ICARUS Week Six Content Update Adds Insurance to Early Missions

RocketWerkz is officially back from vacation — though you’d hardly have known they ever took one considering the weekly updates they’re releasing. This week’s content update has a short list of changes, but includes a significant addition to the game in the form of insured drops. The update also brings with it a new mission and a handful of other fixes.

The new ‘Insurance’ mechanic is a feature added to specific early-game missions. On missions that are insured, characters that are still on-planet when the mission timer expires will be rescued and returned to orbit, rather than being lost forever. It will be interesting to see how the community responds to this change; being left behind on early-game drops doesn’t seem like it would be a serious issue, since those missions tend to take only an hour or two to complete.

Perhaps more interesting is what the official announcement says in regards to how the game handles player death in general: ” This adjustment is the first of many… Expect more significant changes on this front in future updates.” Given that many players feel that the game is too difficult for solo players, and too easy for groups, hopefully these upcoming adjustments will address that issue.

The Week Six Content Update also adds a new Extended Survey mission, STATION TO STATION. The new mission comes with a hardcore variant, and a hardcore variant of BIGSHOT: Stockpile is now available as well. Some mission descriptions and an issue with the objective timer in one mission have also been fixed. While we’ve basically covered the entire patch notes at this point, read on if you’d like to see them in the developers own words!

ICARUS Patch Notes – Version: 1.1.1.90123

• Added new mission – STATION TO STATION : Extended Survey
• Added new hardcore mission variants – STATION TO STATION : Hardcore Extended Survey and BIGSHOT: Hardcore Stockpile
• Changed several early-game missions to now be ‘insured’ drops. This means once the drop timer expires any characters that have not left the drop will be rescued and returned to the HAB, instead of permanently lost.
• Updated some mission descriptions and briefings for clarity.
• Fixed issue where mission objective timer was displaying incorrectly for SANDY BRIDGES: Extended Survey for multiplayer clients.

Do you have thoughts on how death works in ICARUS? Do you think drop “insurance” is a good idea? Let us know in the comments!