You’re buying the game in whole,.which it’s currently in an alpha stage of development. You don’t pay anything else regardless of what the price of retail might be. Sometimes Early Access games are sold at a discount of what the release will be but that is typically marked clearly on the Steam page if that is so (it will show as being on sale for 25% off, for example).
Well, the number of “survivors” right now is 608k. I wonder what implies, it isn’t the number of players online as Steam has the right number 42K. Number of units sold? If it’s that, damn they are going to reach 1 million of units sold fast.
Cant have more than 1 survivor per player so you can assume its the total amount of buyers that bothered to play the game.
Does anyone know if this will be available without Steam?
Maybe after it leaves alpha?
No, I don’t think so. Arma 3 is also steam exclusive.
Dean Hall will leave Bohemia at the end of the year
Wow. That’s nuts. DayZ has pretty much been a product of his vision.
In one sense, maybe it doesn’t matter. DayZ has a studio behind it now - one that has tons of experience releasing games in alpha state! So it should be seen through to some sort of completion completion.
In another sense, he is the driving force behind the entire concept of DayZ, it is his vision. He’ll not be around beyond beta (assuming that is on time). But who cares, right? He got his payday. It’s not like he has any obligation to those that paid for it up front.
This right here, is the problem with Early Access. Sure, this project will continue, but the guy that started it has already decided he no longer wants to spend time on it - after he got paid.
To be fair, he did say that he now realizes DayZ does not meet his vision for the “best possible multiplayer game.” Rather than changing it to make it so, he’s just going to quit and try again.
From his comments on the reddit stories about this.
Wow. Just wow :-/
I suspect he can’t realize his vision with Bohemia engine…
I think this may have a lot to do with it. That Bohemia engine is just too clunky to implement the zombie infestation stuff he had talked about doing a long time ago. It’s just not built for it. Hell, it barely does the straight military stuff BI wants to do with it. It’s certainly never going to have the kind of robust (and secure) multiplayer ability that other engines have.
Honestly, this is a pretty crappy thing to say about the project you’re leaving:
“I feel like DayZ is a fundamentally flawed concept,” he went on, “and I’ve always recognised that. It’s not the perfect game; it’s not the multiplayer experience, and it never can be, [with] the absolute spark that I want in it.”
I remember Dean mentioning the new “network bubble” system a lot of times before the alpha version. How it was crucial for the standalone, how it would increase the network performance allowing for a less laggy experience and much higher zombie and player counts as players would only receive updates from their area, instead of all the map. It made sense.
From what I know, the network bubble is already implemented but… the benefits still aren’t there. I wonder if in the end they found other bottlenecks in the system.
Dean posted months ago that he plans on leaving passing on project lead position when the game hits beta, or about a year away, but will stay longer if necessary.
Of note: he still plans on working on DayZ but no longer as lead. Remember he moved away to focus on DayZ SA:
I am still the project lead. I will be the project lead for the remainder of the year. I’m available and committed to the project as long as I am providing value, whether that is in a creative or leadership role.
However, I hope that at the end of the year I can move home to my family, and whatever contributions I make to DayZ from that point would be remote.
Rocket stahp!
Interesting blog update posted today.
They’re getting their new team members up to speed and trained. Redoing all the zombie pathfinding.
The biggest news to me? This is a goal they’re working on:
- Redeveloped “action” system, replacing the mouse-wheel scroll action system.
Good Lord! FINALLY.
News from E3: DayZ is “evolving” to a new engine.
“I guess the big news that we’ve been telling here at E3 is that we’re actually moving to a new engine. It is called infusion. So that is going to allow us to do DirectX 10 and 11. It is going to allow us to do dynamic lighting, which means no more flashlights going through walls, proper dynamic shadows, stuff like that.”
It is a complete rip out of everything, but we’re definitely leveraging existing tech. So if you look at Bohemia as a studio they actually acquired a great number of other studios, so really were kind of looking around and taking up tech that is available there and mixing it into the engine, rewriting new stuff from scratch that we want to do as well.
Our core audience, I think they are happy with the progress. They see us tackling the big issues, going at the architecture, those kinds of things. I think that those people understand that. If we focus on, I guess, the wider audience you are never going to make them happy. I think the release time was good. I think that we committed to too low a price initially. I think the Planetary Annihilation model, pricing it very high so you get much smaller numbers might have made more sense, but the problem was we committed very early. I don’t know, I might be wrong with it. I kind of feel like if we’d have been able to restrict the audience a little bit, we thought about restricting the number of keys, but that seemed quite unfair.
Isn’t that the second engine change for DayZ?
Wasn’t it moved to a new engine when it initially went standalone, now again? Or is it the same change?
It’s the same engine, it’s more a marketing move as they are planning to change it enough (multi thread structure, 64 bits, renderer separated from simulation, dx11 renderer, new pathfinding system, ragdoll) as to call it with a new name.
Well, they started with Arma 2 as a mod. They went to a modified version of Take on Helicopters, which is itself a modified branch off the Real Virtuality engine used in Arma II, III, and the training sim VBS. Each one being heavily iterated on as they went.
This “new” engine is called Infusion which is a blend of Real Virtuality and the engine used in Take on Mars and Carrier Command (the Enforce engine) which was originally meant to be used for console and PC back when they thought they were going to move into the multiplatform space. Of course, BI is supposedly doing a lot more work on the blended engine as well.
Basically, what TT said. Don’t expect a lot of mechanical changes. Infusion adds 64-bit capabilities and DX 10/11 support, but the game is still going to be clunky.