Dear community,
Today we are announcing the delay of Insurgency: Sandstorm from its originally planned release date on September 18th 2018. The game will now be releasing for Windows PC on December 12th 2018, and the Pre-order Beta will continue until the release of the game.
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 the game 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 your positive feedback, 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 item variations and 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.
We appreciate that these improvements may mean you have to wait a little longer; however we feel it is important that we deliver a game that lives up to your high expectations and that Sandstorm can be deemed a true successor to Insurgency. Those of you who have been supporting us during the Pre-order Beta tests will be able to continue playing until the release of the game, and we look forward to more of your feedback.
The pre-order discount will be extended until the new release date and we will continue to grant pre-purchasers instant access to the ongoing beta along with the 10% pre-order discount. The additional 10% loyalty discount for owners of the original Insurgency will continue to run until the end of March 2019. Note that the Loyalty Discount does not stack with other promotions.
We thank all of you for your passion and support, and look forward to continuing to test with you over the coming weeks ahead of our launch in December.
Sincerely,
New World Interactive