Remember like 50 million years ago when DayZ was young, Dean Hall was at the top of everybody’s interview list, and nobody realized the survival sandbox genre was about to blow up? Ah, 2013.
DayZ still hasn’t launched all these years later, to the point that it’s been supplanted as the most-egregiously-still-in-early-access game multiple times, and Dean Hall has left the company and started multiple games since then (and closed some of them, too). But at least the early access part is about to change as the team makes its “move away from legacy DayZ,” according to a post penned earlier this week by Bohemia Interactive Lead Producer Eugen Harton and Creative Director Brian Hicks.
The team admits that the current experimental build (0.63) isn’t up to snuff and won’t make it to players this year. When it does launch next year, it’ll introduce new crafting, revamped ranged and melee combat, the new central economy, new visuals, new animals, new zombies – gobs of new stuff and overhauls to old stuff.
That said, Bohemia is promising that 2018 is guaranteed to bring the beta to PC and consolers alike.
“Let’s just state the obvious: the PC BETA is not coming before the end of 2017. We tried to get it done sooner, but it’s going to be 2018 folks. Both the BETA update and any further 0.63 updates, up to 1.0, will happen in 2018, which is shaping up to be one of the most important years for DayZ. That is as much as we are sure of yet. I’ll be honest, it has been a long wait already – even for us – but that’s all we got now. DayZ BETA is not meant to be a feature complete game from our point of view. It’s a start of a platform that will be extended by us, and can be extended by the modding community. When we kick-started DayZ, one of the most challenging projects at Bohemia, the aim was to bring both the game AND a new engine out to you – a complete game platform. Almost all company resources were focused there. It’s a giant undertaking that bit us in the ass, but we kept our focus on delivering that envisioned platform.”
