Surviving Mars is currently free in the Epic Store. It might also be a good time to climb aboard a rocket to Mars: during tonight’s Paradox Insider stream, the strategy publisher announced that game content development has resumed with a new development studio at the helm.
This new work begins this Monday with a free tourism update and In-Dome Buildings DLC.
The tourism update is free and allows visitors to your colony to give their stay a Holiday Experience rating, which can enhance players by building new hotels, zero-G amusement parks and building a safari route for Rovers to to drive around.
The In-Dome Buildings package, meanwhile, costs £ 4. It was created in partnership with community mud Silva and adds 8 new buildings to build.
Delveopment on Surviving Mars updates are now led by Abstraction, a studio in the Netherlands best known for working on ports and supporting other companies. They are also currently working with EA on performance optimization for Mass Effect: Legendary Edition.
This is not the first time Paradox has used a new studio to continue long-term updates to an existing game. In 2019, they acquired Prison Architect from Introversion Software and gave the development of further extensions to Double Eleven.
Surviving Mars has already been significantly improved by expansions, and Nate wrote in his Surviving Mars: Green Planet review that the DLC, which added the ability to aggravate Mars, was the moment the game really clicked for him.
The original Surviving Mars developer Haemimont was meanwhile the first studio signed by Elite Dangerous developer Frontier’s third-party publishing initiative, in 2019. There is no announcement yet on what Haemimont is making, but they usually create management and strategy -games.