Survival games are built on the back of risk management. They present you with objectives, and they dare you to overreach in your efforts to achieve them. They cascade their challenges upon one another. You are hungry, and so you need food. But to acquire food, you'll need a weapon to hunt with. You'll need a fire to cook the meat with. You'll need shelter for the fire. You'll need tools to create shelter with, and a space to put it, and you'll need water and oxygen and storage and… Before you know it, you're juggling more elements than a circus performer at a science museum. And in the great survival games, you won't even realise how many things you're keeping in the air until hubris kicks in, you overreach and it all comes crashing down.
It's still early days for Rocketwerkz' Icarus — it enters public beta this weekend (learn more on the official site) — but the New Zealand-based developer's survival game already feels like it's tapping into that intricate balancing act, and its session-based gameplay provides ample opportunity for players to be foiled by their own pride.
Superficially it's like any other survival game. You land on the planet (Icarus itself), you do survival things, you try to live. But thanks to sessions, Icarus is able to change the parameters of your drop each time you try a new prospect. While early on you might take easy prospects in safe areas, later your drops might involve higher stakes, with tighter timeframes.
Thanks to sessions, Icarus is able to change the parameters of your drop each time you try a new prospect.
"I think that simultaneously the worst and best part of Icarus as a project is its session-based nature," Dean Hall, founder of Rocketwerkz, says of sessions. "It's the worst part because it's difficult to explain. And you should never try and sell something that people need but they don't want. But it's the best part because it's the solution to a lot of problems. So if we can figure out how to actually explain to people succinctly its true value in a way where they understand and they agree with the value proposition of session-based survival in a PvE context, then I think we win, and we are able to solve their problem.
"And I know it can seem a little paradoxical to say, 'okay, it's a crafting and building game but in a temporary session.' But actually, if you look at it, all your game sessions are temporary. When you go in and play Valheim, when you go to kill Bonemass, you build a little base [near the boss fight] and many times you'll never visit that base again. Or in Ark — you'll play on the same server for two or three weeks and there'll be a wipe. Rust regularly wipes. These are games that already do sessions, they're just not calling them sessions.
"What we're trying to do is really define what your task is for a session. And by doing that, by having an endpoint, we have a clear failure mode that you can work against. And from there we're able to build on that a scaffold of progression between those sessions. So I think in reality, we're just sort of putting a structure around what already exists."
In the early part of the beta it seems sessions will be long — 21 days is where the countdown currently begins, and it ticks down whether you're in the game or not. But Rocketwerkz can create different prospects for different skill levels.
"When we started out, we thought that beginner players would want very short drops, and experienced players would be the ones playing the game over weeks and weeks," Hall explains. "We've actually found that it's probably the inverse. Later on when you have very high level characters, you probably want to go gamble them all. Take on whatever scenarios we could throw at you, maybe focusing on throughput and getting in and out very fast, using vehicles and all these other things like that. But early on, you really want the time to breathe, and explore and develop your character and stuff."
Short drop or long, when you land, there's no time to lose. Icarus is a daunting planet, rife with all manner of nasty pitfalls for the unwary. In the case of my recent hands-on, I landed on the planet in the middle of a storm, a raging weather event that wreaks havoc, tearing down trees and lighting spot fires, and whipping players with wind and dust and debris. You take exposure damage just being out in a storm, so I needed to heavily prioritise shelter.
Luckily, two members of the Rocketwerkz team were on the same prospect, and they knew just what to do, carving a hole in a nearby stone outcropping and letting us huddle in place until the storm ended.
Icarus uses raycasting off player bodies to determine the level of shelter, which means the three of us crammed into a rock the size of a washing machine is fine, if a little claustrophobic. In fact, according to my guides it means even huddling in a circle would provide adequate shelter for the person standing in the centre of it.
This is the sort of thing Icarus does spectacularly. It follows ideas all the way through to their logical conclusion. Bodies should be able to huddle together for warmth. Fire should propagate from lightning strikes. When you skin and clean a deer you just killed, it should leave nothing but a bloodied, meaty skeleton behind.
And players who flail about wildly should do damage to their teammates. Friendly fire is absolutely a factor in Icarus, but it's firmly — for now — a Player vs Environment (PvE) game.
"I think we've seen a natural evolution from those days, a long time ago, where you had something like DayZ, which had its core in this mod, and that flowed through into other mods, and then it flowed through into PUBG, which then flowed through into Fortnite," Hall says when asked about Icarus' PvE focus. "And then you see a lot of different games doing Battle Royale modes and stuff like that.
"So I think we saw a real evolution of PvP, which is why you started to see a lot of other PvP-focused multiplayer games bringing out Battle Royale modes. [Battle Royale] gave PvP really good context, it gave really good pacing around the player versus player experience that people could understand. But we didn't feel like the same thing had occurred on the player versus environment front.
"So on the PvE front… I think if you're going to do something in the video game industry, I feel like you should try and do something new, at least a little part of it. And so we felt like PvE was really ready for some sort of push. And I think we've been validated in the market with that. Valheim I think brought some really, really awesome stuff to the survival lexicon, and sort of proved that, hey, there's this huge appetite for PvE.
"And as a genre, we've required a lot of previous survival titles to do this mixture of PvE versus PvP, and we've not necessarily done it well. And so [for Icarus] we wanted to be very clear and say, right, we're going out, and at least for the start, we're approaching it [as a PvE game]."
It's clear from our conversations and time with the game that Rocketwerkz has learned a lot from DayZ. One issue Hall's mod and Bohemia's game constantly ran into was the absence of a satisfying endgame. Icarus, on the other hand, has been built from the ground up to avoid this problem.
"So when people say, 'hey, what's the endgame?' What they're really talking about is what is the goal? What am I working towards?" Hall explains. "If you look at a game like World of Warcraft or New World, if you ask what the endgame is it's less of a problem, because it's like, 'well, I'm working towards this or that.' And that is what session-based survival does.
"And I think the anatomy of the PvP survival genre, the real evolution — and you've got some excellent outcomes from it with both Fortnite and Tarkov and stuff like that — what they really did is took those feelings from games like DayZ, and they just put a really nice structure around them. That's the same thing that we want to do with PvE.
"We don't have to turn around and say it's a PvE game. We could introduce a session that's PvP, there's nothing stopping us from doing that. And I think that's the advantage that we really need to sell to people. We can provide you with an endgame for now, but we can always provide another endgame later. Whereas if you take something like Ark or Vaheim, if you want to add endgame content you have to add it to that person's current session, which becomes a problem because you suffer from technical inflation, you know, the new stuff you're adding can break the older stuff later on."
The idea that Icarus could easily transition to PvP really lays out the breadth of what sessions make possible for Icarus. It hints at the sort of "metaverse" style of development that is en vogue right now.
From a gameplay perspective it speaks to the sorts of social interactions DayZ was famous for. With stakes like permadeath and high quality exotic materials on the line, I wonder how long it will take before players are standing at the drop ship as the session counter winds down, negotiating a tense truce between one another over who gets to bring the lion's share of a prospect haul into orbit? Will Icarus one day have muggings?
Icarus was originally slated for full release this week, but Rocketwerkz has instead implemented three-ish months of beta weekends, pushing the actual launch back to November.
"Broadly speaking, a game needs to be at a certain point before the feedback you get back is worthwhile, right?" Hall says of the delay to November. "There's no point in getting feedback on something if the game is broken. There was a really obvious bar we needed to reach in terms of playability before we'd be able to get good feedback. So the delay really came from that. We were very clear [internally] on where the game needed to be at before people could play it and give us good feedback. So we had to delay it.
"The other side of that is that if we wait too long for feedback we pass the point where we could really make any meaningful changes. So what we're hoping is that this represents the Goldilocks Zone between waiting too long to get feedback versus getting feedback too early before players can really get a grasp on what the experience is.
"Spreading it out over these beta weekends is really about focusing in and getting feedback on specific areas while avoiding what I call 'beta fatigue'. Too often games come out in beta and everything's there, but you're experiencing everything at a time when the game is not necessarily balanced or working as intended. If you've got a game and it's good and it's fun, but you're progressing way too fast, you're missing out on entire areas of the game, I call that beta fatigue because I think you don't always come back to it."
Still, it means the game will be playable this weekend. It's the build I played, with a tutorial and multiplayer and all the survival game goodness you might want. Or you can wait until November, to play the game in its release form — although as Rocketwerkz has made clear, it will be far from its final form.
Joab Gilroy is an Australian freelancer that specialises in competitive online games. You can tweet at him here.
