author: Michael Zegar
Mass Resurrection of 64,000 Characters in Icarus; Players Misunderstood a Mechanic
Icarus devs have decided to bring back to life 64 thousand characters, including those subject to permadeath. This decision was dictated by the gameplay mechanic which were misunderstood by many players and numerous errors causing deaths.
- 64,000 dead characters have been brought back to life in Icarus;
- Players did not return to the capsule before the end of a mission;
- This resulted in the permanent death of their characters.
Survival game Icarus - the latest work of Dean Hall, creator of the DayZ mod, and his studio RocketWerkz - has proven to be quite a success. Like in the aforementioned zombie production, death lurks at every step in the devs new game. If we do not want our character to end up in her clutches prematurely, we must quickly learn the rules governing the game. It seems, however, that rules in Icarus are not always clearly explained to new players - what creators addressed in a post on the game's tab on Steam.
Because of this - as well as the likely upcoming holidays - the developers have decided to bring 64,000 dead characters back to life, which they jokingly commented on with the words: "Icarus may not forgive, but we do". In addition, the post included a detailed description of the permadeath mechanics.
The gameplay in Icarus, unlike in most competitive survival games, is conducted in a model of limited time sessions. Players travel to the surface of the eponymous planet from their orbital station in a special capsule. After reaching the place they have a certain amount of time to get acquainted with the environment, complete the mission and find exotic matter.
Missions can last from a few hours to several weeks (real time). This means that once you leave the game, the clock is still ticking. If we get knocked down while completing the mission, our character will become unconscious. We can wait to be picked up by a companion or be reborn at the respawn point (with a penalty to experience points), then return to retrieve items lost at the point of death. However, if we don't return to our capsule before the mission time runs out, our character will die permanently, with which we lose all experience, talents and blueprints.
Unconscious character. Source: Pcinvasion.com.
Quite a few players probably forgot about this aspect due to the habits formed in other games of this type. Thus, after leaving the game for some time and returning to it, an unpleasant surprise awaited many of them. Either way, the aforementioned resurrection evet consists of the restoration of 42 thousand characters affected by permadeath and 22 thousand unconscious characters. The creators note that this is a one-time action.
At this point we can have a maximum of three avatars in Icarus. If we have already reached this limit, the restored characters will also appear on the character selection screen. In this case, we won't be able to create any new ones until we delete some old ones to make room. It is worth noting that deleted avatars were not included in the "resurrection".
Additionally Icarus is plagued by a lot of bugs and performance issues (the developers recommend up to 32 GB of RAM). They are probably responsible for many deaths - including permanent ones. There's probably nothing worse than failure through no fault of our own.. Restoring lost characters to life may therefore encourage many players to return to the game.
