Dean Hall recently announced that he was more excited about the DayZ standalone game now than he ever has been before, which is good news for everyone waiting for the finished product.
So what, exactly, is he excited about?
What to expect
Remember that DayZ has made improvements to the graphics engine used in the game? They’ve also been working with ARMA 3’s artists to enhance the lighting and textures for the game even further, so it looks better than ever. Along related lines, they have a system for random cloud-generation, one of those little details that is normally very easy to overlook.
DayZ is also going to have completely re-developed server system, one that takes many of the methods that are used to hack such server-based games and places them beyond the reach of the players themselves, making the game significantly more complicated to hack at all. It will also enable such things as spawning all zombies and items when the server is generated, preventing things like looking if there are zombies in a town to see if there is a person in it.
They’re also adding to the clothing and inventory, with clothes able to have diseases on them and talking of creating models for clothing on the ground that match what they look like when worn, and even eventually having video of what it looks like to change clothes in-game.
Character customization is also getting a lot of new thought put into it, with the obvious race/gender choices as well as possibilities such as tattoos or unique attire, even having certain health ailments represented graphically. Strangely rare in online games, the idea is to have character creation be simple, but to have characters actually change graphically based on the actions and events the character goes through over the course of their DayZ experience.
Weapons will also be getting customization options, with various attachments having playable and graphical effects. The one example given is that a weapon’s magazine technically counts as an attachment that is loaded and then attached, which already adds a level of realism and immersion that simply does not exist elsewhere.
It’s starting to become apparent exactly why Hall is so excited about DayZ. I’m beginning to share his enthusiasm.
Published: Jan 26, 2013 05:43 pm