Anyone that considers themselves a survival game expert is unquestionably familiar with Dean Hall. The New Zealand-born developer made quite an impact with DayZ, a zombie survival title that inadvertently helped popularize battle royale as a genre. Hall’s latest project, Icarus, isn’t fairing all that well.
During an interview with GLHF at Gamescom 2022, Hall spoke openly about the largely negative response to Icarus.
“We tried an avenue with Icarus. So it’s a session-based survival game, and we had a really mixed response — some people loved it, and some people didn’t. So we’re now kind of pivoting the game to have new, more of the traditional, as we call it ‘outpost,’ or more traditional Ark-style,” Hall said. “The customer’s always right when it comes to matters of taste. People want that experience; you give them that experience. I am proud that we tried something. And that’s, to me, how you get experiences like DayZ — you have to try stuff. But trying stuff means you have to be prepared to fail. And I think we did fail a little bit on it.”
Icarus came out back in November of 2021. It’s currently sitting at a “Mixed” user rating on Steam, and the critic consensus isn’t much better — averaging a Metacritic overall rating of 67. It isn’t the reception that Hall and everyone else at RocketWerkz wanted. However, they’re not giving up on Icarus yet.
“Our aim is to get Icarus to mostly positive . And I think that will be validation that we’ve actually listened to customers, and we’ve got better at community engagement,” Hall explains. “And then I think that’s when we’ll start talking about the next things as well. I certainly think that’s a huge competitive strength over Bethesda or the big companies — we can do an interview with you and go, ‘Well, yeah, we screwed that up. ‘That’s our superpower. That’s how we get better.”
If Final Fantasy 14 and Destiny 2 have taught us anything, it’s that any game can come back from the dead. Heck, even DayZ itself wasn’t in great shape for years!
Written by Kyle Campbell on behalf of GLHF.