Sons of the Forest Just Ended Its Early Access Period, Releasing At Version 1.0

Endnight Games has revealed that Sons of the Forest just left Early Access.

In an update on their Steam blog, Endnight shared this message:

“Hey Everyone,

Today is our 1.0 Release of Sons Of The Forest.

We are super excited for you guys to play all the new additions, changes and fixes. If you have an older save game it will still work, but we recommend starting a fresh save if you want to experience the story and all the new features fully.

The biggest features, improvements and balance changes are listed below, but beyond this list there are many more small fixes and improvements.

As always, please continue to post your bug reports and feedback in the Discussions area of the Community Hub.”

You can read about the rest, including patch notes, over at the link above.

Sons of the Forest is a survival action game that earned some fame as it went past Starfield as the most requested game on Steam. It is a sequel to the survival game The Forest, and features similar open area, but story based, survival gameplay.

The scenario to this game is a wild narrative about mutations and cannibalism, but on a moment to moment level, fans found the freedom to explore the world of the game enticing.

If Sons of the Forest is bound to arrive on consoles eventually, it still isn’t quite ready for primetime. SteamDB indicates that the game had a peak of 414,257 concurrent players when it first released on Steam Early Access about a year ago. Today its most recent peak lies at 27,056 players.

So, truth be told, Sons of the Forest may still have an active player community, but that community is a shadow of its former self. Perhaps, even with all the updates and fixes that Endnight has applied to the title, the game hasn’t caught up yet to the point that it meets player’s expectations.

In 2024, we understand that even games like these that saw a dip in player numbers can redeem themselves in time, as is the case with Cyberpunk 2077. We also know that that’s even possible for online games, and live service games, such as the originally much maligned Sea of Thieves.

But we don’t know quite yet if Endnight is up to the task of enticing players to jump back into this world, or to enter it for the first time. If anything, they are going to have to exceed what they had accomplished before if they want to raise their franchise and company up to the next level.