ICARUS Q&A – DayZ Creator Dean Hall Talks Console Edition, Ongoing Support and Survival Genre Evolution

RocketWerkz and GRIP Studios have just announced that ICARUS, the sci-fi co-op survival game created by former DayZ lead Dean ‘Rocket’ Hall, is coming to PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series S|X in Q1 2026.

ICARUS launched on Steam in late 2021. It was initially quite rough, but over time, it secured a very dedicated fanbase, partly due to the continued support of the development team.

Console gamers can look forward to a much-improved version of the game that also includes the New Frontiers expansion, which added the alien region of Prometheus for an additional 64 square kilometers of terrain to explore (on top of the base game’s 64 square kilometers). Prometheus also introduced three deadly biomes, a host of mutated apex predators, over 30 additional workshop items, the ability to craft over a hundred new items, and six narrative-driven missions across a single story arc.

As part of this announcement, I had the pleasure of interviewing Dean Hall about ICARUS: Console Edition, but we also discussed the game’s four-year journey on PC, the evolution of the survival genre since DayZ, and more.

First of all, Dean, it’s a pleasure to have you on Wccftech for the first time. Can you walk us through today’s news?

Sure. ICARUS is coming to consoles. It’s something that people have asked me about a lot on social media. In fact, there’s people who still contact me every few months on the ICARUS subreddit, which is kind of awesome. A lot of work has gone into getting the game ready for that, and we had to actually partner with another studio because we just didn’t really have the experience with even just basic stuff like a controller. That’s something that’s actually been missing from ICARUS, controller support, and there’s a lot of specialty knowledge in there.

As far as I understand, it will be developed by GRIP Studios for console, right?

Yes, we partnered with them. A number of their staff I actually worked with on DayZ, and I ran into them a couple of years ago at the 10th anniversary of DayZ and they had set up their own studio and were doing a bunch of good work. I was familiar with their work and obviously knew them. So, we hung out and just kind of hit it off from there. It felt like they were a team that we could partner with, a team that understood survival games and could help us in all the areas we weren’t experienced with.

Can you tell me if there are any major differences between the PC and console versions, or will they be largely the same?

Certainly, if you’re coming from the PC, it’s very different in terms of the controller versus the mouse. There’s been a lot of work that had to be done in terms of how you navigate around. But broadly speaking, it plays the same as on the PC, except you can sit down and play on the couch. That’s really I think the miracle of it: the experience has been able to be ported very nicely to consoles. The biggest difference for me at least is the controller and just learning to jump around the different menus, because ICARUS has a lot of menus. It has a talent tree, it has inventory, it has all the interactions with deployables and placing things and all that kind of stuff. How the game gets put together is a little different as well. We packaged stuff a bit more to make it easier for console gamers to get into it. That’s in terms of some of the content.

Will you also port this controller-based UI to PC for those who may want to play ICARUS with the controller?

That’s something that we’d really love to do. There’s also a number of optimizations, fixes, and other things like that that the GRIP team has done. We’re very interested in pulling those things off. In a way, I’m a little jealous of console gamers because their first experience of ICARUS is going to be the product of over 200 weeks’ worth of updates. They’re coming in with this refined experience, so we’re hopeful that some of the changes that GRIP have made will actually be able to make it back to the PC game as well. There’s certainly a lot of PC gamers who contact me about having really good controller support.

Yeah. It’s even my preferred way to play on PC nowadays because I have my PC connected to a big OLED TV. So it’s much more relaxing to play with the controller. A lot of PC gamers have this kind of setup.

True. It’s very frustrating that we haven’t been able to put the controller support in before. It’s something we’ve long wanted to do, but we just haven’t had a lot of experience with that. And I think too often a PC game implementing controller support poorly leads to a very bad result and vice versa, where a console game is ported to PC. I think it’s very important that the teams doing that have experience with it. Being able to partner with GRIP, get their advice about how we approach controller support and integrate it with the menus. Now that work’s done, it is much easier for us to look at that on the PC.

The press release says ICARUS is launching on Xbox Series S|X and PlayStation 5, but several Unreal Engine games are also being ported to the Switch 2. Do you think that’s potentially feasible, and if so, would you like that to happen?

I know the Switch 2 is something that’s been talked about. I think it’s already a minor miracle that GRIP has been able to do the fantastic work getting ICARUS to run as it does on consoles, just because the game is very RAM hungry. It’s very memory hungry, very resource hungry in general, and this is largely just because of the scale of the worlds and the content in them. I think sometimes it is lost on people just how big it is as a survival game. That all adds up to a lot. So GRIP has done a pretty fantastic job at being able to port to that. I certainly know they’re very keen to get it to as many platforms as possible, but I guess we’ll have to see how it goes on PlayStation and Xbox first. One thing I should add is that we’ve really tried to focus on improving the performance of the game over the last 200 weeks.

Sometimes, with other games that were first released on PC and later on consoles, the optimization that had to be made for the console ports was eventually backported to the PC version. Do you think that might happen here, too?

Definitely, I think there is stuff like that. We were very particular, though, to make sure that both the console and the PC version run sort of branched. That’s very important to me, because I don’t like it when a game comes from PC to console and it just feels like a PC game on console, or vice versa. We really wanted each version to live sort of free and able to best utilize what each platform gave it. So that means that when we want to port something between them, we actually really sit down and say, “Hey, is this appropriate? Does this work? Does this best utilize the hardware?” Obviously, with a PC, you get a massive breadth of hardware available to the consumer. You have some people with insanely good graphics cards who want to turn everything up to a million. With consoles, you’re getting a much more standardized experience. So, we wanted to make sure that each of those was able to go in its direction. We’re definitely hopeful that we’ll be able to pull across some really good stuff on the PC, but we also want to make sure that on the PC, people can utilize the latest and greatest hardware they have. That does limit some of those things we pull across from consoles.

Will there be crossplay between PC and consoles in ICARUS?

Crossplay was something we really wanted to do, but because there are those two separate versions, it’s just not something we can deliver at the moment. The biggest challenge is simply that we’ve been updating the game every week on PC, which would just make that absolute hell for GRIP to try and deal with. Either we would have had to stop those weekly updates or figure out a way to try and do weekly updates on the consoles. which just isn’t possible at the moment.

Is there crossplay between consoles?

No, not even then. Multiplayer sessions are hosted natively on each console platform, which prevents cross-platform connectivity between PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series S and X.

ICARUS has been live for nearly four years on PC. It’s been quite a long journey for you. Can you walk us through it and all the expansions that you’ve made? How important has the community’s feedback been to get these updates right?

When we launched, it was a little rough. We went straight to Mixed reviews on Steam. We had broken localization. That was one of the biggest issues. We actually released to Mostly Positive reviews in the United States, but there was a simple bug with a drop-down combo box for the language settings that meant the language settings didn’t get applied. So, a whole bunch of people weren’t able to play the game in their language, which was super frustrating. We did get that fixed within hours, but there was that and there were a bunch of other bugs, not to mention a lot of optimization concerns. That’s where we really committed to that idea of doing an update every single week just to build trust with the community and turn that around a bit. And we did an update every single week. We didn’t miss one. We did it through the floods of Auckland, the city we live in, which got flooded twice. There was basically a cyclone, too. We went through many different natural disasters and still managed to deliver an update every week. That community feedback was intensely important through both Steam as well as Discord and Reddit. There’s actually two ICARUS subreddits, so we hang out in both of them. They really helped us head the game in the right direction.

Probably the biggest example would be bringing in the open world. We still really love the idea of the session-based survival, but I think for that to really hit it off, we would have needed to have put a lot more work into the orbital side of it, which we just weren’t able to do and deliver to the level of quality we wanted. However, we were able to bring in a full open world, which means that people could do the missions in one session. That came from a lot of discussion and a lot of working with our community veterans, who got early builds and gave us a lot of feedback. It has been a really long journey, very difficult, especially the first two years, and also when we removed our backend. Some people don’t realize this: when we launched, we had this huge backend and we were spending like $100K a month running it. It had some good features, but it meant people couldn’t run their dedicated servers. Eventually, we were like, look, this is really bad. If we get into financial trouble, the game will stop working. What we did was sit down and look at it. It was an enormous amount of work, but we changed it so it didn’t have that backend. So if the company stopped running, it would still be totally playable as it is today, and that lets people run their own dedicated servers.

Again, we worked really heavily with the community on that one as well, so it was a long journey. But the last two years have been just a lot of fun as we’ve added a lot of content and things we really wanted the game to have.

Now that ICARUS has been out for a while, are you happy with how it’s done commercially on PC?

Yes. By all rights, a game that is this old should have tailed off. Actually, all the games we released with have disappeared off the radar, which is sad in its own way. But we actually had a resurgence, particularly in Europe and Germany, after Gamescom. For a while there, Germany was our top-selling region. In fact, one out of every two copies of the game was being sold in Germany. We just had a sale recently on Steam that really reinvigorated things as well. It’s always been a little bit of a surprise in a good way. I like to think a lot of that is just because of the work we’ve put in to really turn things around, try to address some of the community’s concerns, and sort of almost meet in the middle. We obviously have our vision for what the game should be and also what the game is capable of doing, but the players are the ones who actually play the game. We also really like to try and play the game a lot ourselves and try and experience it as a customer and then see where we can take it from there. I would say ICARUS has been commercially successful in terms of us being able to keep developing it for all this time and we hope to keep on developing it as well.

Regarding future content additions, I know you have been working on a map called Elysium, right? Can you share the status of this map? How far is it in development?

The first thing I’d say is that there’s a lot of DLC for ICARUS, and that’s a good thing and a bad thing. Some people get pretty nervous, quite rightly, when they see so much DLC. We kind of identified when ICARUS launched that we didn’t want to just leave the game where it was. We wanted to keep making stuff, and also, I get a bit frustrated with sequels. We tried to divide the content into three parts: expansions, which are almost like another whole game and they’re priced accordingly. Those are for someone who plays ICARUS and goes, “Man, this is just the game for me.” That is definitely not going to be everybody, but that’s how we tried to position that. And then the content packs and outposts, they’re more for people if they want to support the studio. The outposts are kind of a fun little thing that some people really like, and a chance for our map designers to show off some of their skills. With that in mind, we treat our next big expansion really as approaching almost like another version of ICARUS. We actually do a map review session every week, and the last two weeks have been fantastic as it’s really been coming together. I won’t give out any spoilers. But I think you will see the progression that we’ve had in the team with our technology around worldbuilding.

This new area just brings in a lot of those map design lessons that you started to see in Null. There are also a lot of art improvements in terms of how we design and approach areas, and a heck of a lot of new creatures, a few new mechanics, and quite a few surprises. The narrative chain I’m very happy with as well. I think it builds on the experience of New Frontiers and tries to give you this fun, interesting mission chain that you can play with your friends in the open world.

Do you think it will be available in the first half of next year?

It’s definitely going to be the first half of next year. We’d really love to get it out this year, but it could end up being pretty tight. The internal target for the studio is to finish it this year, but people in the community who follow us a lot will remember that with Null and with Prometheus we did hold them back just to get the quality and stability we wanted. Actually, I think the real turnaround of ICARUS was when we released the New Frontiers expansion, which was the Prometheus map, because I think people saw, hey, that’s what they wanted the studio to do. We were able to finally hit our stride, and then we went back and reworked the base game content as well. So yeah, the target would be the end of this year, but it will be pushed if we need to get that performance and quality we want. For example, very recently while we’ve been playing through it, we just realized we wanted more missions, so we are actually going back and adding more side missions.

Anyone who follows a lot on Discord will know that we push stuff if we have to. I’m so glad that now the studio has a bit of financial security that we can do that. It was looking very grim with the ICARUS launch as to whether we would be able to continually push it. The fact that people have bought those DLCs has meant that we could take our time with a lot of this content and updates.

People want to know if they can get a power switch in the game!

It’s something that we’ve talked about a lot. I’ll bring it up at the steering group and we’ll see what the team says. A lot of our decisions around what we do with ICARUS are really made just by talking with the team from a technical perspective. I’m hopeful we can. I’d recommend that people post about this on Feature Upvote, where people can actually upvote different features they want to have. It doesn’t mean we necessarily deliver it. But yeah, I will go back and check out and see if we can do that one.

Did you ever consider adding vehicles to the game? Was that something you discussed internally?

Yeah. When we were developing ICARUS, we went all the way and we actually made a whole vehicle system. You could drive around in vehicles. You could actually assemble the vehicles from parts. But we noticed it just destroyed performance, particularly back then. The traversal of the terrain just got that stutter that many people have seen in Unreal Engine games and we worked extremely hard, to the point we nearly ran out of money at the studio, to try and bring that one and make that one work, and it just didn’t. Additionally, it really affected how we were designing the maps. The speed at which you wanted to move around when you were in the vehicle just didn’t really work, and we had a lot of technical problems, physics problems, etc. We’d even developed our building system so that you could build bridges to support this. If you have a mount and you stand on a structure, you actually add extra weight to it, and that was actually intended to be for a vehicle system. What we ended up doing instead of that was focusing on the mounts, and that seemed to work well, so we’ve just leaned into that. It also means we can deliver those talent trees per mount, which has worked out very nicely. So, what you’re going to see particularly with uh you know the new expansion and in fact, there’s a new mount coming to the game, the Ibis.

Vehicles are something we’ve thought about and we keep looking at again, but our maps are handcrafted and a lot of effort goes into them. As we found with our other game, Stationeers, if you have vehicles and the terrain doesn’t handle them, it gets intensely frustrating for players. You get your vehicle jammed up in a corner every ten seconds or so.

Will there be any updates to the pathing/pet AI?

If people haven’t checked the game out in, say, six months or so, it’s definitely worth checking it out now because we’ve already done some updates to this all the time. If people do encounter problems or issues with the pathing, if they’ve managed to get a video of that, throw it on Feature Upvote. We have some really good programmers who then just look at those edge cases, particularly if people can report where they have pathing issues on the map. There are some spots that are just difficult for even the player to path, which is deliberate, particularly some of the areas in Null are designed to be quite tricky to navigate. We do a lot of work on the AI stuff, but it can be a sort of work that can take three to four months, and then we test it and we’re like, okay, it’s actually causing problems, so we have to go back and do some more work. It’s the kind of thing that people might be like, why are they not working on pathing? It’s just because it’s not linear from how much work you put in to what you get out. It’s almost a bit like prospecting, really. You’re exploring to see if something is going to help and work.

You’ve been making survival games for a long time, since the days of DayZ. What do you think about this genre and where it is today compared to when you started? How has it evolved in your opinion?

It’s evolved awesomely. You can tell there’s features in ICARUS that are a result of playing Valheim. Valheim came out in our development and I remember that I went like, oh man, we made some bad decisions. We tried to change some of the things we could. There were just some fantastic things in Valheim. It can be such a cozy game sometimes, and I really love that push and pull and the feeling of the biomes is just so consistent. Our food system and that stacked buff system came as a direct result of us putting about 400 hours into Valheim. We were playing Valheim to the point that it almost delayed the project. I wish we could have gotten more in-world interaction. It’s something we’ve done an enormous amount on with Stationeers and we had intended to do with Icarus. You know that idea, like in Minecraft when you walk up to a door and you just whack the door and it opens, or you walk up to a switch and you whack it and it moves.

Stationeers does a fantastic job of all that in-world stuff, but we never quite got into Icarus. But yes, there has been a lot of new survival stuff. There’s Enshrouded. I’m actually pretty keen to get back into playing Project Zomboid’s new build. I mostly play multiplayer, so I like multiplayer survival games, but with Project Zomboid, there’s just so much good new innovation in terms of its experience. Some people would say that there are probably too many survival games out there. Players do have a difficult time finding the time to try them.

True, even though the new kind of hotness is PvPvE games, right? With some extraction and survival elements thrown in.

It is. Many people asked me, “Why did you make a PVE game after making Day Z?” The thing is, I’d love to look at another PvP game. But with Icarus, I didn’t want to look at a PVP game until we had learned to deal with performance stability, quality, and particularly antisocial-type issues like hacking and stuff like that. I really feel that the survival genre hasn’t dealt with this enough: how do we deliver these consistent experiences that aren’t getting destroyed by other people?

I actually think I made a mistake with DayZ where I tried to solve it all just in terms of everything on the server. If you look at Minecraft communities, I think a lot of it can actually be solved by the communities themselves if you give them the tools to do so. So, giving people a lot of support for how they run and control dedicated servers, logging, and stuff like that. That’s super important. I’m still extremely interested in PvP. I just think it’s really important that we deal with the ability for the games to scale. Even Icarus suffers from this a lot. I saw people posting on Reddit about performance. We have done an enormous amount of work to try and improve the performance with large bases. In fact, in the last month or so, we actually released an update, well, two updates focused entirely on performance, particularly for large bases and stuff like that.

That’s a very long-winded answer to your question. I’d say I’m very interested in survival and PvP, but I think it has to be done right, and it is something that we’re not doing a very good job at, including myself, which is why I kind of needed to get back to basics and develop technology and approaches that would deliver those experiences.

Do you plan to support ICARUS for years to come?

Absolutely. This is probably a good segue to another controversial topic: DLC. Broadly speaking, I think the community is very positive towards the DLC in Stationeers but also in Icarus, because we kind of said to the community, hey, we want to keep developing this game as long as we can. We really love all the effort we put into it. There’s still heaps of people playing it. I think there’s like 8,000 people playing Icarus right now at this at this very second. We really want that to continue, and we want to keep paying our staff and pay them well. The content approach we came up with delivered on that and I think we managed to find a really nice sweet spot instead of doing a whole bunch of bad stuff. We split it into those three parts, and that actually allowed us to keep the base game cheaper and also allows us to put it on discount while still being able to fund the studio. We don’t have any plans to stop. We’ve done an update every week and they’re pretty meaty updates. Last week, it was the farming backpack, and this week, it’s a new, combat-focused mount too.

Just a final question about AI and its impact on game development. What’s the opinion within RocketWerkz? Did you discuss the possibility of using it in some way or are you just against it? What are your feelings?

I’m part of that micro-generation that first had the Internet at school. It just sort of came in, and all the adults lost their minds over Wikipedia coming out and Google and it’s going to be the end of information. It feels a little bit like that. I think that regardless of what we do, AI is here. So really then it’s about a matter of how do we deal with what the impact of that is. We handcraft our maps and a lot of stuff. We like to say games are played, not made. For us, there’s not really a lot of stuff that we use AI on for ICARUS because the whole idea of it is we want to sit down and handcraft an experience. That’s not a judgment against AI. It’s more, that’s what we really wanted to do. We wanted to sit down and sketch a big map out on a whiteboard and then see it come to life. Our lead world builder actually worked at Bethesda for a while and just loves worldbuilding. We do utilize AI for some of our other projects as a coding support tool. We get an AI model, expose it to our codebase, and that means you can ask it questions, which is really helpful because one person can’t easily have the whole codebase in their head so that we can expose the codebase to it and then ask it questions. As to getting it actually to do work, I don’t think we are necessarily quite there yet.

Thank you for your time.

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