Publisher Focus Home Interactive announced this afternoon via press release that Insurgency: Sandstorm is being delayed again. Previously due to launch next week on PC, it will now debut on December 12th as the developers at New World Interactive "improve and polish their gem and make it a stand-out title in the modern FPS genre". The console release remains tentatively planned for next year.
New World Interactive shared a message to explain the decision to fans. As a reminder, if you choose to pre-order Insurgency: Sandstorm via Steam you'll get into the ongoing beta test.
This was one of the hardest decisions our team has ever had to make and not one taken lightly. However, we feel it is in the best interest of the game and our community to spend more time working to ensure we deliver the best possible experience.
During Pre-order Beta 2 thousands of players took to Insurgency: Sandstorm and gave us great feedback on dozens of topics. Our small, but highly dedicated team has been working around the clock to respond to and address as much feedback as possible; releasing two hotfixes over the first weekend and a significant patch last Thursday. We’ve already seen more positive feedback from the community, as our team have started to address priority areas such as performance, hit registration, and player movement.
Despite the game’s improvement, we are acutely aware that not all of you are having the ideal experience we want to deliver. By extending the beta and moving our launch date to December, the additional time will allow us to make significant improvements to the game with continued input from you. The additional time allows us to target a lower minimum system requirement, address more bugs, work on overall polish, gather additional feedback from the community to refine gameplay, and ensure that highly requested community features which may otherwise have had to be added post launch (such as community servers and custom games) are ready for day 1.
The major goals we aim to achieve with this extra time are as follows:
- Upgrade to Unreal Engine 4.20 and continue optimizing
- Improve the character models, textures, and animations in the game
- Improve the “scoped” experience for both high and low-quality scope settings
- Improve the level visuals, gameplay and optimization
- Add more cosmetic variations, including a new forearm tattoo cosmetic type which can also be seen in first person
- Expand in-game server options to include a server browser, community-run server support, and a custom games system allowing users to specially configure games hosted by our server infrastructure.
- Refine the game to the point it has far less bugs, glitches, visual inconsistencies and other issues.
