Day Z gets standalone game

Day Z, the zombie survival, permadeath mod for the three year old ARMA II, has now finally been given the go ahead as a full game. The original creator of the mod, Dean “Rocket” Hall will be the project lead, with ARMA II creator, Bohemia handling the publishing.

The announcement was made by Hall on the Day Z blog, beginning the post with: “That's right, this is actually happening.”

The idea of turning the incredibly popular mod – it recently reached a million players and helped sell over 25 per cent of ARMA II's total copies – into a full game in its own right, has been around for a while, but for several reasons it hadn't been finalised. Apparently Mr Hall was offered several big money gigs at different companies to develop the game, but turned down them all in favour of working with Bohemia. Presumably this was so he could continue development using the Real Virtuality engine that has been used as a base for the Day Z mod.

So far because the mod was built upon ARMA II, it's been using the Real Virtuality 3 engine. However some are speculating that the official Day Z game would make use of the next-gen Real Virtuality 4 engine.

If that happens though, it might be difficult for Mr Hall to keep both the game and the mod at the same level, since he plans to continue developing the mod alongside the game – so that those who purchased ARMA II in order to play it aren't left out. Presumably though at some point, the full game will break away in terms of functionality or features, since undoubtedly a standalone game is going to be easier to put together from scratch than a modification based on an already finished game.

Day Z is set to follow the Minecraft development model, so will be selling alpha, beta and finally full copies of the game throughout the development cycle, with early adopters getting not only early access, but unlimited updates throughout the life of the game.

If you want to check out the official game website where the tagline is “It's your story,” you can find here at www.dayzgame.com.

KitGuru Says: This is great to see, but not surprising. When you can leverage a million players you have some real bargaining power.

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