Icarus makes the "first of many" changes to ease the survival game's permadeath

Icarus developer RocketWerkz is making the "first of many" adjustments to the survival game's permadeath and difficulty issues.

Right now, if your character dies and/or is left behind after the mission timer expires, you'll lose them, their blueprints, and their XP for good - a problem further compounded by server issues around the time the game launched last month, and an acknowledgement that some players may have not realised how death worked in the session-based survival game.

Now, however, the team is looking to revise this system, "particularly for new players".

"We've been talking and working away behind the scenes on how we want to approach difficulty, particularly for new players, and you'll now see we have added 'Insurance' to a handful of early-game drops," explains an update on the game's Steam page, where the game boasts a "mixed" reception since it released last month (thanks, PC Gamer).

"This means that any character left on [the] surface after the timer has expired will be saved and returned to the HAB. This adjustment is the first of many, giving us a chance for us to test out some theories and concepts we've been working on behind the scenes. Expect more significant changes on this front in future updates."

Icarus was first announced back at E3 2020, when it was described as an alien planet survival game where you must go on missions to gather resources and then survive until evacuation. You can then turn these resources into upgrades for your next trip, and so on. Icarus has since gone through a few changes, ditched its initial free-to-play plan, and pushed back its planned August 2021 launch in order to run beta weekends.

"It amazes us that there are thousands of people with well over 100 hours playing Icarus and we haven't even fully launched," developer RocketWerkz said at the time.

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