It’s been a little under a year since the vehicular combat racing game Warhammer 40,000: Speed Freeks launched into early access, and yesterday developer Caged Element Inc. announced that it’ll be receiving its 1.0 launch next week, May 22nd. There are a couple notable changes that come with this launch though. For starters, Wired Productions are taking over from Plaion on publishing duties. As the devs explained in a Steam post, the reason this matters to you is the second change, which is that you’ll have to pay for it when it arrives next week. Some of you, anyway.
Anyone that played the early access version of the game will be getting the full release completely for free. That’s great for that subset of people, though perhaps a small bummer for anyone that was interested but prefers to avoid early access games. Ah well, it won’t be very expensive, as it’ll only launching with a discounted price of $16 (the full price hasn’t been shared just yet, though I doubt it’ll be much more than that).
A press release also says that microtransactions are also being removed from the game with this change. Anyone that earned or bought in-game currency, called Teef, will still be able to spend it for the next 12 months. Anyone that is new to the game with the 1.0 launch won’t be able to the in-game store where you can spend Teef. There’ll also be some DLC packs coming at launch, which I’m assuming will be the same bits you’ll be able to pick up with Teef, though this wasn’t clarified in the press release.
Caged Element explained that moving away from free-to-play does have its benefits. For one, player-hosted matches with custom settings will be possible, alongside hosting private games. There will also be a new free-roam mode to “explore any map and create custom races.”
It’s probably worth noting that the game won’t be playable from this coming Tuesday, May 20th to the 22nd, launch day, so don’t panic if you can’t get your freek on.
