and find folks to play with in our #LFG (looking for a group) channel. Our community is thriving with people eager to get stuck-in, and those who wish to help others.

Follow us for regular updates

We will be communicating updates in real-time to make announcements regarding:

When each Beta Weekend goes live
Server status information
Known issues and solutions
Shared media from content creators
When each Beta Weekend ends

And via our social channels

Unless there are any game-breaking issues, we plan to resolve any bugs throughout the week outside of Beta Weekend activity.

How to report problems and provide us with your Beta Weekend feedback

Icarus is ready for its players! We need your fresh set of eyes to test and play the game. We’re committed to listening to our community so we can develop Icarus to ensure the best possible experience for you on launch day.

Please report bugs and other issues at https://icarus.featureupvote.com

Our devs read these tickets and you can see tags with more detail around its state and progress. Feature Upvote is user-friendly and easy to use without having to log in or make an account.

We have channels within our Discord server where you can discuss Icarus and any issues with other players, but please note we will be monitoring the Feature Upvote page for official reports.

Streaming and VOD content is encouraged!

Whether you are a seasoned or newcoming content creator, we would love for you to show your Icarus gameplay to the world. Keep in mind that Icarus is in Beta, and we are proactively working to squash all bugs and performance issues that arise and that are reported to us.

Our Community Manager Lorii and other developers will be keenly dipping in and out of your channels across Twitch, YouTube and Facebook, saying hello and enjoying your gameplay! We may be streaming Icarus on our accounts too!

Content creators can apply for a beta key through our Rainmaker or Woovit campaigns.

We want to see your gameplay, clips, screenshots and memes as you pump them out online. Tag us @surviveicarus and use our hashtag #surviveicarus so we can see your work!

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Icarus coming December. Pre-order to join the Beta Weekends

rwsluser — Fri, 30 Jul 2021 08:08:28 +0000

RocketWerkz has announced that its highly anticipated session-based survival game, Icarus, will officially open beta gameplay on 28 August with the first of several “Beta Weekends” and that the full game will launch afterwards in November. The company will roll out brand new features and content every two weeks for players to test out (see the schedule above). Anyone that has already pre-ordered Icarus, or pre-orders the game during August, will be able to play in the beta.

Icarus is a uniquely session-based PvE survival game for up to eight co-op players. Set on an Earth-like planet where terraforming failed, players explore, craft, build and survive against the elements as part of an interstellar goldrush. Initially equipped with nothing, players drop to the planet for missions lasting from hours to weeks, before returning to orbit to progress their character and tech for the next drop.

New features will be unlocked for the community to test every second weekend. “In the first Beta Weekend players will be invited to put Icarus’ core survival gameplay to the test,” says gamerunner Dean Hall. “Then we’ll start throwing more at them every two weeks. We’re really looking forward to playing Icarus with our community and hearing their feedback.”

The second Beta Weekend will unlock Icarus’ base-destroying storms, followed by the arctic biome two weeks later, then the desert biome, and special faction missions set by the corporations vying for control of Icarus in the following weeks.

“We wanted to do a smart beta,” says Hall. “By focusing on a new gameplay system each Beta Weekend we can gather more useful feedback from our community as we iterate and evolve the world. Icarus is ready for players, and we weren’t afraid to delay the game so we could get as much of their feedback as possible to make it the very best it can be.”

Icarus’ developers at RocketWerkz have been very open with their community during the game’s development, with regular community Twitch streams, a ‘Making of Icarus’ video series and an active Discord community. “We did this intentionally with the aim of developing the game collaboratively with players as we evolve the world,” says Hall. “We plan to continue this approach during the beta.”

Icarus is available to pre-order on Steam.

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Pre-Order Supporters and Standard Editions now

Icarus — Sun, 13 Jun 2021 21:47:32 +0000

New gameplay trailer and pre-orders available now

AAA survival game Icarus is available to pre-order now on Steam. Players who pre-order can also access the Beta Weekends from 28 August 2021.

Icarus is a uniquely session-based PvE survival game for up to eight co-op players. Set on an Earth-like failed terraforming planet players explore, craft, build and survive against the elements while searching for exotic matter. Players return the exotics to orbit to craft more advanced tech and progress their character for the next drop.

The Standard Edition is available to pre-order now for USD $29.95 with a 10% pre-order discount.

A Supporters Edition is available for USD $99.95 and includes Icarus’ next two DLC chapters New Frontier and Dangerous Horizons, an limited-edition First Cohort envirosuit, plus two additional Outpost maps. This edition also has a 10% pre-order discount.

Chapters will be major DLC expansions that add new biomes, enemies and maps. The core game will also receive regular updates for all players.

The Supporters Edition also includes an additional two unique Outpost maps, persistent game sessions ideal for building bases. Outposts are 1km x 1km plots of land where prospectors can build structures at their own pace and share them with friends.

When first announced in June 2020, game runner Dean Hall hoped that Icarus could be free-to-play in order to bring the survival gaming genre to as many gamers as possible. Ultimately RocketWerkz has decided to make it a paid product. “We didn’t want the business model to get in the way of the game experience,” says Hall. “We also heard loud and clear from our community that they wanted to avoid the pitfalls of free-to-play. We want Icarus to continually evolve as a living game, always adding new session challenges and game modes. We think regular chapters and content updates are a great way to deliver that.”

The New Frontier and Dangerous Horizons DLC will also be available for purchase separately in the future.

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Watch the Making of Icarus: Episode 1

Icarus — Fri, 30 Apr 2021 02:05:30 +0000

RocketWerkz is opening up development of its upcoming survival game Icarus by publishing Episode 1 in the Making of Icarus series.

For the past 18 months a videographer has been embedded in the studio filming early game development, design decisions and team meetings to provide a behind-the-scenes look at what goes into making a AAA PC survival video game.

RocketWerkz CEO Dean Hall is keen to embrace open development with the game’s community via the Making of Icarus videos, Discord and Steam communities. “One of the strengths of the DayZ mod was the community involvement in the process, giving feedback in real time and creating a product that was crafted by its players. I wanted to capture this again with Icarus. The ability to be upfront, transparent and raw with the community is what creates trust between us and them and builds a better game,” says Hall.

The first episode talks about the challenge of Icarus’ simultaneously sci-fi yet primitive survival setting, rejected early concept art and shows the game’s first internal milestone, Woodcutting Simulator, which focussed on getting the feel of core survival game mechanics right.

Future episodes cover world building, tech trees, playtesting, balancing a session-based gameloop and how the New Zealand-based studio handled covid-19 lockdowns.

The Making of Icarus will be published weekly at www.youtube.com/surviveicarus/ and players can join the discussion with our Community Manager and developers on Discord and Steam at www.surviveicarus.com.

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