When DayZ launched as a standalone game in 2013, it made waves. It quickly became one of the most popular titles on Steam despite the early stage of development and saw immense success. Bohemia Interactive, the company developing the game, initially claimed the full release of the game would come in 2016. In 2017, they said the game would enter beta in the first half of 2018. We’re now in November 2018 and finally, the DayZ beta exists.
In a blog post on the official DayZ website, lead producer Eugen Harton wrote: “...today is the day that we updated the Experimental branch with what will become the first BETA update. The update itself contains multiple features and tons of content. Just to name the headliners: all new base building, a new implementation of vehicles, player restraining, leaning and more. I'm excited about this first step to a more polished gameplay experience with more endgame goals to achieve.”
The beta update to DayZ is classed as version 0.63 and is currently available on the experimental servers, with a full release coming soon. Impressively but also somewhat questionably, Bohemia Interactive is planning to have the full version of the game out before the end of the year. Um, you folk realise that’s less than two months away, right?
In a self-answered FAQ in the blog post, Harton explains that they truly believe DayZ can have a polished and stable 1.0 version by the end of the year. “There is about a month of real development left, and hopefully some you have noticed we have started fixing some really pressing issues in DayZ over the last week as we shuffled our priorities. And that is what deadlines do. They make you think twice about what is really important. While there are large numbers of issues left, only about 600 of them are crucial to make DayZ work as intended. We plan to do exactly that. Fix features, stabilize the game and make it enjoyable after being weighed down by bugs for a very long time.”
The blog post goes on to explain that the remaining features planned will be worked on next year and that “one of the top priorities will definitely be weapons and content variety.” With the move to beta, it also means experimental modding tools are now available. You can find out more about them in the full blog post linked above but essentially, it means the Steam Workshop side of DayZ will be opened up.
In other gaming news, check out the new leaked aerial vehicle potentially coming to Fortnite.
(Header image courtesy of Wccftech.)
