Awooo! DayZ Teases Predatory Animals
Wandering wolves
Historically, the go-to feature for adding a splash of scary to games has been zombies. Hordes of 'em, coz the undead are terrifying, yeah? So what do you do when your game began life as a zombified mod for another game, like DayZ [official site] to the open-world military sim Arma II? You introduce predatory animals to the relative safety of the world's expansive plains. In DayZ, that's the plan and this here work-in-progress video is proof:
"It’s no secret that we've wanted to bring dangerous predatory animal threats to the woods and fields of Chernarus - and we're getting close to being able to do just that!" lead producer Brian Hicks said in the latest dev blog post.
Although the DayZ standalone has been criticised for its lacking zombie threat, for me it's at its best in its quieter moments. The safe ones, the peaceful ones, the calm before the often brief but inevitably deadly storms. A lot of DayZ, you see, has you cutting about the fictional post-Soviet state Chernarus on your lonesome, scavenging for food and water and whatever else you can lay your hands on. The moments of action tend to be fleeting and often fall within confined spaces, all of which adds to the tension of the tranquil ones. Enemies spotted out in the wild can be telegraphed with relative ease thus adding packs of ravenous wolves - and possibly other avaricious animals - that can't be outrun will be a very interesting development to the survival sandbox.
The critic in me is excited. The shitebag in me is not.