DayZ is a survival video game developed and published by Bohemia Interactive. It is the standalone successor of the mod of the same name. Following a five-year long early access period for Windows, the game was officially released in December 2018, and was released for the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 in 2019.
The game places the player in the fictional post-Soviet Republic of Chernarus, where a mysterious plague has turned most of the population into violent "infected". As a survivor, the player must scavenge the world for food, water, weapons, and medicine, while killing or avoiding the infected, and killing, avoiding, or cooperating with other players in an effort to survive the outbreak.
DayZ began development in 2012 when the mod's creator, Dean Hall, joined Bohemia Interactive to commence work on the standalone version of the game. The development has been focused on altering the engine to suit the game's needs, developing a working client-server architecture, and introducing new features like diseases and a better inventory system. The game sold over three million copies during its early access phase.
Gameplay
The goal of DayZ is to stay alive and healthy during the conditions of the zombie outbreak that have befallen the in-game world. The player begins equipped with only simple clothes, a road flare and a rag, and must begin exploring the large 225 km2 landscape of the fictional former Soviet Republic of Chernarus to investigate locations such as houses, barns, and apartments to scavenge supplies. These supplies include food and water, which are basic keys to prolonging the player's life. Beyond the bare bones of survival, players can find various forms of clothing, which not only allow the player to customize their character, but can bring the benefit of extra storage space for supplies and warmth. Also scattered around the map are a variety of weapons, allowing players to protect themselves from zeds or other players if necessary. These are largely focused on a range of melee weapons, but a small number of firearms (more are to be implemented with future updates) are present, as well as various attachments such as bipods and telescopic sights.
Player interaction is a major part of DayZ gameplay. The game provides in-game voice chat which allows players to communicate with each other within a certain distance. Text chat is also provided for those players who lack any means of voice communication. DayZ also provides in game actions such as the ability to wave to other players and allowing players to put their hands up in order to show that they surrender.
While travelling around the game, players can also find various medical supplies as the environment poses a range of threats to their character. Planned features include diseases such as cholera, dysentery and hepatitis, which can be caught by ingesting dirty water or rotten food and must be cured with the appropriate medicine. If a player is shot or otherwise hurt, items on their person may be damaged. The player may also start bleeding and must be bandaged quickly to minimize blood loss; excessive damage or blood loss will result in serious deterioration of vision for the player and can render them unconscious. The game also includes hundreds of public domain books throughout the map for players to read, including titles such as War of the Worlds and Moby-Dick.
Planned features of the game include being able to build bases in the world in which players can keep their items safe, with the possibility of security systems and programmable computers having been considered. The standalone game will build on the text and close range voice chat of the mod version by including a new whisper channel, which will allow players to communicate over a very short distance without players nearby hearing, as well as radios (based off the "ACRE" mod for ARMA 2), which will allow longer range communication, including the possibility of encrypted two-way radios and player-run radio stations. A number of features which have been addedwhen? to the release are hunting animals and cooking.
Following the huge successes of the DayZ mod, Dean Hall announced in August 2012, via a new development blog, that DayZ would begin being developed as a standalone game with himself as project lead, in conjunction with Bohemia Interactive. He said that the game needed to be released before the end of the year "in order to achieve what we have to do", also stating that he wanted an initial release around November 2012. The game will be running on a branch of the Take On Helicopters engine (part of the Real Virtuality engine), and the main areas of developmental focus were to be "critical issues", such as bug fixing, hacking, and security.One of the developmental focuses was making the world feel more realistic by increasing the number of enterable buildings. Hall stated that he hopes to implement bad ideas into the game, in order to find what players enjoy, rather than taking no risks at all. The game will be based on a client-server architecture, similar to that used in many massively multiplayer online games where functions such as item and NPC spawning are decided on the server rather than on the player's machine (the ARMA 2 architecture had a large proportion of these tasks performed on the client). The main aims of this change are to reduce the number of hacks and exploits available, and to remove any unnecessary functions of the previous engine (such as AI flanking). It was announced in November that the game would be released via digital distribution software Steam, allowing use of the Steam server browser and patching functionality.
