Vostok Games and Focus Home Interactive have decided to postpone the release of Fear the Wolves due to technical issues. For once, the "technical issues" bit was not just a publisher excuse, but legitimate issues that need resolving.
Fear the Wolves was originally planned for a Steam Early Access release on 18 July 2018, but it was postponed for "a few weeks" so there is no exact date as of yet. On the bright side, leaving the date open for further discussion will give developers a larger time frame to optimise the game and fix game breaking issues.
It still suffers from choppy gameplay, ghost bullets and other factors that threaten to ruin the experience. Vostok Games have been addressing them gradually throughout the closed beta, but many technical issues still remain. The most important part at the moment is that developers are actually listening to player feedback and postponing the release date was one of the most frequent requests.
Fear the Wolves is showing potential to differentiate itself and likely build a cult following in oversaturated battle royale genre at the very least, thanks to its unique PvPvE format, zone shrinking and win conditions.
Focus Home Interactive and Vostok games have also thanked the closed beta participants for the massive amounts of feedback they provided during the testing. They have announced that Fear the Wolves will not only aim to fix the existing technical issues until Early Access release, but also expand or polish the mechanics that the game currently employs.
Judging by the pace at which Vostok Games have been releasing updates in closed beta so far, cautious optimism might not be a good outlook on the state of Fear the Wolves. The game is currently plagued by issues that hamper user experience, but the developers are literally releasing patches on daily basis, fixing bulks of issues each time.
Vostok Games
Should this habit persist, we may have the next level of PUBG on our hands, but with developers that actually care about community feedback as well as better pacing. It only remains to be seen whether Fear the Wolves will manage to carve its own slice of battle royale cake, as there are so many games attempting to the exact same thing right now.
