Feature: Bore me
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DayZ
4 months ago
10 months ago
I'd forgotten all about DayZ, but being reminded of it's existence brings the memories flooding back. That moment when I broke my legs, and my friend had to put me out of my misery and inadvertently became a bandit. That time when I was stranded, weaponless on a rooftop and the same friend arrived just in time to save me. The session where I was…
1 year ago
Feature: A day in the Safe Zone
Every week we abandon Brendan to the post-apocalyptic wastes of early access. This time, the cold, hard life of Next Day: Survival [official site] I found my new friend sitting in a car outside the Safe Zone compound. The car was broken down and stationary, but he sat behind the wheel anyway. He was making his own speedy car noises and engine sounds. "Brrrrrrr-brm-brrrrrrrrr. Brrr-brr-brrrrrrrvvvv!"…
DayZ creator Dean Hall has announced Stationeers, a game about constructing and operating a space station on your tod or with chums. No, don't confuse this with Ion, his effectively-cancelled space sim. Stationeers promises complex simulation of station workings, and it's encouraging that Hall cites the phenomenal (and phenomenally complex) Space Station 13 as an influence. It's due to hit early access "soon" but is…
2 years ago
Ion, a simulation-heavy space game inspired by role-playing adventure Space Station 13 and announced by Dean Hall back at E3 in 2015 has been cancelled, reports Eurogamer. A sad day for fans of dying from a lack of oxygen in a floating metal cylinder, but perhaps not surprising given the ambition behind the game. “I want a game that is not a game," Hall had…
Dean "Rocket" Hall, the force behind DayZ and more recently his own studio, RocketWerkz, has made some fairly strong comments about the perils of VR development, the hostility of the tech's community, and his belief that profitability is extremely unrealistic for games developed for the host of new goggles. His own studio, he says, is unlikely to develop for VR again.
RocketWerkz' VR project Out of Ammo has tiptoed into official release with very little fanfare. It's quite sneaky for a game about leading little LEGO-esque soldiers into combat, guns a-blazin'. Out of Ammo has been an experimental attempt at VR for Dean Hall's (DayZ) fledgling studio. It's a strategy game that has you building up defenses and directing units as they head into battle, and…
Feature: VR tower defence + FPS
I suspect the 'I'd love to see X in VR' conversations have dried up already. No, we're not getting Dishonored: CorVRo's Birthday Surprise or Total WaVR: VRHammer, because the headsets' screens aren't really up to it, and few of us have PCs which can power it anyway. As that message sets in, thoughts turn from what VR gaming would ideally do and towards what can…
Feature: Shining a light
The Division has been infecting everyone at RPS one by one. And I am no exception. The Dark Zone of the game, however, is a strange beast. It is far less dangerous than its rough cast of heroes and miscreants want you to believe and many have complained that there is almost no incentive to kill the other human players who roam there. It is…
3 years ago
Feature: Let us be human
Trade! Buy low, sell high. Tradey trade trade. Is that intro length? Good. Now that's out of the way, let's talk about trading in videogames, and why it's always rubbish.
One big milestone DayZ [official site] has headed for on its hike through the boglands of Early Access has been a new renderer [the bit of a game engine which turns numbers into pictures -'Technical' ed.]. Developers Bohemia Interactive have been working on a new DirectX 11 renderer which should bring far better performance to the open-world survival game, and maybe tart it up a…
Cast your mind back to the hazy summer of 2012, when the world first went wild for DayZ [official site]. ITV sent Ross Kemp in to interview DayZ's most notorious player-killing gangs, an entire edition of The Observer's New Review supplement reported on arts and culture in Chernarus (with a fascinating piece on puppet theatre!), and MasterChef's Invention Test round gave contestants scavenged ingredients -…
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.…
Feature: And it's worth celebrating.
Global illumination. Volumetric clouds. Sub-surface scattering. These are words that make me hot. But I know this feeling is forbidden. I should care about games, not the empty pursuit of photorealism. But oh my, it’s so exciting, and not empty. In fact, I think that right now photorealism is becoming crucial to games, and that we should celebrate it.
Feature:
Have You Played? is an endless stream of game recommendations. One a day, every weekday of the year, perhaps for all time. DayZ [official site] takes the pernickety simulation of Arma and applies it to a grim survivalist tale. One in which the already dreach weather and desolate towns of Chernarus have become infested with zombies and in which the survivors are driven to do…
Feature: RPS Chat v0.86
Early Access games are here to stay, but is that cause for concern or celebration? We gathered to discuss whether early access benefits developers or players in its current state, and how we'd make it better. Along the way, we discussed the best alpha examples, paying for unfinished games, our love of regularly updated mods, Minecraft and the untapped potential of digital stores.
Feature: Or map, if you prefer
Level 28! No, the other kind of level. The type that you run around in, shooting people or jumping on their heads and that sort of thing. Adam, Alec, Alice and Graham gather to discuss their favourite levels and/or maps from across the vast length of PC gaming, including selections from Deus Ex, Call of Duty and Quake III. Someone even makes a case for…
Feature: Don’t Recycle
Bethesda have a spectacular talent for making moth-eaten ideas feel like revolutionary concepts: Fallout 4 [official site] will let you play a property baron who constructs not just houses but connected settlements from bits of duct tape and broken globe. I was beside myself with excitement at this news – giddy, even – but not because of any particular flair on display in the five-minute…
DayZ creator Dean 'Rocket' Hall has announced his next game, Ion [official site], at E3. He calls it a "simulation MMO that explores mankind's expansion into space" and Space Station 13 is cited as an inspiration, which sounds like a fine mix for wacky emergent antics. It'll be simulation-heavy, and sounds great. Come have a look at the first trailer, and hear what he had…
Feature: The end of an era
It used to be that the only way to make money from a mod was a) make a standalone sequel or remake b) use it as a portfolio to get hired by a studio or c) back in the pre-broadband days, shovel it onto a dodgy CD-ROM (and even then, it almost certainly wasn't the devs who profited). As of last night, that changed. Mod-makers…
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