Note: This article has been updated with a response from the developer. [When we first heard about Icarus at The PC Gaming Show in 2020, this survival game by Dean Hall and RocketWerkz was planned as a free-to-play base title. Earlier this year we began to suspect that the free-to-play plans had changed, and when we asked Hall about it during a play session with him in March, he basically made no comment.

Now it's official: Icarus is not a free-to-play survival game; a release date was announced in a post on Icarus' Steam store page - Icarus will launch on August 11 and a pricing plan was revealed. a new called Outposts game mode was also announced, but more on that later.

The first chapter of Icarus, "First Cohort," is priced at $30. A pre-order discount will take 10% off this price.

This option is known as the "Normal Edition". The "Deluxe Edition" is a bit spicier, especially with regard to price.

The Deluxe Edition of Icarus costs a whopping $100 (again, 10% off with pre-order) and includes First Cohort and the next two DLC chapters, New Frontiers and Dangerous Horizons (release date TBA), plus a special environmental suit. But most surprisingly, this expensive edition also grants access to a new game mode called "Outposts."

An announcement on Icarus' Steam page explains what Outposts are and how they were born from community feedback:

"Our community is free to gather resources, craft, and squid without time pressure. We wanted to create a game mode where people could freely collect resources, make crafts, and build Icarus without time pressure. So we did it. The outpost is a 1km x 1km piece of land with no storms or enemy AI threats, but you can do pretty much everything you could normally do in the original game mode. You can relax there, test your building and crafting skills, and invite friends to play with you"

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This may require some unpacking. First, the community envisioned being able to build a permanent base on the same planet on the same map where they play their missions. However, as Dean Hall said on the Icarus Discord yesterday, Icarus is a session-based game and is not designed to support permanence. This is something of a workaround.

"Custom made for different maps, persistence. (for now)," said Hall in response to a community member's question about how the outpost would work. 'The existing terrain at Icarus is designed very specifically to play a certain way. So we didn't want to just throw permanence in there."

Another problem is that those who wanted the option to build permanent bases without mission timers probably still wanted storms and enemies. They don't mind enduring in adverse conditions or fighting dangerous animals around their homes, as in Valheim. I don't think the players wanted zero pressure or threats during construction, they just didn't want the clock to tick and didn't want to lose their base when they left the planet and returned to orbit. Throw a storm and an angry bear my way.

And a final thought: this might not work too well. Sometimes incorporating a popular community suggestion into a game can work. Making it so that "unless you pay $100 for the deluxe version of that game, the community member who suggested it will not have access" is not a good idea. As I understand it, if a friend has the deluxe version and you only have the regular version, you can visit your friend's outpost.

I really hope this changes and kinda doubt it will. It is hard to justify locking a community-suggested feature behind a $100 price tag, so I hope the outposts are included in the regular version as well as the deluxe version. I contacted RocketWerkz for more clarification.

Update: I received a reply from RocketWerkz: "We are still investigating exactly how [Outpost mode] works, so we are only confirming details about the Deluxe Edition."