The Stomping Land sprinted into my heart–much like Jeff Goldblum fleeing the T-Rex in Jurassic Park–and I’ve been anxiously awaiting more news from what appears to be DayZ with dinosaurs. The silence has been broken! Not hugely. Not like the roar of a T-Rex with a bellyful of goat, but more like the squirty trill of the dilophosaurus*. The developers have been updating their site for the past week with more information about character customisation, taming, and tracking. Follow the footprints to find out more.
Multiplayer dino survival is a great idea: the players will live in the world of the wandering beasts, fighting together and amongst themselves for a stomach full of raptor steak. Intriguingly, you’ll only be able to kill the smaller creatures, meaning the larger animals will only die when two or more meet and fight. You’ll be able to feed from the loser’s corpse, which will provide a heartier meal than the small dinos. But to do that, you need to find them.
Tracking sounds very neatly thought out: the larger animals are represented by bright stars in the sky, and if you can see them you can follow the dot to the light. If the stars are together, you know there’s a dino fight happening and a potential meal. The light won’t tell you what sort of lizard is scraping gizzards, but you can also track footprints and listen for distant thumps and screams to help make that sort of judgement. This light will attract other hunters as well.
Which means it’s probably best to not be spotted, which is where the customisation will help: as you live and grow in the world, you’ll collect loose pieces of foliage that you can use to help define your character, and with each leaf you’ll blend more and more into the backdrop.
You will have some power against the larger dinosaurs, though: as your character lives he gains Expertise. Come upon a dying dino and you have the opportunity to restore it to health. Doing so will make it your mount, and the more Expertise you have, the larger the resurrected beast can be. You can totally ride a Rex, and use it to defeat other hunters and the larger prey, though any death you suffer will wipe the Exp.
I am ready for this, and I can’t wait for the cat expansion.
No word on a release, but I think the update is still ongoing. Check the site in a few days if you’re super keen.
*I don’t know a lot about dinosuars, but I do know a lot about Jurassic Park.
21/03/2014 at 20:27 BadBannana says:
I hope that this does well. I want a good dino-action game, is that too much to ask? I know Telltale did the point and click but it’s just no the same
21/03/2014 at 20:50 SillyWizard says:
I want a good caveman game. So. Maybe this will satisfy that desire…?
21/03/2014 at 21:50 Cosm says:
Wow, this looks awesome. The setting, the ideas, the designs… gonna get way too hyped for this.
Also, the customizable camouflage is brilliant.
21/03/2014 at 22:08 Blackcompany says:
“You can totally ride a Rex.”
Sold.
22/03/2014 at 01:55 Cutter says:
Yeah, yeah, but the devs are so preoccupied with whether or not they can make this they didn’t stop to think if they should!
22/03/2014 at 04:40 stiffkittin says:
Yes, but will there be feathered t-rex?
22/03/2014 at 06:15 derbefrier says:
lets hope not.
22/03/2014 at 06:58 stiffkittin says:
I dunno. Crafting a boa could be pretty sweet. There’s no excuse for my caveman not to look fabulous.
22/03/2014 at 07:13 TechnicalBen says:
Ok, how strange is that, I watched the cat raptor last night…
22/03/2014 at 22:03 Delicieuxz says:
Why do people reference Jurassic Park whenever Dinosaurs come up? The movie turned Dinosaurs into something boring, generic, and unimaginative. The movie’s representation of them is paper-thin, dull, and dopey.
And why do dinosaur games never feature anything resembling dinosaur-eras foliage? Instead of the massively diverse and surreal plant life that existed across those millions of years, there’s always the most boring, completely-uninspired, and non-realistic eco-systems, that look as though I’m walking in a modern local forest, only one without any diversification?
22/03/2014 at 22:32 derbefrier says:
you seem to hate fun movies. I am sorry
use a time machine go back to when you were 12 years old and seeing this movie in a theater. It was awesome.
23/03/2014 at 01:39 keithzg says:
I’m with him on his other point though, ie. the foliage. Fauna isn’t the only thing that’s changed dramatically over the hundreds of millions of years of large multicellular life! And just having Dinosaurs plunked down into a world that looks otherwise like our own is far, far less immersive than experiencing an entirely different world overall than our present-day.
23/03/2014 at 22:51 Ergates_Antius says:
Because it was the first film to represent dinosaurs in almost believable (at the time) CGI.
23/03/2014 at 14:45 XCrusherX says:
The taming part destroys the game in my opinion. Would have loved a survival title where a T-Rex or a bunch of raptors always means a threat you have to run away from (or defend your home if you are brave enough). But a bunch of players riding them sounds utterly silly.
26/03/2014 at 17:55 Sharongamer978 says:
Looks fun as hell. Can’t wait to try it.