DayZ Expanding Dev Team

DayZ continues its development into an actual standalone game, and the development team has updates for those of us waiting for the finished product.

Ivan’s Return!

The first big news is the return of Ivan Buchta to the team.  Buchta was detained and jailed in Greece while on vacation with fellow ARMA 3 developer Martin Pezlar under espionage charges related to their vacation photography.  Buchta will be included in the next devblog the development team makes for DayZ, and the whole team is thrilled to have him back.

His return has already had him working to help smooth out and redesign certain aspects of the Chernarus map that he helped originally create in the mod.

Expansion

The team working on the game has been expanding rapidly in recent weeks.  People have been brought in to work on testing the server functionality internally while others have been drafted to begin creating new weapons, buildings, and hundreds of various other items.

Character development is also being expanded, with the team’s stated primary focus being on the customization and later development of player characters in the game.  They’ve already got preliminary screenshots of heads of various ethnicities for character creation, and with it as the core of their focus on DayZ development the progress already made is promising.

Q & A

The devblog entry also lists out and answers several questions inquisitive fans have put forth.  For starters, the final game is confirmed that private servers will be supported.  The game is also going to be brand new, with the development process having resulted in the entire original mod being effectively rebuilt.  Almost nothing was ported, giving the dev team more options and control even if it did result in them missing their initial December deadline.

Endgame content has always been a concern, as part of the problem with the original mod was that players who’d found all they needed to survive and gotten situated well had no real goals left and so often turned to preying on other players.  The DayZ team confirmed endgame is something they are considering, but they are more concerned with getting the game functioning first.

New ways of showing hunger and thirst are in the works using entirely audio and visual information.  The game currently has no HUD whatsoever and the dev team wants to keep it that way.  The eventual pricing is hinted as being low, but to start with players will only have a single character slot due to the amount of data being stored for each character.

DayZ’s development has come a long way and is now getting to the point where each week sees loads of new updates and things to get excited about.  Still no word on a release date, but it can’t come soon enough.