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After spending 11 years in Early Access, the open-world survival horror sandbox game 7 Days to Die is finally, officially launching for PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC on Thursday, July 25.
Developer and publisher The Fun Pimps first announced the 1.0 release date in June, and in a new blog post on its website, it recommits to that timing and provides some additional details around the release and what's included. Frankly, after more than a decade in development, it's just nice to know the developers were able to meet their deadline for release.
"This milestone release heralds a groundbreaking evolution in the survival horror genre, packed with new a wealth of new content, innovative new features, polish, transformative quality-of-life improvements, optimizations, and revolutionary gameplay systems," reads the announcement. "No other game offers a fully buildable, fully destructible, truly open world where every location can be explored inside and out without load screens and with unmatched random world generation."
As players have been waiting so long for this full release build, The Fun Pimps wisely revealed the specific launch times for each region, and I'll go ahead and do y'all the courtesy of sharing those here:
- Los Angeles – July 25th – 10:00
- Dallas – July 25th – 12:00
- New York – July 25th – 13:00
- London – July 25th – 18:00
- Berlin – July 25th – 19:00
- Shanghai – July 26th – 01:00
- Tokyo – July 26th – 02:00
It's not an understatement to call the 1.0 launch a "milestone release," and while you can scroll through the full patch notes here, here's a brief rundown: the update includes HD overhauls of the character models, clothing and armor, and animals, as well as a new challenge system for new and returning players to learn or re-learn the ropes, new vehicle models, new and improved environments, tool improvements, updates to the random world generation, new points of interest and zombie variants, a world lighting upgrade, "enhanced" gore, and a "massive" progression update. Phew.
New Steam users will need to pay the retail price of $44.99 USD at launch, but PS4 and Xbox One players with a digital copy of the original game will be able to take advantage of a limited time 25% discount for the PS5 and Xbox Series X versions, respectively, seemingly for the first 30 days after launch. The old Telltale-released edition will be de-listed on Sony and Microsoft's storefronts, but you'll still be able to play it if you own it.
When I first played 7 Days to Die all those years ago, it didn't deserve a spot on our list of the best survival games, but maybe that's all about to change.
