Stationeers and Icarus developers RocketWerkz are making a spiritual successor to beloved space sim Kerbal Space Program, which is currently titled "Kitten Space Agency" in a flagrant display of adherence to wholesome internet trends. It's based on an actual Kerbal Space Program 2 pitch the studio threw at Take-Two subsidiary Private Division back in the day. RocketWerkz CEO and original DayZ creator Dean Hall has hired several former KSP and KSP2 developers to work on the game, and is describing it on social media as a "KSP killer".
]]>Good news DayZ fans, there's a new map inbound that'll make survival even tougher than it already is! That's right, the upcoming Frostline DLC adds the Sakhal archipelago, home to a rugged environment where you'll battle against the cold and attempt to shoot nasty players at the same time. Oh, there are also volcanoes that prove an extra threat, too. And new diseases. Wonderful.
]]>It's time for another edition of Ask RPS, where we answer reader questions put forward by RPS supporters. Today's question is a nice, warm, fuzzy one, as it's all about the good times we've had playing games in co-op with friends and family.
It comes courtesy of Aerothorn, who asks: What is your favorite co-op gaming memory? (along with the additional clarification that these memories don't need to be confined to designed-for-co-op games, but could also stem from playing a single-player game with a friend. "I used to play Descent with me piloting and my friend gunning!" they said).
So which games make us think of happy times with pals and good company? Come and find out below.
]]>The makers of Arma and DayZ have revealed Enfusion, the new cross-platform game engine they plan to build future games on. No, Bohemia Interactive haven't announced Arma 4, but they do say they would use Enfusion for "any potential new Arma game", so maybe that's something to bear in mind while looking at its screenshots of vast landscapes. While they don't have much more than screenshots and a wee video to show right now (sorry, engine enthusiasts), they do hint that they'll release some sort of "playable demonstration of its features" at some point "soon".
]]>Chinese tech megacorp Tencent are buying a minority stake in Bohemia Interactive, the Czech gang behind Arma and DayZ. Bohemia say they "will continue to operate independently and be led by the existing management team." Alrighty then!
]]>Post-apocalyptic videogames, the ultimate escape. How wonderful to venture to a strange land, so different from our own, and see what the world may look like an entire week from now. Well, today the PlayStation clan secluded themselves behind their barricades with The Last Of Us Part 2, leaving the PC tribe to suffer in the harsh elements of reality alone. But never fear, wanderer. Here are some similar games to play if you want to leave your austere existence behind, and indulge in a grim struggle instead. Pull up a plastic bucket, break open a tin of Pedigree Chum, here are the 8 bleakest post-apocalypses in PC gaming. A post-apocalyst.
]]>When the historians of the future cast their cyber-eyes over the deluge of stupidity we encrusted upon the primitive internet, they will see that our fables, our moral storytelling, was mostly conducted with flashing colours and double-jumps. Yes, videogames have adopted the moralistic finger-wagging of fairytales and Victorian novels, for better or for worse. They have taught us a lot about ourselves and our place in the world. Here are 13 of the "best" moral lessons from PC games. Yes, you may take notes.
]]>The former creative director of DayZ's standalone version has joined RocketWerkz, the studio of DayZ creator Dean Hall, to work on a new survival game. Brian Hicks split from Bohemia Interactive and DayZ in 2018, and now he's with Dean "Rocket" Hall, who bailed on Bohemia and DayZ in 2014. All Hall says to describe RocketWerkz's technically-unannounced survival game is that it is "massive". Hang on, you know what else is massive? Jungle. That can only be a huge hint at a tropical setting.
]]>I love a spin-off. Angel? Great stuff! Count Duckula? The Better Call Saul of cartoons. Kourtney and Khloé Take Miami? Take me, I’m yours! I could go on and on cutting-and-pasting from this Wikipedia page, but I’ll get to the point. Games also have spin-offs. Often they’ll be forgotten about. Sometimes they’re even disowned. On a few occasions, they’ll take on a life of their own and exist apart from the game that spawned them, never calling, never visiting, only sending a multipack Christmas card. Below are a few stories of surprising spin-offs. The 2D Half-Life 2, the Fortnite that failed, the single-player Counter-Strike that no-one asked for, and more.
]]>It has been over five years since DayZ was released. In all that time, Chernarus has been the only home the survivors have known. (Officially at least, there are already unofficial map mods like Deer Isle). The lumpy land of Chernarus is a place the players know well, perhaps a little too well for a survival game that works best when it’s unpredictable. To keep things chaotic, Bohemia have just announced new DLC for the game. The upcoming Livonia is 163km², with plenty of forests to frolic in. And bears.
]]>DayZ, arguably the game that started the explosion of battle royale shooters, is becoming one itself. Or at least adding one as an optional mode. To Bohemia Interactive's credit, Survivor GameZ doesn't sound like the standard 'closing circle of death'. Instead, it's more inspired by the original Battle Royale film and novel, with players constrained to looting, shooting and evading zombies in a series of safe areas. Matches end in a rush for a final objective with the power to wipe other players off the map. The first public alpha test begins soon, DayZ owners can sign up for it here.
]]>I spot the man seconds before my flare fizzles out. It’s dark - so dark that even though he’s just a few feet away, I can only tell he’s there from the condensation of his breath. My own breathing stops, thoughts racing behind a moment pregnant with possibility, a crossroads where anything could happen. “Hey”, he says. “Would you like my beans?”.
DayZ doesn't get more exciting than that.
]]>Six years in the works (counting its time as an Arma 2 mod) and Bohemia Interactive's zombie survival sandbox DayZ has left early access, flinging open its doors for a free launch weekend. Snag it here on Steam before December 17th and you too can enjoy hiking through the rain across the sprawling, bleak land of Chernarus. Maybe you'll even find weaponry and shelter before zombies or other humans do you in. Having not played it since its early days as a mod (I feel very old, suddenly), I went for a jaunt around Chernarus last night. Thoughts and a launch trailer below.
]]>Not-being-eaten-by-zombies simulator DayZ has had a huge impact on gaming over its six years of development, arguably inspiring the all-consuming tide of battle royale shooters. Not bad considering that it's still not out yet. The end is very nearly in sight, though - Bohemia Interactive say it's leaving early access next Thursday, December 13th, after a whirlwind run of beta testing. It recently added base-building, upgraded animal AI and integrated mod support, and began a major round of bug-hunting. Below, a near-final trailer, giving us a peek at its eastern European apocalypse.
]]>It might have been the spark that lit the battle royale inferno that consumed the industry, but zombie survival sandbox DayZ has been largely forgotten, languishing in early access. The end is finally within sight for the former Arma 2 mod, as its first beta build has officially rolled out today, a major release with the aim of preparing the game for a final launch by the end of 2018. The new beta release brings significant engine changes, base building, a map overhaul and more. Check out the patch notes here and the accompanying dev log video below
]]>Whoa whoa, calm down, breeeathe. Now, explain it to me slowly. The RPS podcast did what? They talked about the games that make them panic? Hm. That does sound like something those scoundrels of the Electronic Wireless Show would do. They’d probably talk about Subnautica and Duskers and SpyParty. Okay, well stay calm. That’s right. Inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale. There’s no need to –
[The podcast appears from the shadows]
AAAGGGHHHHHHHHH.
]]>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 playing with Pip while she was streaming, and got taken hostage by two of her friends who convinced me they were random strangers.
The devs have written a status report, containing news both good and bad. The bad: the next major update isn't coming until next year. The good: DayZ will come out of early access in 2018. Maybe then I'll dive back in and try to get myself kidnapped again.
]]>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!"
I stepped in front of the immobile vehicle, wearing nothing but the boxer shorts and t-shirt that accompanied me into this world. I peered through the windshield to get a closer look at the man inside, pretending to drive.
“Oh shit!” he shouted “A pedestrian!”
]]>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 playable at EGX Rezzed so I assume some of the RPS rabble we sent to That London will swing by for a bash at some point.
]]>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 said at the original unveiling. "I want a game that is a universe. A universe built not on scripts or quests, but on the laws of physics, biology, and chemistry.” Looks like that was aiming quite high.
]]>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 controlling them yourself in first-person view if you want. See it in action in the launch trailer:
]]>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 it actually do right now? Out Of Ammo, a loosely tower defence strategy game for from RocketWerkz - that being DayZ creator Dean Hall's new studio - attempts to provide a more elaborate answer to that question.
]]>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 less a Dark Zone and more of a Slightly Gloomy Zone. But despite the problems, I still think it is the most interesting part of post-Bigpox Manhattan. Let me tell you why.
]]>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 little too. This has, of course, taken far longer than they'd planned (and said), but it is coming along. Check out this new video showing off the DX11 renderer and some dangerously heavy rain.
]]>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 - trail mix, tinned sardines, a can of Mountain Green, etc. My, how the survive 'em up took off!
So you may have a DayZ forums account, in which case you should know that they were hacked recently and you should do that whole password-changing dance.
]]>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:
]]>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.
]]>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 terrible things in order to keep on living - or to entertain themselves. It is also, just as importantly, often boring.
]]>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.
]]>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 Xen from Half-Life, and means it.
]]>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 crafting reveal at E3. As my New Vegas mod list and cack-handed fumbling with the Creation Kit will attest, I’m a sucker for anything that lets me inhabit the Wasteland. The idea of reshaping it by my own hand (benevolent, naturally) is intoxicating, even if the mechanics are crap.
And crafting mechanics are almost always crap.
]]>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 to say about it.
]]>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 can now charge for their work, via Steam.
]]>Why is Sony's unfinished multiplayer zombie survival game H1Z1 (official site) proving so popular? On paper, it doesn't make a lot of sense. Initial reports were negative; we've already got DayZ; even if we wanted a less hardcore DayZ with more crating, we've got 7 Days To Die already.
So what on Earth is H1Z1 for? And why am I enjoying it even though I really feel as though I shouldn't?
]]>Which is good, because the last thing anyone wants is an unstable cannibal.
My complete personal experience of DayZ can be summed up with "ran around in the dark, got attacked by some zombies, panicked and ran away, managed to lose them before bleeding to death in a churchyard". I never did well enough to become intimate with the game's gory innards, and as such its patch and changelog notes are largely a mystery to me. Fortunately they're still almost as entertaining as, er, bleeding out whilst cowering behind a gravestone.
]]>Let's play a game of good news, bad news.
Good news! DayZ's developers have laid out their development roadmap for 2015 and it includes long desired features, and should finally bring parity with and improvements over the original mod. These additions include basic vehicles and better zombie AI in early 2015, and eventually will stretch to construction and base building in late 2015. The game also has a projected final release date sometime in the first half of 2016.
Bad news! The game's price is going to increase gradually over the remaining development period and to begin with has increased from $30 to $35 and then immediately been discounted by 15% back down to $30 as part of the current Steam sale. Depending on your point of view this is either a nice way to soften the blow of an understandable and inevitable price increase or, in the UK at least, a breach of consumer protection guidelines.
]]>Look, we can't put this off much longer. I'm putting up a dado rail in the sitting room and if I have to go to B&Q on a Sunday afternoon, you have to go to B&Q on a Sunday afternoon. No lone person deserves that grim hellscape. If it'll help you steel yourself, here, have a play of MiniDayZ for free. It might not prepare you for a couple furious that the paint-mixer's out of a particular pigment, but a top-down 2D take on Bohemia's zombie apocalypse survival sim comes close to the experience.
]]>Games with permadeath -- wherein you start over completely when you die -- provide certain stakes to a gaming session. Rather than reloading your last save after you die, you lose all your gear, you lose all your progress, and you essentially lose all the time you've spent playing up to that point. For a while now (a couple years, to be honest) I've been thinking about a way to up those stakes, to go a step beyond perma-death: perma-permadeath, where dying means you don't just lose your stuff, you lose the game itself. Forever. Survival Week on RPS seems like an apt time to finally give it a try.
So, today I'll play DayZ, and if I die, I won't simply start over. I'll stop playing DayZ, and I won't play it again. For the rest of my life. For real.
]]>"This is a a remake of DayZ but made in a superior engine in which zombies can't just walk through walls." I love that. Puritanism in zombie games. If there was a Mojo magazine for games, "Doom is still the best engine in the world" would be its "the Beatles are still the best band in the world."
I digress. DoomZ really is DayZ in Doom, including the whole rickety, unfinished thing, at least for now. And, to be honest, there is some truth to its obstinate declaration about superiority - but it's not because of anything to do with walking through walls, and more because of how its appearance affects -and enhances - my survival game mindset.
]]>In early 2012, a mod for Arma II called DayZ was released. Two-and-a-half years later, its odd mixture of multiplayer, horror, and a need for players to keep themselves fed and watered, has given rise to the survival genre.
Let's celebrate that genre.
]]>Many of us have been round the Early Access block a few times now, strolled through Alphafunding Park a few times, and taken a pedalo out on Crowdfunding Lake. We've had some good times, haven't we? And some bad too. By now we surely all definitely understand an important point with all this: you're not buying a finished game. You're paying for the dream of a game, or an early sketch of a game, or simply to support artists you like. Even when you're playing these games, DayZ producer Brian Hicks reminds, "You are not playing DayZ, you are playing development builds. Early development builds."
]]>First the bad news: DayZ was absolutely, definitely hacked. That happened. After an initial period of being cosigned to Reddit rumor status, Bohemia's confirmed to RPS that DayZ's servers were compromised in some significant form or fashion. Initial reports pegged the hack attack as a full-on swiping of source code (which will also be the title of George R.R. Martin's eventual cyberpunk novel after Game of Thrones takes his life and he returns as a nano-borg), but Bohemia has yet to enter panic mode. Instead, a rep told me that both players and development of the game are completely unaffected.
]]>So maybe you weren't expecting SOE's vaunted Star Wars Galaxies spiritual successor to be an overtly DayZ-inspired zombie MMO called H1Z1. And maybe you're not exactly shaking the sand out of your old Tatooine-scouring boots in excitement. That's fair. But as far as these things go, SOE does seem to be kind of on the right track. CEO John Smedley isn't shamefully shambling (shamebling) away from DayZ comparisons, and he's tackling community complaints head-on. Case in point: the survival-obsessed masses are easily spooked by the notion of rampant nickel-and-diming, but Smedley assured Reddit's assembled hordes that SOE won't charge for anything that affects gameplay.
]]>If it wasn't already plainly obvious, survival games are all the rage these day(z), and zombies - thanks to DayZ's ever-looming influence - come part and parcel with that. The War Z/Infestation: Survivor Stories hit a little too close to home on that front, and Nether, with its possibly dubious ties to the former, also deals in apocalyptic baddie bashing, but with a slant toward the occult. Rust, meanwhile, frolicked through the gray-green fields with the shambling undead only for as long as it had to. And now it seems EverQuest and PlanetSide developer SOE has come down with a case of the Z diseaze as well, with its "soon" to be available H1Z1 promising DayZ-style antics on a much larger scale.
When Smedley promised a game "dedicated" to longtime Star Wars Galaxies fans, I'm not sure if this is what they had in mind.
]]>Each Monday, Chris Livingston visits an early access game and reports back with stories about whatever he finds inside. This week, survival horror in DayZ's experimental branch.
While nearly two million players have paid to act as DayZ's beta testers, there's a much smaller subset of lighthouse customers acting as beta testers to those beta testers. On a handful of DayZ experimental branch servers, changes are rolled out and played with weeks before being introduced to the early access game at large. This week I opted into the experimental branch, keen to inhale the future of DayZ before most players even get a whiff.
]]>Mid-way through Rezzed, I decided that somebody must have cloned Dean Hall. The DayZ creator was everywhere. One minute he was talking about the most frightening moment of his life - hanging off the side of Everest, I hear - and the next he was playing games on the showfloor. If he wasn't admiring Maia with an excited twinkle in his eye, he was telling interested parties about how much he digs Project Zomboid. The man loves games and since he has so many interesting things to say about them, we should be thankful that he enjoys talking about them quite as much as he does. One panel involved The Indie Stone folk and Hall talking about zombies. They offer a defence of the oft-maligned enemy and it's often compelling. Behold.
]]>A more hysterical headline would have suggested that Bohemia have doubled the size of DayZ's team in anticipation of the loss of Dean Hall, the creator of the multiplayer survival game. That's not the case - I have it on good authority* that Bohemia are actively gathering strands of Hall's hair and traces of saliva from his favourite coffee mug in order to create a functional clone. The team is expanding though and will be focusing on survival mechanics. Which makes sense, given that DayZ is a survival game.
]]>In this episode of Tales of the Unexpected, we learn that DayZ creator and lead Dean Hall plans to leave Bohemia by the end of 2014, in order to set up a new studio in New Zealand. The early access version of the multiplayer survival sim passed 1.5 million players this weekend and I don't think it's dropped out of the top three sellers on Steam since release, but Hall told Eurogamer that his continued presence would become a hindrance to the project:
...maybe I've got the gift of the gab, so I can talk, I can explain something, I can talk people up to the ledge and get them to jump off it. That's what I did with DayZ; I've done it twice now - two new code teams have separately done it. But eventually, that's the bad person to have. Eventually, you don't want the guy telling you to go over the top and get through. So at some point I'll be a disaster for the project, at least in a leadership role.
Bohemia have acknowledged the statement but declined to add comment. More details below.
]]>The first man I murdered probably deserved it. But not this guy. The only thing this guy had done wrong was wander into Berezino with some water, a compass and a rifle (without ammo). It was just his luck that we were there too, looking for baked beans amid the inexplicable piles of shoes which amass inside every townhouse of DayZ. We saw him go into one of the two apartment blocks that loom like huge, Gray tombstones over the city. I followed him inside, calling out: “Hello, anyone here? Friendly!”
]]>CCP might be best known for EVE Online, but they've had another project burbling away in their developmental cauldron since basically the dawn of time. World of Darkness, based on White Wolf's Vampire: The Masquerade setting, is technically existent, though CCP has become quite adept at keeping it shrouded in, er, darkness. But every once in a while some news slips out, and not all of it is good. For instance, the World of Darkness team recently laid off 15 members of its rather small (for an MMO) force. So then, what's going on behind-the-scenes? Should we be worried? And how is the game evolving? I asked CCP CEO Hilmar Pétursson, and here's what he told me.
]]>DayZ is a multiplayer zombie survival sim which, though incomplete, produces anecdotes of drama, desperation and clown mask-wearing weirdos. Emily Richardson has been playing it with a question: can you be a good person in the videogame post-apocalypse? Read parts one, two, three.
On the way back to Elektro we meet two New Spawns on the road. They're totally bear, in nothing but t-shirts and jeans. They seem to be having a little trouble with a fence, so we puff out our charitable chests and take our opportunity.
“Hi there!” one of us announces. The pair turn to look at us.
“Are you guys thirsty? Hungry?” we ask. They say nothing, merely looking at us, a group of about four. We start dropping food and water on the floor for them and I try force feeding one some water from my canteen, but he shuffles awkwardly away to break the animation.
]]>DayZ is a multiplayer zombie survival sim which, though buggy and incomplete, produces anecdotes of drama, desperation and clown mask-wearing weirdos. Emily Richardson has been playing it with a question: can you be a good person in the videogame post-apocalypse? Start with part one.
We're a team of four heading straight for the city of Cherno. We have another survivor to pick up and we want to help some people around the town if we can. Yes, by now we realise how dangerous this is. Cherno is not a friendly place and we know that bandits go to find a more challenging kind of prey there, but we'll be a pack of five soon, and we're up for the fight.
]]>DayZ is a multiplayer zombie survival sim which, though buggy and incomplete, produces anecdotes of drama, desperation and clown mask-wearing weirdos. Emily Richardson has been playing it with a question: can you be a good person in the videogame post-apocalypse? Read part one here.
I've started a new life in DayZ and I'm determined that this one isn't going to kill anyone. I've already lost all my friends, but I've got a lot of food and water from the town of Polana. It's time to head back to the coast, meet up with some allies and begin my work as a good Samaritan of Chernarus.
]]>Of all the things for DayZ to be inspired by, I didn't think it would be the 1947 song "Buttons and Bows". But according to zombie master Dean Hall's RedditAMA, DayZ's eventual future will include bows, throwable weapons, and more zombies. Bows, people. Bows. Oh, wait. And arrows. That makes more sense.
]]>This is the latest in a series of articles about the art technology of games, in collaboration with the particularly handsome Dead End Thrills.
An irony of Chernarus, the fictional-yet-you-can-somehow-cosplay-there home of DayZ, is that the older the game gets, the younger the map should grow. The awesome ArmA machines for which it was built - planes, helicopters, tanks, boats, guns, the Lada - will fall into disrepair. Some survivors might have the specialist tools to fix them, but more will have the skills to steal them. Those bandits maybe won't fix them, and this post-Soviet state will suddenly start to look very pre-Soviet indeed. Though this natural outcome seems unlikely for a mere computer game, it's what's so exciting about DayZ being Early Access. We get to watch its apocalypse unfold.
This must be a rather strange prospect for Ivan Buchta, the Bohemia Interactive designer who grew up in the northern area of the Czech Republic the map so closely resembles. To the current DayZ Standalone team he's the "Ambassador Of The Republic Of Chernarus", which makes plotting the death of his birthplace an unlikely part of his job description. But then that's the other thing about DayZ going Early Access: it's a job he seems to share with just about everyone, from his workmates to the players who think they should ratify the game's every move.
]]>DayZ is a multiplayer zombie survival sim which, though buggy and incomplete, produces anecdotes of drama, desperation and clown mask-wearing weirdos. Emily Richardson has been playing it with a question: can you be a good person in the videogame post-apocalypse?
I’m waiting behind a big green house in the grass, watching the city below me from my little hill. It’s my second time in DayZ, the first consisting mostly of finding and eating sardines with my guide, Andy. I’m waiting for him to find me when I see a silhouette coming up through the grass toward me, a big M4 rifle pointed at my head.
I yell, ‘Wait, wait, don’t do that!’ and turn and run round the other side of the house. When I turn to look back at him he’s stood waving. It’s Andy, but as a woman, in different clothes and wielding a weapon I hadn't ever seen before. He thinks I’m an idiot.
I'm so new to this that I feel a lot like the hopeless little kid from The Road and Andy is a bit like my dad, leading me through the world and trying to keep me alive. But not in a weird way, that's just an analogy. I have no idea what I'm doing, though, or what my course of action is for bashing into other survivors.
]]>Is it worth playing DayZ Standalone in its current alpha condition? Probably not. But anecdotes of scary charcoal-eating clowns, wiggle cultists, forced axe fights, and slow death from disease and dehydration, make it hard to resist.
Still I'm a little sad the changelog for the next experimental patch doesn't contain more basic fixes, like maybe 'Removed the invisible sodding zombies', or 'Zombies can no longer run through walls and floors', or even 'Doorways are now easier to manoeuver through'. Instead I have to settle for the likes of "Balanced stomach capacity", as outlined in a post by Dean Hall over on the official forums.
]]>People can finally play DayZ's standalone alpha en masse, and so they have. As of Bohemia's last count, the still ultra-buggy alpha had fallen into the ravenous hands of 875,000 players, which totals out to 8,750,000 fingers. Even rockstars who crowdsurf at every show can't boast that. Despite that, the newly reborn undead survivor isn't even close to finished - or out of alpha, for that matter. Keeping in line with the game's appropriately shambly development cycle, DayZ's beta won't even kick off until the end of 2014. Don't expect to see this one in any state resembling "finished" for quite some time yet.
]]>Plenty of people who were veterans of the original DayZ mod had been wondering whether the magic of the original experience had survived the making of a standalone game. I'm pleased to report that not only has it survived, but there's new magic, too. Rocket and his team know what they are doing, and the changes they've made have created some tense and terrible moments in this new game. The realism it strives for is simultaneously unreal and dark, and creates some of the most awkward and sinister roleplay situations I've experienced in any game.
Surviving is back. And it is horribly compelling.
]]>I'm crouching indoors, peeking out of a window at a man in the street. He is carefully searching this row of houses, getting closer and closer, toting an axe and wearing what looks like a clown mask. He's looking for me. I know this because I said 'hello' and there was no response. DayZ is about a zombie outbreak. But there's a clown at the door, and the undead are nothing next to the living.
Hit the jump.
]]>OK, maybe those aren't quite the real figures, but at some point these headlines just become giant neon "LOOK AT ALL THESE IMPRESSIVE NUMBERS" signs. That said, the DayZ alpha is definitely a sprinter, not a shambler, given that it raced to 172,500 copies sold (and counting) in only 24 hours. Maybe this whole zombie fad has a chance of catching on after all, despite the fact that fairies, goblins, and poofy haired troll figurines are massively outpacing them in the pop-culture-sphere-o-scape right now.
]]>It's beginning to feel a lot like Earlyaccessmas, which is the sort of buzzword holiday title that I probably deserve to be crucified for. But honestly, between Starbound, Wasteland 2, Elite: Dangerous, Blackguards, Dungeon of the Endless, and now DayZ, this is getting ridiculous. We are figuratively getting our Christmas presents early during actual Christmas. Someone must have planned it this way. That is the only possible explanation. Or everyone was just trying to capitalize on the December Dead Zone, because you can't spell capitalize without capitalism. Wait. Never mind, just go below for a trailer and foreboding words from the DayZ team.
]]>Once upon a time, "early access" meant "a glorified demo with maybe a few features toned-down or MIA." These days, however, it's increasingly become a legitimate look behind-the-scenes of the game development process, a chance (for better or worse) to pay a penny to give our thoughts. On one hand, it aids game development on multiple levels, but on the other, there's ample room for abuse of the system. I cannot in good conscience discuss these things without offering that disclaimer, and neither, apparently, can DayZ creator Dean "Rocket" Hall. In a recent forum post, he was quite upfront about it: DayZ Standalone will be a mess on day zero, and many of its new features might not blossom into full fruition for months to come.
]]>HELLLLOOOOOOOOOOO RPS. I'm shouting as though far away or shrunken down and trapped in some kind of tiny snowglobe prison or something because it's the weekend, and I am now in the far off land of not having every lobe of my brain consumed by videogames - for two whole days! You, though - you've arrived here poor and in need of something to play/pine longingly for/discuss, and thus I bring you a spot of light weekend viewing. How does eight-and-a-half minutes of uninterrupted, un-blathered-over DayZ footage sound? There are many axe murderings, and I know how much you all love those.
]]>Did you play DayZ before it was cool? I did. I spent two hours getting it to work and a further six hours wandering around aimlessly before it clicked and I had fun, because that's the kind of trendsetting cool guy that I am. But I understand if you're waiting for the standalone release, that maybe makes it more functional and accessible. We can't all be a cool person like me.
Unfortunately you might still have a while to wait, as lead developer Dean Hall outlines the remaining progress required on the game before you can get your bandwagon-jumping not-a-cool-person sticky fingers on it.
]]>Zombies are nothing if not decisive, single-minded creatures, but DayZ's standalone has proven to be anything but. After narrowing down a release date on multiple separate occasions, it recently ended up on the backside of another delay - having slipped on the diabolical banana peel that is unforeseen server infrastructure issues. It was only a matter of time, though, before it rose again, hungry for human gray matter and brain-stroking moral quandaries. Today(Z) is that day(Z). Kinda. The multiplayer survival dynamo has appeared as an Early Access game in Steam's database, and Rocket's once again optimistic about an impending launch.
]]>One of the most interesting things from the DayZ presentation at Gamescom (which I still have to find time to write up) was Rocket explaining why they're working on the kind of feature set we're seeing in these videos of the standalone, and what that means for the game. Perhaps the most significant is item degradation and damage, because it's one of the things that will push DayZ back into the direction of the taut survivalism that defined its early months. Rocket doesn't want us to all shoot each other, because getting things that we've all gathered will be much more important. Shoot someone and you probably wreck his kit. Moreover, bullets are now individual items, and you will find less of them, so spending them on a noob for his beans will be a bad idea indeed. Watch the latest thoughts on this sort of thing below.
]]>Standing alone is hard. Believe me, I know. As a newborn infant, it took me years before I was able to master the art without any parental assistance. Even now - as a young adult who lives inside of a house and can cook without burning it all down (some of the time) - I still occasionally go sailing end-over-end as though tripped by some malevolent practical joke ghost. That in mind, I can totally understand why DayZ's standalone version keeps slipping. Sometimes it's unavoidable. And so, due to online infrastructure issues, Dean "Rocket" Hall's expanded multiplayer survival sandbox is once again without a release date.
]]>Day Z's standalone release still isn't upon us, unfortunately, and the conciliatory explanations in this video (below) suggest that it's still some way off, too. Personally I'm content to wait, however, because it looks like Rocket and friends are taking time to add the kinds of detail that will make that wait worthwhile: Rocket explains the new animation systems and so on that work with the injury system, while Ivan talks new Chernarus: there's a lot more going on in there.
]]>Dean "Rocket" Hall has no plans to port DayZ into Arma 3's shiny new MAXIMUM GRAPHICSABILITYROCKABILLY engine, but fans? Well, they're free to do as they please. And so, the Zoombies mod was born. It is, for all intents and purposes, the DayZ Arma 2 mod transferred directly into Arma 3. Same models, weapons, and systems, but with lots of sleek, seductive makeup for the zombies and glorious goodies like a streamlined inventory. Sounds like quite the thing, huh? It's not quite DayZ Standalone, but bravo nonetheless.
]]>I have a theory: eventually all games will just become EVE Online. This stems partially from the spacefaring MMO's remarkably forward-thinking focus on player interactions and player-powered corporate empires that make EA look like The Most Comparatively Decent Company In America, but mostly from the fact that developers are literally saying that it's their goal. PlanetSide 2, EverQuest Next, Age of Wushu, countless indies, etc. And now we can add DayZ to that list, based on a conversation I recently had with Dean “Rocket” Hall.
]]>VG247 got hold of Dean "Rocket" Hall at E3 and put a bunch of questions to him, as supplied by Reddit user DrBigMoney (if that is his real name), and you can see a video of that below. There's a lot of detail in there about what the Standalone will entail.
In related news, the mod itself just got updated to 1.7.7.
]]>VG247 seem to be saying they have the "world's first look at the standalone version of DayZ". Perhaps they mean from this year's E3? Of course creator Dean Hall has been showing footage for ages, not least twenty minutes of it back in March. However, what VG do have is ten minutes of the very latest build that's being shown at E3, featuring new animations, weapons and features, and is well worth a look.
]]>DayZ creator Dean "Rocket" Hall recently climbed a very big mountain. Many game developers take time off by going on lavish-ish tropical vacations or catching up on two-year game/movie/strained family relationships backlogs, but Rocket - true to his nickname - ascended Mount Everest. (OK, maybe not many real rockets specifically shoot for mountains, but you get the idea. IGNORE MY FLIMSY METAPHOR.) It turns out, however, that he wasn't just on holiday. Sure, DayZ's still got a bit of a way to go, but Rocket has his sights set on something new. And no, there won't be any zombies this time.
]]>DayZ will make money... or continue to be dead trying. But in order to do that, its standalone has to first become, well, existent. We've seen bits and snippets stumbling around in YouTube's muddiest brush, but Bohemia has yet to pull the trigger on anything the succulent-brained masses can play. Good news, though! A closed alpha test is now underway, and the Rocket man/myth/legend himself has a pretty good idea of how we'll be paying for it. The short version: ever hear of a game called Minecraft?
]]>Something about today's sunny countenance has left me longing to spend some time in DayZ's threat-filled bleakness. I have an almost overwhelming need to get back there and indulge in tension and horror. I'll wait for the standalone, though, as it sounds like something from another planet, or a parallel world where dream-games are forged.
What am I wittering about? Well, Team DayZee have been talking to PAX, and you can see that below.
]]>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.
]]>If you're me, and you've tried to install the DayZ mod into Arma II, then you made a real hash of it. Fortunately for all the me out there, there's a simpler way. The mod has been made available directly over Steam, meaning you can just click a couple of buttons and all the scary work is done for you.
]]>"Matt, if you maybe take your clothes off over here," is something Rocket says in this devblog, which perhaps suggests something of the flavour of the piece. The DayZ devs have rolled out a dev video with a fairly lighthearted overview of the work they've been doing to get the standalone version of the game out. The environmental details are interesting - no more just searching for piles of loot, you'll actually have to go and look for stuff in the buildings, and they can even be hidden behind other objects, meaning you'll have to search. Anyway, go watch below, it's got some interesting reveals.
]]>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.
]]>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.
]]>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.
]]>DayZ Bounty's made a positively deafening amount of noise over the past couple days - and with good reason. In short, it's a private server that players will eventually buy into using real money. Then they'll get the chance to win it all back - and more - by killing zombies, survivors, and bandits. And while DayZ exists to encourage crazy emergent behavior, creator Dean "Rocket" Hall and the DayZ team think this is taking it a few steps (and dollars) too far. As such, the brains behind the wildly popular zombie mod have publicly stated that they plan to "ask that [DayZ Bounty] cease their activities in their current form." However, speaking with RPS, Bounty's creators were quick to point out a few key arguments in their favor: 1) no one from Bohemia/DayZ's reached out to them, even though they've hollered in the DayZ team's direction multiple times, 2) they're not charging real money yet, and 3) their goal is to mod DayZ into an entirely different, more PVP-focused form. Apparently, this is only just the beginning.
]]>As promised in the discussions of how the mod would develop in tandem with the standalone game, Day Z's mod version has been patched to 1.7.3 with contributions from the wider community (as opposed to just the original dev team.) Discussing the patch on the Day Z forums, Rocket posts a list of everyone who has contributed to the latest update, and encourages others to get involved: "There is much being done, new features and content. Official support is also being made available to community development team members for some requests, where possible."
]]>That headline doesn't refer to the times when games break and throw up oddball bugs for our amusement, but rather when games throw so many problems at the player that they become a sort of jeopardy-based experience in crisis-juggling. Earlier today I was running through my game collection and thinking about what I might like to play. It wasn't Dishonored. Three things other stood out: Day Z, FTL, and X-Com. I began to think about what those had in common which, and what that said about my enjoyment of this year's immersive masterpiece.
And I realised it was this: peril.
]]>I once read a suggestion by conservative philosopher Roger Scruton, that you could drop all of culture into two broad categories (I paraphrase): “High culture”, which is best appreciated with some formal education about what is going on with it (difficult literature, opera) and “Low Culture”, which is basically everything in folk, primitive, and pop culture, for which education is not required. Sounds stupid and elitist, doesn't it? Scruton himself admits many caveats, as I recall. It's clearly impossible to create two such categories. But recently, well, I've started to think that perhaps he's right about the education thing. At least when it comes to videogames.
I speak with reference to this FT article about a non-gamer judging videogames, and subsequent defences of the same. Actually, no, I don't think we really need to worry about what non-gamers think of games. And that is because, in this instance, we are the highly educated elite.
]]>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?
]]>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.
]]>Hello. Hello you. Did you go to the Eurogamer Expo this weekend? Did you have fun? Because I couldn't go, so I couldn't have fun. My bitterness could destroy worlds. Fortunately, I can catch up with at least some of what I missed, as Eurogamer have posted videos of a great many of their developer sessions. Valve! Hitman! Molyneux! Tomb Raider! Assassin's Creed! DayZ! Remember Me! WARFACE. I've embedded those I am personally most interested in below, selfish twit that I am, but you can see the whole lot over here.
]]>The Eurogamer Expo 2012 approaches at frightening speed - I'm measured it with my Velocitometer, and it's headed towards us at exactly 81.7 terawatts per nanoclick. Like I say, terrifying. If you've been holding off from attending due to its apparent focus on hiss-spit console games, you may be cheered to hear that its One True Format contents have increased exponentially. Avuncular DayZ bossman Dean 'Rocket' Hall will be holding a talk, and now EG have taken the wraps off the Rezzed PC and Inde Games Zone, an attempt to recreate some of the delightful amicable, laid-back mood of last month's lovely, RPS co-headlined PC-only Rezzed show in Brighton.
]]>I hear some very strange rumours about DayZ, er, contemporary The War Z's genesis and fears about the speed and timing at which it's apparently happening, but I am reluctant to detail/opine upon them until things seem more sure. In the meantime, I can wave you cautiously at a bunch of in-game footage of the open-world zombie survival MMOette (sound familiar? Of course it does) from PAX, and leave you to draw your own conclusions about whether this is a goer or not. We've seen very little of it in action until now, and now we, er, do.
]]>One of numerous RPS interview victims at GamesCom was Bohemia bossman, Marek Spanel. The smiley Czech was keen to discuss the studio's success, and to talk his upcoming projects: Arma III, and the Day Z standalone. We also touch on the importance of modding, that Operation Flashpoint was almost something like a post-apocalyptic Carrier Command, and why DirectX 9 can be dispensed with. As for Carrier Command itself, well, I am leaving what he said about that for another article. Read on for the rest.
]]>Earlier this week I sat down with Day Z creator Dean Hall to talk about the new standalone game. Read on for information on why the mod version of the game will now "open up", how dogs work, how original Op Flash developers came back to work on the new title, how "underground construction" might work, and for an explanation of why there won't be a military simulator mod of Day Z. At least not yet.
]]>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.
]]>A post on the Day Z Dev team Tumblr confirms that the game is going standalone. Rocket writes: "That’s right, this is actually happening - DayZ will be developed as a standalone game, with me as project lead, by Bohemia Interactive. This is the fairy-tale outcome for a mod that many would have said impossible four months ago."
]]>We could have waited until it hit 1 million for the sake of the bigger headline, I suppose. But I wanted to say something: the success of zombie mod Day Z couldn't have been predicted. It was a one off. A outlier. It's one of those rare and beautiful times when a game design experiment explodes into a phenomenon. No one can plan for that to happen, not really. But I can predict one thing: the companies that do not support modding will never have a zombie mod sell hundreds of thousands of extra copies of their game.
]]>The most well-attended session at Rezzed was Dean 'Rocket' Hall chatting about the game/mod of the moment, DayZ. Zeitgeisty!
Relaxed and charming, he goes into the making of the open-world zombie survival mod for Arma II before fielding a ton of audience questions on everything from the nature of fun to 'Day Z hipsters' and in-game kidnappings. It's a shame you missed it. If you're very well-behaved I might let you watch a recording of it below, though.
]]>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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