Features & News

DayZ to become its own thing

August 8, 2012, Author: Andy Corrigan

The ever-so popular ArmA II zombie mod, Day Z, is about to become a standalone game, as was announced by creator Dean Hall on his tumblr account.

Hall will continue as the project lead, while Bohemia Interactive, developer of the ArmA series, will publish.

“That’s right, this is actually happening,” wrote Hall, “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.”

Players already enjoying the mod will be completely unaffected, as they can continue to use it, and the mod will stay available at its present site, while the standalone game will operate from www.dayzgame.com.

For those who haven’t taken the plunge on DayZ yet, it sounds like you won’t have to wait all that long for the standalone game, as the development cycle will follow that of Mojang’s Minecraft, which Hall describes as “fast iterations with the community alpha available for a heavily discounted price.”

In case you’re unaware, DayZ is a mod/social experiment for the PC game ArmA II, where you are dropped randomly into a zombie apocalypse with only a few supplies to hand. Your only objective is to survive for as long as possible by finding food, drink and more weapons.

As with any good zombie setting, the zombies are not the real threat; supplies are a scarce commodity, so you’ll never know whether you can fully trust any of the other 49 human players that you might come across. Death is also permanent, so whether you fall to a horde or a backstabbing looter, you’ll respawn randomly with basic gear once more.

As a life-long fan of zombie fiction, I’ve been extremely tempted to try DayZ recently, especially thanks to all the interesting individual accounts I’ve read (involving kidnap, betrayal and paranoia) that wouldn’t sound out-of-place in something written by Romero or Kirkman.

I think I’m going to hold out for the standalone version now…

(Source: dayzdev.tumblr.com)