Xbox One gamers looking for something new to try this weekend have a new free title to put to the test.
This means Xbox Live Gold subscribers can download the new free game to their Xbox console right now and start checking it out.
And it’s not a special Free Play Days event that offers full games for a limited time, but a full-fledged release that’s been part of the Game Preview program for quite some time.
Vigor is the latest game to go F2P on Xbox One and can be downloaded and played alongside the current August 2019 Games with Gold lineup.
So fans still have plenty of time to add Forza 6, Gears of War 4, and Castlevania to their digital libraries.
The good news is that Vigor won’t cost anything extra to download and play, and is supported by the in-game microtransaction, as confirmed by a recent blog post.
Bohemia Interactive has been planning this free launch for some time, so it won’t surprise the current fanbase as much.
But there are probably quite a few players who have never played Vigor.
Vigor is described as a free-to-play shooter and loot where you can build shelter in post-war Norway while trying to survive the fallout of a nuclear war.
The F2P launch was scheduled to go live during Gamescom Expo, which means chances are many will have missed the big announcement.
Vigor is an Xbox One exclusive that has been part of the Early Access Preview program run by Microsoft since summer 2018.
And although the game is now fully launched on the Microsoft Store, it looks like there will be plenty of support in the future.
Set in Norway, players must head into the post-nuclear war world and survive against PvP and PvE elements to stop them.
If it looks a bit like DayZ without the zombies, that’s because it was made by the same team.
“Vigor has come an insane distance since entering Xbox Game Preview,” says a message from the Bohemia development team.
“Just over a year later, we can clearly see all the changes that have improved the game. Feedback from our players has helped shape the game and provided us with a ton of new ideas to improve it.
“The Duos feature wasn’t supposed to be in the game from the start, but we’ve heard from the community and listened. We want to focus more on the social aspects of Vigor based on feedback – even adding Random Duos and spectatorship was a natural step in that direction.
“We built the system in such a way that it allowed us to react quickly to feedback, and we were able to make changes to weapon settings within days of the 0.9 update.
“And there are less visible changes that are sometimes even more important – we’ve managed to get better performance both in-game (allowing smooth 4K rendering most of the time on the Xbox One X, for example) and on the servers.
“We’ll share more details about the optimizations in the future – just imagine servers going from just 16 fps on average a year ago, to a solid 60 fps almost all the time these days.
“There has been a steady increase in the number of players in the game since Update 0.9, which turned into Free Play Days, and we managed to fix a ton of stability issues thanks to your support.
“There were over 700,000 players in Vigor during the game’s preview, 140,000 in the last days of free play alone. It’s a big responsibility and an incentive for us to keep improving the game. . »