The future of Day Z

Eurogamer:
It's a telling sign of just how stagnant the current console gen's Autumn years have got that one of the most exciting and talked-about games in the month's leading up to E3 2012 is a PC mod.

Day Z, a DIY riff on Bohemia's PC shooter Arma 2, has built a huge following with its rich emergent gameplay that dumps players in the midst of a hugely hostile undead wasteland and leaves them to fend for themselves.

It's proved so popular that it has fired Bohemia's three-year-old game to the top of the Steam charts, and now constitutes around 20 per cent of its total lifetime sales. Considering it's only been live for a few weeks, that's a remarkable achievement.

However, as noted in our Day Z feature earlier this month, there are big problems with the game - it's only in alpha and is both hugely unstable and very difficult to install.

With that in mind, we sat down with creator Dean Hall - a New Zealand-born Bohemia contractor and former soldier - to find out how he...

[WagFanger]

The only trouble I find with DayZ is considering how big the map is, there's actually very few people, so you sort of wander round not seeing anyone, and the occasional zombie.

[MAJ0R]

Try going into towns.

[h311rais3r]

That's the point dude. It's not about always being in te action. It's a game where ur supposed to feel alone and the danger is having to survive. It's not about killing at all. You have the choice to kill but some of the top players haven't killed anything but for food. If you find the map too big fix a car.

[kevnb]

article doesn't need the trolling. PC mods can often be completely awesome and industry altering. Counter Strike, DOTA, and now Day Z are excellent examples.

[WeskerChildReborned]

Yep and ARMA 3 will be getting a DayZ mod too.

[Dovahkiin]

Which will be amazing.

[Somebody]

They better do something pretty soon though. They have a gold mine in their hand and they really need to lock it down. The Patch 1.61 is a good start.

"I've had a lot of approaches with a lot of money offered - really quite a lot of money - in the last three weeks."

That's worrying. It'll be sad if by the time Day Z reach Beta, there would be already some finished clones for the consoles taking their thunder away.

[KwietStorm_BLM]

Not sure how necessary that shot at consoles is. Day Z can stand on it's own, as can plenty of full console games, even in their "autumn years."

[FriedGoat]

Nothing on consoles comes close to the dayz experience.

[KwietStorm_BLM]

Subjective, irrelevant, and completely besides the point that I was making. That wasn't even a reply to what I said. You just fueled the same unnecessary statements that I was referring to.

[FriedGoat]

My apologies, I thought by you trying to defend consoles my point was valid.
I own the latest consoles and even the back catalogue from nes to the sega saturn, I was simply stating the fact that sure, console games can hold their own but in comparison are dumbed down and will unfortunately never have an experience like that.
Unless they pull an operation flashpoint or ghost recon and ruin the franchise by dumbing the games down into oblivion.