Video Full coverage of the PC Gaming Show and an interview with Dean Hall can be found above, and on YouTube.

Today at the PC Gaming Show, DayZ creator Dean Hall and studio Rocketwerkz premiered their next survival game, titled Icarus, which will be free to play in base. Interestingly, Icarus is also a session-based game, rather than an open-ended survival game like DayZ.

The teaser trailer shows astronauts descending from a space station to mine resources from an alien planet. They are shown chopping down trees with stone age axes, building box forts, hunting animals with bows and arrows, and driving futuristic vehicles through primitive worlds, very similar to the same activities we have seen in numerous survival games over the past decade or so.

However, Hall reveals much more about how Icarus works, and the survival game plays with some interesting concepts. [Icarus players start on a space station orbiting an alien planet. They can invite friends to the station (Hall likens this to bringing friends to the penthouse in GTA Online before a heist) and prepare for a planetary descent. For example, the mission would be to collect and deliver a certain amount of a specific resource from a biome on an alien planet.

Contracts can be short missions of 30 minutes or much longer missions of up to 48 hours. These can also be real-time minutes or hours, so you will have to play Icarus many times to complete one long contract. A drop that visits a planet at night is much more dangerous than a daytime drop, Hall says.

In other words, rather than an open-ended expedition like survival games like Ark or Rust, Icarus is a timed expedition to a session-based planet. The planet's terrain is entirely handcrafted, Hall said: Icarus does not rely on procedural generation.

Materials brought into orbit can be used to improve the space station and survival equipment, modify landers and ground vehicles, unlock new technologies, and build futuristic weapons. That doesn't mean that everything made on the space station can be brought into the mission. Hall calls the dropship system a "choke point" that limits what can be brought to the planet, balancing the "super-technology" of the space station with the primitive world of the planet.

Hall said that with Icarus, Rocketwerkz wanted to emulate the feeling of the first tension-filled hour of Minecraft. 'What we're trying to do is capture that feeling, and basically create a game that allows you to do that over an extended period of time,' Hall said.

"So we needed to go back to the roots of what a survival game is and why the moments you get in it are really intense and emotional."

The catch. According to Hall, there is only one failure state in "Icarus. If you are late returning to the descent craft, the descent craft leaves without you. And if you are left behind on the planet, the character dies. Everything that has gone on with that character is lost, and everything that character had is gone. That's why the tagline for "Icarus" is "There are worse fates than death," Hall said.

"If you run out of oxygen," Hall says, "someone will come and resuscitate you.

"If you are attacked and damaged by this particular animal, someone will heal you. But if you run out of time, it's over."

Rocketwerkz looked to many other games as well as the survival genre for inspiration for Icarus. Skyrim's archery, Mudrunner and Snowrunner vehicle systems, Kerbal Space Program's rocket mods, and Deep Rock Galactic's mining were all influences, Hall said. He also cited the rules of the battle royale game as a way to give players direction and structure in "Icarus."

"If you look at 'Fortnite' and 'PUBG,' you can clearly see that if you package things well and explain them well, they resonate with gamers much better. We want to do that same thing with PvE survival."

Icarus is slated for 2021, and the official website is here.

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