"Let's see what the game is before anyone passes any judgment. That's why DayZ is in that fairy tale position. "I believe, maybe kind of arrogantly, that DayZ is innovative, and DayZ is always going to be innovative, and anybody who tries to clone it is going to be in a difficult position, because they have to go so much further. That's the ultimate form of flattery."Īnd just because DayZ and The War Z share some surface similarities doesn't mean the former game is going to be so easy to copy wholesale, Hall says. If they take that idea and make something awesome out of it, great. "I'm not gonna say I'm thrilled about it-I'm not going to invite them over for a cup of tea," he said, " I don't think you can steal an idea. Despite the similarities, though, Hall doesn't seem too concerned about being ripped off. AdvertisementĪnyone with even passing familiarity with DayZ will find a lot that seems pretty familiar in The War Z, a zombie-themed survival horror MMO that has already attracted over 100,000 beta signups since being announced last month. That doesn't exactly fit with the vision Hall has for a wide variety of zombies in the final game, ranging from shambling, starved undead to well-fed monsters that have become more threatening as the virus has continued to eat away at their brains (Hall says he'll be working with his brother, a virologist in his native New Zealand, to integrate that kind of world-building narrative context into the final game, and reveal it to players as they play). This means they run directly at players at full speed, an artifact of the host game's pathfinding AI. The zombies in the mod, for instance, are simply altered versions of ArmA soldiers.
Working on top of ArmA II's pre-set canvas led to some compromises in the design of DayZ, Hall said.
"The purpose of DayZ is very different, so that's why it needs to make the transition." No more compromises " ArmA was designed for a pretty broad purpose, but it was designed as a military simulator," Hall said in an interview with Ars. It's also a move that will free DayZ itself from some design constraints imposed by building on top of the structure of a very different, pre-existing game. It's a move that will help directly monetize what has, until now, just been an extremely effective marketing tool for the core ArmA II game.
That's why Hall, now a full-time project manager at Bohemia's Prague headquarters, is leading up the development of a standalone version of DayZ (currently planned for release later this year). But now that DayZ has broken through to mainstream gaming success-recently crossing over the one million player threshold-it's starting to outgrow the game that it was initially built on top of. When Dean "Rocket" Hall started working on the zombie-themed DayZ mod for Bohemia Interactive's ArmA II, he figured it would get a decent response from the few thousand people in the game's devoted modding community.
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