Rock, Paper, Shotgun

DayZ‘s latest dev log features a man ingesting and then allegedly defecating a tin can, at which point Dean “Rocket” Hall nonchalantly decides to bend over, pick it up, and save it for later. This has led me to the following earth-shatteringly profound revelation: videogames are weird, you guys. Really weird. I doubt anyone else noticed, but I’m being totally honest! Most of the time, people don’t procure their cans that way in real life. Also, zombies don’t exist. The latest batch of Rocket-narrated DayZ footage, however, has those too! What’s next, I ask you? Men ignoring the iron-etched laws of common decency and discarding their trousers with reckless abandon? Like filthy, brief-flaunting savages?

…Oh. Oh god.

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If I didn’t know any better, I’d say Rocket “Dean” Hall was rocketing through DayZ standalone‘s development in order to stop rabid fans from sinking overeager fangs into his heels. But now I do know better! Rocket explained in a recent (and completely massive) dev blog: “We don’t know [when it's coming out]. We’re going to take our time. I feel fantastic about the situation, more than ever I feel like we’re doing something really interesting with this development. Now is not the time to rush things, but we do need to ensure our pace is kept up.” He then proceeded to discuss all of the things – chief among them anti-cheat server technology, character customization, and the current closed test. Find out heaps more about the Z-est of days after the break.

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DayZ‘s standalone version continues to be shrouded in real life’s most potent zombie fog – aka, mystery – but Rocket’s not the type to intentionally keep people in the dark. So he’s been trickling out details where he has them, and now we know that a closed test is “imminent.” But how exactly will it work? And what lies beyond – for instance, once players start flooding into nebulous “endgame” territory or. further, when ArmA III reawakens the ancient modder kraken currently sleeping in Rocket’s soul? Thanks to Reddit‘s eternally inquisitive hivemind, we now have answers.

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It is 2013. If you’re still alive, congratulations (or sorry, I guess, depending on your perspective)! You made it. But while this techno-neo-cyber-space-face year is going quite swimmingly so far, there’s one thing missing from society’s collective vision of a utopian ultrafuture: DayZ‘s standalone version. It was supposed to come crawling out of the woodwork at the tail end of 2012, but Bohemia’s camp didn’t make a peep as we all made our annual holiday sacrifices to our respective Blood Gods, as per cataclysm-averting tradition. So then, what’s the deal? Why the delay? Rocket took to DayZ’s dev log to provide answers.

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For a while, it seemed like Day Z and Arma II would be one of those hair-pulling, plate-flinging couples that never musters the guts to actually make a clean break. “Oh, I’m really leaving this time,” Day Z would bellow, hesitantly hokey pokeying its way out the door. “Yep. Here I goooooo.” And then… nothing. Moving on, after all, is tough – especially when the old relationship was comfortable and also supplied you with all of your vital organs, which you’re now in the process of clawing from your stomach to replace with new ones. I think we’ve all been there. But now, Rocket’s given standalone Day Z’s alpha a release window, and it’s right around the corner. So then, let’s take a look inside, shall we?

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It’s been a little while since I’d caught up with the rolling experiment that is Dean Hall and the Day Z project, so it was interesting to watch the Eurogamer Expo talk given by him, which I have posted below. In it it talks about “authenticity, tension, and freedom” as the main guiding concepts for their work, but he says that he intends for a lot of what they do to be quite radical, and admits that he’s not sure how that will work out. Survival and “medical” aspects of the game will be coming under a lot of scrutiny, creating greater depth for that “silent antagonist” part of the game. The groaning, brain-eating antagonists will be getting a revamp, as he discusses. Go watch.
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I was just having a lovely chat with Dean Hall and Marek Spanel over at the BIS stand at GamesCom, and a couple of things emerged that I thought were interesting. Firstly, the Day Z standalone, which Hall anticipates arriving before the end of the year, could eventually have “instanced” building. Hall described how he saw the future of player-driven construction in the game consisting in underground bases that would be instanced from portals (“a grate in the ground”) across Chernarus. He described how players could dig it out, concrete it, building hydroponics, or even see it collapse on them. The second thing that was interesting is that Chernarus is being redone (“Chernarus Plus”) for the release with more enterable buildings, more detail, and even entirely new areas. New maps for the game will, apparently, be a major part of the plan for the standalone in the future.

Full interviews with Hall and Spanel coming up next week.

I had long discussions with several people about Day Z at Rezzed and most were were surprised, mid-talk, to learn I still haven’t played the ARMA 2 mod. Turns out I’m very good at borrowing Jim’s opinions and absorbing experiences vicariously through Youtube. The infectious growth of the mod was a story in itself but the possibility of a standalone version, perhaps as early as September, could mean significant changes are coming. Here’s what we know.

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Speaking at Rezzed, Day Z‘s Dean Hall said: “We’ve got 420,000 now. We’ll have 430,000 tomorrow.” The Arma 3 developer reckons that his mod will end up selling more copies than Arma 2 did originally. “Currently we’re running 22,000 concurrent at full peak, and 10,000 off peak, which is pretty huge numbers considering the original data structure and system was designed to handle 100 concurrents, and two servers… We now have 1000 servers. We’re getting 110,000 players in a 24 hour period at the moment.”

Game of the year so far, for me at least. And for a few other people, it seems. [I missed Rocket's session, sadly, so thanks to Eurogamer for covering it.]