DayZ standalone by April (hopefully)
James Haresign January 17, 2013 - 9:56 amDean ‘Rocket’ Hall hopes to have the standalone DayZ out by April, but isn’t promising after he got it wrong last time.
Remember when Dean ‘Rocket’ Hall said that we’d have the DayZ Standalone game with us by Christmas 2012? That clearly didn’t happen, and Hall was quite apologetic about that. Which is why now that he’s discussing a new time frame for the release he’s being quite cautious about how he phrases it. During a impromptu Reddit AMA when asked if it would be out by April he said, “Yes I think so, but anything could happen and usually does. We’ll know more when the results of the tech test are out. Any dates before then would be pure speculation, and my last speculation didn’t work out so good.”
But as is always the way with Reddit AMA’s, that’s not the only piece of info Hall gave away about the upcoming zombie survival game. The Chernarus map is getting a bit of an overhaul as Rocket feels that the map is empty as there is so much space but has so few points of interest. Animals are incoming, with a deer and a rat already implemented.
But quite a few features are going to be after the the game launches. Things like ragdoll physics. Far too complicated. “ We looked at it, even tried some, but it was just going to cause far too much delay.” Yes, do not delay this further, thank you Mr. Hall. Other features set to come further down the line are all the things that are set to raise DayZ up even further. Base building is not expected until the end of the year, and will likely be a different game mode. Vehicles will remain “very, very basic” initially, though they are pretty high up on the list of extras, “later we will add great depth to the parts mechanic something like a ‘vehicle construction’ system. This will be our first foray into ‘endgame’ type content, after we have stabilized the build.”
I’m starting to get excited again. And so is Hall. It’s no secret he took The War Z’s performance and attitude badly, as well as feeling like he let down the community by missing the Christmas launch. Now things are turning around.
Things are quite good for us now. Last year, I had made some very bold and tough calls. We changed the architecture of the project and instantly broke everything. I mean everything. And increasingly I had nothing to show people of the progress, and we didn’t know whether we would pull it off. Well, from about January 2nd onwards, the payoff started to come. With each day and each payoff, not only did I get more excited – so did the team. So the results just started rolling in.
“It’s way too early to call “success”, for sure some huge parts of this new architecture are going to completely break during testing, there are massive holes in the design as well as the code – but none of these are anywhere near as scary as what we come through.
“We took a risk, and combined with the WarZ risk, well… they seemed like things could have gone bad for us. But it appears it was a risk worth taking. I haven’t been this positive about the project since May last year, when things were still all fun – and not big business (DayZ is big, big business now).”
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