Game Devs Explore The Future Of Mods In An Increasingly Online World

The PC saw an epic revival of sorts over the last few years, quashing ideas that the console and handheld markets would consume all of gaming. Aging home game consoles and the rise of digital sales, Steam and the indie market have been a shot in the arm for PCs and now it is one of the most exciting platforms out there. With a growing audience, many new or returning gamers have been taking advantage of one of the benefits of exclusive to PC gaming – modding.

Whether for extra content, graphical enhancements or the ability to explore a physically twisted world, mods have always been a way for the community to enhance the experience of a game and keep playing long after release. It is mods that allowed the expansion of Minecraft, endless new content for Skyrim, and the origins of an entire game in DayZ.

For some big devs and publishers, modding is becoming a dirty word. Part stopping the community getting their hands into a software’s innards, part a byproduct of making games dependent on an internet connection, the world of modding for many major games has ceased to exist such. Franchises like Battlefield have put an end to community created content, although there are certain game developers who disagree with this new tract. On a PC Gamer panel at PAX, Dean Hall who created the incredibly popular Arma II mod DayZ, thinks that major publishers are missing out on the potential that the community brings by holding the games so close to their chests:

“I think that if DICE wanted to kill Arma, all they’d need to do is release some modding tools tomorrow. Psh, gone. It always really hurt me when Battlefield 2 was the end in terms of modding, so I’m pretty obviously supportive of the whole modding idea.”

Although the panel went on to talk about the difficulty of supporting a modding community when you are creating online and shared spaces. Hall explained that he is currently locked in a struggle to come up with a solution that allows modding in a shared world, to which he said, “I don’t have the answer for that.”

Star Citizen‘s Chris Roberts chimed in saying he will support modding and offered a solution which deals with the two concepts separately, going the old school route of allowing players to mod in their own servers but take it out of the core online space, the shared persistent universe.

“You definitely can mod and you can run your own servers, but if you want to be on the big persistent universe everyone else is on, obviously you can’t mod in that situation, because it wouldn’t work if someone built a battleship that could blow everyone up.”

It is an interesting question going forward into the online future though. Modding is one of the big things many console players feel they miss out on, and it clearly has a great deal of worth to the PC community. But in a future where more and more games are required to be shared and constantly online, it will be interesting to see if game designers can figure out a way of supporting mods and if it is possible to incorporate them into a wider, online world.

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‘The Last Guardian’ & ‘DayZ’ Still Have No Release Windows

As Gamescom goes on, more and more news is pushed to the surface as publishers and developers try to compete with one another to make sure their games and their accouterments are in the spotlight. Each publisher neatly packages their lineups, all vying to be the prettiest belle at the ball in order to entice gamers. With so many people pedaling their games, big and small, it can be tough to keep up with what exactly has been shown and from whom. Although, even with all these games on display, sometimes it is the titles that are absent that are more noticeable than the ones on show.

When talking about which games might be announced in the run up to a big expo,The Last Guardian is probably only eclipsed by Half-Life 3 in terms of what has been speculated upon the longest. There have been four E3s since Team Ico‘s followup to Shadow of the Colossus was first shown. Since then, development has been on and off hiatus multiple times, with reports of other studios trying to lend a hand to finish the game. You might be forgiven for beginning to lose faith that the project will ever see daylight, but here is at least a small glimmer of hope for you to hold on.

In an interview with CVG, creator and now producer, Fumito Ueda, confirmed that they are still making the game but it may still be a little while. The reasoning according to Ueda, “SCE Japan Studio, who’s working on The Last Guardian, also has titles like Puppeteer and Knack, and those are only the ones currently announced. Those are taking priority right now.” He also said that all involved have actively decided not to reveal if the game is set to come to PlayStation 3 or 4 just yet, assuming the game is going to be released. Ever.

In similar news, those holding out on the DayZ standalone game should get ready to wait a little longer for news. Creator Dean Hall told Joystiq that the game no longer has a release window due to them having to wait on the “core network architecture” to be fine tuned. He also explained that, from his point of view, it would be good if enthusiasm for the game died down a little, going as far as to say“I think if DayZ has a soft launch, it’s the best thing that can happen to it.” He explained that it is a game that won’t take a lot to break even and one that he thinks would benefit by growing popular over time, rather than all at once. It is certainly an interesting business model, although he might have a tough time trying to convince his investors.

DayZ standalone was initially announced with a 2012 release date and the team recently had plans to announce their targeted release window but their latest gameplay dev diary explains why it’s not happening while also fleshing out some of the new features they’re working into the game. In the meantime, the original DayZ mod has been ported to Arma 3 so players still have that to hold them over until the full game releases.

So just for the moment, DayZ and Team Ico fans, cool your expectations. You may want to get comfy because you may be waiting for quite a while longer.

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New ‘DayZ’ Video Shows Updates & Explains Delays

Over the weekend, DayZ creator Dean Hall released another developer diary video to talk about the current status of the standalone game. The good news is that the team hit another milestone and cleaned up a few features, the bad news is that it’s still not ready for Alpha release and Bohemia Interactive won’t be able to hit their internal release date. But we’re getting there.

In the meantime, the DayZ mod is now playable on the beta version of Arma 3. As for the full standalone release, it could still be a while, but with good reason.

The above 17-minute video showcases new gameplay (featuring overly loud gunshots that make it hard to hear Hall), highlighting the new animations and improved first-person gameplay. Hall talks about the status of the game and what they’re working on for the back-end to support the eventual launch and high player counts.

Informational Highlights:
Client updates region you’re in – more efficient with thousands of items, loads of zombies and players.
New bleeding system allows for blood from point of wounds.
Gun mods/attachments: suppressors, extended mags, etc.
Database being upgraded to support large number of players for release.

Hall admits that there’s really not much to play and enjoy until the fundamentals of the game are in and working properly. He understands that it can be frustrating for eager fans, but they want to do it right instead of rushing something that doesn’t work.

As for the original DayZ, a popular, albeit super buggy mod for Arma 2, it is now working for the Arma 3 beta. Thanks to the updated Real Virtuality game engine, even with the same zombies, it looks much better and benefits from an improved inventory system. Zombie animations however, are still borderline out of control – at least that element can be sometimes entertaining.

For more on the standalone DayZ watch this great presentation from Hall at Rezzed 2013. Here are the highlights of that session:
Players use up different amounts of calories depending on temperatures and how much physical strain they endure.
Pirate radio stations featuring content chosen by community. Players can place radios on ground as bait.
Disinfectants and human blood that must be kept cold, purification tablets for water.
Can create improvised explosive with things like duct tape, flares and butane.
Weapon attachment system: all guns redesigned, can add silencers, etc.
Zoom in from 3rd person to 1st person with weapons.
ARMA II sounds in the game will be replaced with original content after gameplay is refined.
Oculus Rift support coming eventually.
Zombies spawn at very beginning, and zombies killed in an area stay dead until players leave and new ones spawn in. There are also roaming zombies.
There are super rare items that literally may be one-of-a-kind.

Worth the wait?

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Open-World Survival: ‘Rust’ Releases in Alpha, ‘DayZ’ Gets Alpha Date

Since DayZ first came out and YouTube gameplay videos began to gain popularity, we’ve been excited for the idea of the imminent explosion of a genre of video game that scratched that infected itch for a massive survival sandbox experience, where the only rules are the ones players choose to play by. DayZ was a fan-made mod for ARMA 2 (and now ARMA 3) and it’s sinced evolved into the development of a full-fledged standalone release by ARMA studio Bohemia Interactive.

Before DayZ was a thing, another open-world sandbox game played with our imaginations, another title that began as a mod, aptly titled Garry’s Mod (GMod), a project built on Half-Life 2′s Source engine that’s constantly evolved since its 2006 release. Players simply use all of the tools and objects from the game and from other people’s creations to do whatever they want. Facepunch Studios, the team behind it, have their own sandbox survival title coming out titled Rust, and like DayZ, it’s also in its alpha stages.


Unlike the repeatedly delayed DayZ by creator Dean Hall, the alpha build of Rust is available right now for free. You can download it here. From viewing gameplay of Rust, it’s no surprise that it actually began as a clone of DayZ, zombies and all, but Garry Newman’s team knew they couldn’t compete with the resources behind DayZ (see: ARMA) so they decided to make it more like the STALKERgames, still open-world, but with radiation and the ability for players to craft their own builds anywhere on the map. The theme emphasized by the team is freedom.

One of our main aims with Rust is to not control how people behave directly. For example some people want us to implement something to discourage people killing each other. Some kind of rating. Or turn killers red to warm you they can’t be trusted.

I hate that. It’s not giving the players freedom. The players should decide how they play the game. You should be fearful of others. That is the whole point. This is a game where the player makes their own story.. and emotion plays into it a lot. If you see another guy in game.. – you’re going to be scared of him at first. But then you sniff around each other and decide to go on an adventure together. You begin to trust each other. That means so much more if you both had the ability to kill the other at any time and didn’t. And you weren’t just doing it for a green +1.

So what’s to stop you from going around killing anyone you want and taking their shit and becoming more powerful? Nothing. What’s stopping it from becoming a PVP killfest? You. Our job should be to give the players the tools they need. If you’re sick of getting killed – start a town. Build town walls. Give all the town members red clothes. Put warning signs up outside the town. Set up trip wires and alarms. Watch each others back.

As the video above indicates, there’s a lot of work that needs to go into polishing and expanding Rust so the current plan is for the team to continue with bug fixes and work on adding their own assets, beginning with player models, clothing, weapons and tools. Eventually the game will hit Steam. And:


“I also want a 100 foot giant that will come and smash your buildings up – forcing you to work together to take him down. But I’ll have to sneak that past Helk.”



As for DayZ, Hall showed off gameplay of the latest build at the Rezzed 2013 developer conference. Some highlights include the new inventory screens, new map system, crafting and the following:
Players use up different amounts of calories depending on temperatures and how much physical strain they endure.
Pirate radio stations featuring content chosen by community. Players can place radios on ground as bait.
Disinfectants and human blood that must be kept cold, purification tablets for water.
Can create improvised explosive with things like duct tape, flares and butane.
Weapon attachment system: all guns redesigned, can add silencers, etc.
Zoom in from 3rd person to 1st person with weapons.
ARMA II sounds in the game will be replaced with original content after gameplay is refined.
Oculus Rift support coming eventually.
Zombies  spawn at very beginning, and zombies killed in an area stay dead until players leave and new ones spawn in. There are also roaming zombies.
There are super rare items that literally may be one-of-a-kind.

For players eager to get hands-on with DayZ, the devs have set an internal date with a one-week timeframe. We don’t know when that is but it should be relatively soon. The intial plan was to release a limited amount of codes incrementally but now the plan is to open it to everyone to test the servers, architecture and to get feedback for improvements. As Hall referenced previously, the pricing model ofDayZ will follow that of Minecraft with it being relatively cheap during alpha and increasing in price as it moves to beta then eventually, full release. It will eventually make its way to consoles as well, but not for quite some time.

The ultimate community-focused, community-crafted sandbox games are on their way and we’re excited to try both.

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DayZ Creator Not Thrilled About Microsoft’s Xbox One Indie Support

In the growing series of bad ill-thought-out service decisions, Microsoft is now letting their potential third-party partners continue the bad PR train for them. If it’s not analysts and military officials sharing displeasure towards Microsoft’s anti-consumer Xbox One policies, its potential developers. CCP Games and Digital Extremes told us face-to-face last week just how happy they are with Sony’s plans and ideas are for the PS4, and how self-publishing and lack of update costs makes Sony’s next-gen hardware the obvious choice for their games.

This was abundantly evident on the show floor at E3 as well with the Sony booth loaded with indie titles, also present on stage during the PS4 press conference, where all Microsoft had was an updated version of the money-making machine known as Minecraft. With more innovative indie titles on the way and the PS4 being easy to port PC games over, will the Xbox One be a good home for PC titles as well? DayZ creator Dean Hall isn’t sure at this point.

Yes, DayZ is months and months late, but it’s all in an effort to improve the launch version of the product. DayZ creator Dean Hall – whose same-titled ARMA II & III zombie survival mod earned him a chance to develop a standalone game with Bohemia Interactive – is working away still on the PC build, but for quite some time he’s been asked about the possibility of a console version. Knowing the launch version won’t immediately support mods and seeing games like State of Decayperform well on Xbox, if DayZ is a success, console ports are no-brainers(“almost certain,” in fact). But with next-gen hardware debuting this holiday season, what say you, Mr. Hall?


“Yeah, we talked to both of them. But, as I’m sure you’re aware, Sony lets you self-publish and they don’t make you pay for updates. Microsoft requires you to have a publisher. They have no digital distribution strategy and they require you to pay $10,000, or whatever it is, for updates.”

Microsoft fail. Thoughts on Sony?


“Oh, absolutely. We like them. I like what I saw on the PS4. I like what I saw on the Xbox in a lot of cases as well. I’m not s***ting on them. I’m kind of hopeful that Microsoft has just forgot to talk about its indie support. Maybe I’m being a bit naive.”

Let’s all hope that’s the case because the lack of indie support by not letting creative devs self-publish is not good for future development and creativity, let alone future Xbox One owners. And paying for updates when Sony doesn’t charge developers to do so? C’mon.

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News Wrap Up: Xbox One Covers, Ubisoft MMO, GT6, Minecraft & More!

It’s time to play catch-up on a few key games that are releasing later this year and share some fun news bits for some of our recent favorites. We’re going to look at the Xbox One covers of Quantum Break & Forza 5, the Gran Turismo release schedule, the next Minecraft console update, the future of Diablo 3, two cool trailers, some next-gen stuff, some new (old) games, and more!

Read on for the details and a more stories.

Quantum Break Xbox One Cover

The only new game unveiled during Microsoft’s Xbox One presentation last week was the next game from Alan Wake developer Remedy Entertainment. We saw no gameplay but we do know it blends in gameplay with live-action. We’ve seen the Xbox One covers for Battlefield 4 and Forza 5 one (below), but now we have our first look at the game cover a for a new IP. click here for the full-sizeQuantum Break cover, featuring its protagonist: a white dude with a gun.

Gran Turismo 6 Delays

Gran Turismo games take a long time to make, super long, in fact. With GT6 oddly only getting recently announced, but not for the next-gen consoles coming this fall (although you can count it coming to PS4 eventually), some longtime fans are justifiably worried about it being delayed even further. Don’t be. It’s following the formula as product manager Josh Walker tells MCV:

“There is no reason to think the proposed release window for GT6 will not be achieved… We feel it is important to continue to support our loyal PS3 users, and those from many parts of the world who are new to PS3, with a new title. And [series producer] Kazuori Yamauchi was keen to develop the Gran Turismo platform further on PS3. Gran Turismo has a huge following among current PS3 gamers. The release also follows a pattern for Gran Turismo – GT and GT2 for PS, GT3 and GT4 for PS2, and now GT5 and GT6 on PS3.”

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Minecraft (Xbox 360) Title Update #12

4J Studios, developers of the super popular Xbox 360 version of Minecraft dropped a few hints and confirmations for what’s going into the undated 12th title update. First is the screenshot above, featuring an Ocelot (you can tame them!), the jungle biome and Redstone blocks. On Twitter they also confirmed that the maximum build height of the game is going to be raised.

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Diablo 3: Ladders & Books

Planning ahead for the long-term future of Diablo 3, Blizzard devs – speaking during a one-year anniversary livestream – are looking to implement ranking, a ladder of sorts. Such a feature would keep players encouraged of starting new characters and playing longer, well giving them unique rewards for doing so. Wyatt Cheng and Travis Day:


“Sometimes we all want to [start fresh] and we can choose to do it, but sometimes it’s nice to do it together, as a global community. Or have a recognized badge of honor, for having done it. We wouldn’t take away anything from what people have accomplished. People have a lot of investment in their current characters, so you’d still keep those.”

“Five years from now, you’re probably not going to see us making huge content patches, or class updates. At some point we’ll set the game aside, sort of leave it as a work that we’ve completed, and move on to like Diablo 4, or whatever, right? Ladders is absolutely one of the things that helps the game stay fresh for people 5 years from now, or 3 years, or 2 years, or whatever.”

So long as the servers are still online, right gentlemen? Hardcore D3 fans have another companion book to look forward to, this one titled Book of Tyrael that explores the character of Archangel Tyrael. It releases this October for $40.

Source: PCgamesN

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League of Legends: A Twist of Fate



League of Legends is one of the world’s most played PC games. Developer Riot Games released a new epic cinematic trailer, running over four minutes long, that features champions including Ryze, Annie and Garen battling it out. It took a year to create and was made simply because Riot loves cinematics. Read about how it was made here.

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Wii U Game From Creator of Conker’s Bad Fur Day

Developer Rare’s final game for the N64 was Conker’s Bad Fur Day and while Rare has been working on a big Xbox One game to be announced at E3 in just over a week, the lead behind that great game – and its remake Live & Reloaded - revealed that he’s working on a Wii U game.


Check out our list of 5 games Rare could be developing for Xbox One!

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From The Team That Brought You Homeworld…



After THQ went bankrupt, Gearbox Software won the Homeworld property in an auction. While we don’t know the future of that long-silent franchise, we do have another similarly cool looking game from some of the devs that worked on Homeworld. Hardware: Shipbreakers is an upcoming free-to-play RTS game by Canadian developer Blackbird Interactive where players explore and fight over the derelict starships of planet LM-27. The Hardware: Shipbreakers gameplay trailer released this week, appropriately titled “First Contact,” offering a first look at the gameplay, units and a large crashed starship. The game hits open beta Q4 2013.

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‘Massive’ Ubisoft MMO

Ubisoft acquired Swedish developer Massive (Ground Control, World in Conflict) in late 2008 and outside of their help on certain elements Assassin’s Creed: Revelations and Far Cry 3, we don’t know what they’ve been working on for all those years. But we expect to very soon. According to the research of Superannuation, looking at developer resumes, official Ubisoft announcements at investor calls and job postings, we know that Massive is working on a large-scale MMO for one of their biggest IPs. The clues hint that it could be Tom Clancy related, it could be an online RPG involving PvP, it could be third-person action game (Assassin’s Creed MMO?), but we do know that it’ll have companion mobile apps, something Ubisoft has grown fond of with their support of such things for Ghost Recon and the upcoming Watch Dogs.

We’re hoping its one of the major new announcements Ubisoft will have at E3 2013.

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NHL 94 Survival Rate

Kotaku shared the mind-blowing statistic that of all the players featured in the amazing NHL 94, only three remain active in the NHL. Teemu Selanne, Roman Hamrlik and Jaromir Jagr are the only remaining players who who featured in the 1993 release and all three played in this year’s playoffs.


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Mountainous Delays

The popular ARMA II zombie mod known as DayZ is still in development towards becoming a standalone release at Bohemia Interactive and even though the game is months and months behind, DayZ creator Dean Hall took some time to climb Mount Everest. Not an easy task. Now back to that other task which is still scheduled for an increasingly unlikely public Alpha test in June.


Next-Gen Mad Catz

If you haven’t heard, the Xbox One is not only not backwards compatible with its retail or digital games, but its controllers and accessories. That means your expensive headsets, collections of controllers and third party peripherals will all be obsolete this holiday season thanks to that new pot on the Xbox One controller. Prepare for the new – Mad Catz has, and they’ve just confirmed their support of a new product line for the Xbox One. Darren Richardson, the President and Chief Executive Officer of Mad Catz Interactive, Inc.:


“The launch of the Xbox One adds a new revenue stream and the enhanced performance of the Xbox One opens up additional scope for innovation. Today’s announcement demonstrates our continued support of Microsoft’s console and entertainment business and is part of our long-term strategy to bring innovative products to passionate gamers.”

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(Re)Rise of the Triad

Interceptor Entertainment and original developer Apogee Software are gearing up for the release of their (DRM free) Rise of the Triad reboot and they’ve released key details about the game. First, compare the cover art above. Talk about honoring the original! They’ve confrimed that Rise of the Triad will be available on your favorite digital distributors, Steam, GOG.com and Green Man Gaming and released the PC system requirements:


Minimum:
OS:Windows XP 32-bit
Processor:2.4 GHz Dual Core Processor or Better
Memory:2 GB RAM
Graphics:ATI Radeon HD 3870 / NVIDIA 8800 GT
DirectX®:9.0
Hard Drive:5 GB HD space
Sound:DirectX Compatible

Recommended:
OS:Windows 7 64-bit
Processor:2.4 GHz Quad Core Processor or Better
Memory:4 GB RAM
Graphics:AMD Radeon HD 6950 / NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560
DirectX®:9.0
Hard Drive:5 GB HD space
Sound:DirectX Compatible

Rise of the Triad releases this summer for $14.99.

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Hackers Force ‘The War Z’ Shutdown; ‘DayZ’ Console Release ‘Almost Certain’

As DayZ, a mod for ARMA II, grew in popularity, hitting player counts that made the development of a standalone game inevitable, out came the unveiling of a similarly themed online zombie survival MMO-esque experience dubbed The War Z. At the time, DayZ was a buggy and incomplete, early build of a mod, so The War Z, seemingly in development for quite sometime had a real opportunity to steal the opposition’s thunder.

Then The War Z actually released, and it did so without many of its touted features, causing so much controversy that refunds were offered and Valve removed the game from its Steam service. The War Z has since been updated and is back on Steam, but players looking to play yesterday had a terrible April Fools’ Day gag to deal with.

Hackers took down The War Z in early January, just a few weeks after the failed launch, and now barely a month after The War Z returned to Steam, hackers have forced another shut down. Hammerpoint Interactive and publisher OP Productions took down game services for four hours of “emergency maintenance” yesterday as the game and forum databases were hacked. The servers are back online but the forums are still down, replaced with an official statement from the publisher.

We are sorry to report that we have discovered that hackers gained access to our forum and game databases and the player data in those databases. We have launched a thorough investigation covering our entire system to determine the scope of the intrusion. This investigation is ongoing and is our top priority. As part of the remediation and security enhancement process we will be taking the game and forums down temporarily.

We are issuing this Security Alert to all Survivors as a precaution so you can take some precautionary measures on your own. We have already taken a number of steps to increase security and are continuing to work with external advisors and investigators to identify and implement measures to minimize the chance of this happening in the future.

The data accessed included email addresses used to log-in to the forum, forum passwords which we encrypt, email addresses used to log-in to the game, encrypted game passwords as well as in-game character names and the IP addresses from which players log-in to the forum and to the game. If you posted other information to the forum it is likely that such data was accessed as well. We do not collect the names or addresses of our gamers so that information was not impacted unless you posted it on the forum. We are investigating whether additional information may have been obtained.

Emails used to register were accessed, and all players are advised to change their account passwords.

Since every time there’s The War Z news, there’s also news on DayZ, let’s chat about Bohemia Interactive’s upcoming oft-delayed zombie game. The Escapist caught up with Dean “Rocket” Hall at GDC to talk about the potential of a console release for DayZ, and of all things, the issue of hacking.


”Certainly I think if we don’t, for want of a better word ‘fuck up,’ the PC release then I would say a console port is almost certain. I know a lot of people get really hot and bothered about it. Like, I’m not a console gamer, I’m a PC gamer, but I don’t think it necessarily has to hurt things.”

“It appears to be the kind of game that Sony are interested in, I think we just have to wait and see. We’ve talked and met with Sony, and they’re very – you know, they’re obviously interested.”

PC games that are successful come to consoles because they’re profitable. Look at the indie darling Minecraft which just topped 6 million units sold on the Xbox 360 alone, and it’s still ranking as the second most played game on Xbox Live. Imagine a polished, low-cost zombie MMO where dozens of players can hop in and out at anytime without worrying about version compatibility, mods, etc.? If DayZ is anywhere near as successful as its mod precessor in terms of the amount of player buying into it, then its release on the PlayStation 4 is practically inevitable. We already knew that if it was a hit a console version would be developed, and really, why else would Sony be meeting with Dean Hall?

On the hacking front:


”It’s very difficult to be able to turn around and say ‘We have solved hacking’ because of the nature of it and even what [the hackers] are trying to do, it’s a creative thing… There’s kind of now a bubble around the player. So the player only receives updates that are relevant to them.”

Among other things, part of the six month delay on DayZ is to deal with programming around the hacking problem, something that’s plagued the DayZmod since the outset.

Can we expect a Day Z console announcement at E3 2013 or is that too soon?

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‘DayZ’ Update Video: Improving Zombie A

In early February, Dean “Rocket” Hall and Matt Lightfoot of Bohemia Interactive’s DayZ standalone game dev team, shared the first 15 minutes of DayZ gameplay, highlighting some of the core features they’re building into the game, from a greater focus on player customization to new gameplay mechanics.

Last week the first gameplay video since then was released in the form of another DayZ video blog and this one brings a few community members onto the test server to explore the new and improved Chernarus.

The most exciting news – outside of the fact that a popular mod is becoming its own full game – is that the DayZ team is holding lots of exciting features back for unveilings in the near future, notably at PAX East (March 22-24). For now, here’s what this video covers and highlights:
Large city with detailed interiors – based on real-life location of same scale.
Looting cars, with doors/trunks that can be opened and closed.
Moving/working as a group.
Not hotbar and inventory (no images yet)
Re-designed zombie AI – they now move in directions that make sense instead of chasing old pathways. Zombies can also traverse multiple levels of buildings properly.
New zombie types, including “skeletons.”
Fleshed our health/armor system (i.e. bike helmets serve an important purpose).

Players will note bugs being worked out, from sliding characters, clipping animations, and popping textures, but DayZ is still in pre-alpha and the devs are intentionally releasing a limited amount of information. From the official blog on what’s coming next:


Inventory System

One of the biggest improvement areas has been the inventory system, now almost ready for a public display. This new inventory system supports crafting, interchangeable clothing, degradation, tracking, weapon customization, and much more. It’s really a revolutionary system for us and we’re extremely proud of the results that Jirka (our programmer assigned to this) has achieved.

Crafting

Not touched on in the video, but what we will be showing soon is the basics of how users can interact with items in the world – this is the next step in development of our inventory system beyond where it is now. This is not a traditional crafting system, but one that encourages layers to explore the ways in which items can be crafted.

A more detailed post-apocalyptic open-world overrun with zombies is something fans are clamoring for, especially if it improves upon the better elements of the DayZ ARMA II mod and The War Z, among others. Just don’t get held up on release dates.

Head to the official DayZ blog for more detailed updates.

DayZ will release for PC at some point in the future. If it’s a hit, it could eventually hit consoles since it won’t be supporting mods at launch.

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The War Z Returns To Steam After Release Debacle

Aliens: Colonial Marines is a perfect example of a game that wasn’t able to hold its own on release. It’s a game that promised something that just wasn’t there in the final retail version. The War Z however, is a game that took this problem and magnified it to an entirely new level.

The title was released on Steam on December 17th 2012 and within the month was pulled off because of false advertisement claims and serious quality concerns in the Steam forums. Valve even offered refunds to those who bought the game as to, hopefully, amend the problem.

Nearly two months later and the game has been re-released on the Steam platform with some major improvements. Hammerpoint Interactive has been working with steam to vastly improve the game and get it in working order. The refund period for the game has expired as The War Z now holds true to the features it listed on its product page.

The War Z is now available for purchase on Steam. Valve and Hammerpoint Interactive collaborated to address community feedback, update the Steam store page, and make the title available for purchase worldwide. In addition, a patch has been released to update existing customers. As such, the special refund offering extended for The War Z Steam customers who previously purchased the title has concluded.

From the Community Manager:


“We have been hard at work throwing some big changes into the game over the last months and are excited at the chance to be a part of Steam once again.”

The War Z is still under scrutiny for its seemingly unethical micro transaction practices and its questionable banning of users who bash the game on their forums. Valve seems to be giving Hammerpoint Interactive the benefit of the doubt here, but we hope players who are interested, now get what they want from the title that once seemed promising.

The game is still receiving negative reviews even after the update and some players are still vocal in bashing it on its forums. There’s always the DayZ standalone game to look forward to, but that could be a while.

Are you a fan of The War Z, available now on PC, or would you rather play the DayZ ARMA II mod? Let us know in the comments!

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Watch The First Standalone ‘DayZ’ Gameplay Footage

Fans of the buggy, yet unique DayZ zombacolypse mod were excited for jumping into the standalone game before the holidays, but that estimated date was entirely realistic. It’s now February with the game still unreleased and still without any deadlines for public testing. The trade-off for the worthwhile delay, is that DayZ is poised to offer a legitimately improved standalone experience.

Dean “Rocket” Hall and Matt Lightfoot of Bohemia Interactive’s DayZ standalone game dev team shared a 15-minute gameplay video yesterday to showcase a few major changes from the ARMA 2 mod, from the user interface and improved gameplay mechanics, but keep mum on many of the game’s basics.

They stress this is a very early and many of the features are intentionally disabled for this video blog entry so Hall can showcase some of DayZ’s basic features.
Player avatar and equipment visual maintained from last server they were on – they see this on main menu
Focus is to make player character an important part of gameplay – there will eventually be viewable stats for that character
From the menu players and switch between servers.
Over 100 clothing items with plenty of variants. There’s a focus on functional items first, more cosmetic personalization stuff will come later.
Maps include new types of terrain not seen before in Chernarus - the game’s fictional world. The example in the video highlights beautiful countryside lands and a swamp.
New loot spawning mechanic replaces piles of loot from the mod. Specific items will spawn, often in partially hidden areas within buildings and such. It will force players to be observant and take their time to scavenge.
Settlement ruins have been increasingly varied and provide more opportunities for hidden loot.

With the amount they’re not showing in the video, it’s rather evident that the game is far behind schedule and won’t be ready for sale anytime soon. The main reasons is because of the redesigned engine and focus on improving not just all of the game’s systems, but the art work as well. When will it release? Hall says:


“We don’t know. We’re going to take our time. I feel fantastic about the situation, more than ever I feel like we’re doing something really interesting with this development. Now is not the time to rush things, but we do need to ensure our pace is kept up. Our development blog and getting players in and testing as soon as possible will be key in ensuring we succeed in making this a great game.”

What is promising is that they’ve begun closed testing by working with Valve and their Steam infrastructure. From this first look at gameplay development however, players will note the obviously vastly improved graphics and animations, from the more detailed and varied open-world environment to the characters’ clothing options (and head movements). The new inventory screens however were hidden from viewers, likely saved to generate more buzz among dedicated fans and the media as future blog entries are released. Free publicity!

It looks great and we at Game Rant want to walk around in Chernarus as soon as possible, but where are the zombies, the weapons, etc.? And what’s next?

“We’re working very hard on the inventory system even more, and it looks like the crafting system is close in next in our development. It would be fair to say that inventory and crafting are the key development objective currently, second only to the client/server architecture (makes DayZ more like an MMO), and new zombie AI mechanics (an ongoing task).”

Head to the official DayZ blog for more detailed updates.

DayZ will release for PC at some point in the future. If it’s a hit, it could eventually hit consoles since it won’t be supporting mods at launch.

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First Steam, Now Hackers: Taking Down ‘The War Z’

Watching gameplay videos for the ARMA 2 DayZ mod throughout 2012 had us excited at the idea of open world survival in a zombie-filled environment, and so when Hammerpoint Interactive announced The War Z back in July, we were hoping for a polished, complete and feature-rich version of the fan-made mod. We were so, so wrong.

Let’s talk about the release of The War Z and why hackers may be attacking it right now.

Long story short, The War Z released on Steam in late December and after an onslaught of negative feedback and accusations of false advertising and plagiarized images from The Walking Dead, Valve took it down, offering refunds to those who purchased the game. Here’s a sample of why:

The issues boiled down to listed game features not actually being in the build of the game being sold. The game’s description on Steam was simply not accurate, and instead was very misleading, and the situation was made worse when The War Z executive producer Sergey Titov continued to blame gamers for misreading, claiming “there’s a difference between false claims and perception of the text.”

Some fans were vocal about forum posts about refunds being deleted/censored, while others accuse the developers of scamming the community for releasing a ‘version 1.0′ game that didn’t include many of the key features fans cared about (and were listed as included). The few reviews that made it up to Metacritic are rather reflective of this sentiment:

2000+ user scores averaging just over a 1/10 must be a record.

Titov could only take so much bad press before he changed his tune, apologizing for being “arrogant” in an open letter to the community, and now they’re on the road to recovery. He fessed up to the issues, admitted he agreed with Steam’s decision to remove the game for the time being, and said – believe it or not – it was an internal communication error between marketing and the devs as to why the listing was so inaccurate.

Players who wanted a refund through Steam could get it, players who wish to keep playing can do that too, while Hammerpoint continues to develop the title. For its short time on the platform, it sold very well.

The War Z now faces a new challenge: hackers. Hammerpoint’s community manager took to the game’s official forums to post that “over the last few days we have been under attack by various forums of malicious attempts to shut down our servers.” The servers were knocked out of commission intermittently but as of a few hours ago, are back up for the time being.

The timing of the hacker attacks are probably not a coincidence, but we’ve seen Sony, Ubisoft and others attacked for various reasons that in the end, hurt the gamer, so who knows. No matter what, it’s painful for the players who bought the game and want to play it.

It’s been a sad month for The War Z, a game that seemed so promising. Whether or not you believe Hammerpoint can evolve it into something special remains to be seen, but hey, Bohemia Interactive is working with DayZ creator Dean Hall on a standalone DayZ game and you can be darn sure they’re learning a lot from this.

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‘The War Z’ Controversy: What Hammerpoint Did Wrong, What Dean Hall Did Right

2012 has been a big year for controversy in the games industry. From Mass Effect 3‘s ending to smaller issues like the Fuse/Overstrike transition, gamers everywhere have had reason to be riled up at least once this year. But none of these issues compare to that of The War Z.

For the unfamiliar, The War Z is billed as a zombie survival mode, taking many cues from the ever popular DayZ mod for ARMA 2. The game released just a few days ago on Steam, and though it quickly climbed the sales charts, Valve was ultimately forced to pull the game from its digital shelves.

The reasoning is simple: gamers claim that they aren’t getting what was advertised. The game, for example lists that servers support up to one hundred players, when in reality only fifty can play at a time. The Steam description also lists that players can host private servers, yet such an option was not made available. More of these inaccuracies are highlighted in the image down below:

Hammerpoint itself in a difficult position right now, and it’s only made worse by accusations that the studio has stolen images from The Walking Dead and used them in The War Z. Kotaku was able to snag a comparison image, which you can see down below:

While plagiarism is a pressing issue, it’s the least of Hammerpoint’s worries. Essentially, gamers have been sold an incomplete product. Though some may argue that many of these gaming controversies are overblown, gamers certainly have reason to be disgruntled at The War Z developer Hammerpoint. The Steam page promises features which have yet to be implemented, falsely advertising an incomplete game as a fully finished product.

Hammerpoint, however, doesn’t believe it did anything wrong, with the studio’s Sergey Tito putting the blame on the shoulders of gamers.


“I’m sure that a few players may be upset, but I can assure you that based on what we’re seeing, the number of people who post bad comments are a small percentage of people who actually bought the game.

I think there’s a difference between false claims and perception of the text. There’s no such thing as ‘fully released’ for online game. As far as I’m concerned The War Z is in a stage when we’re ready to stop calling it Beta. This is a basic version—bones to which we’re going to add more and more ‘meat’—features and content in the coming months and hopefully years.”

While it is true that online games do evolve over time, the fact is The War Zadvertised features that Hammerpoint has not yet implemented. A lack of ethics in the game industry is starting to become readily apparent, whether it be Hammerpoint advertising an incomplete game as a fully fledged title, or publishers backing out of promises. Perhaps this is just the initial roadblocks of the digital age, however.

When games first started appearing on store shelves, there was no telling what kind of an experience gamers were going to receive. That’s why Nintendo created it’s now famous seal of approval, to provide gamers with some sort guide as to which gamers were quality titles. We’re once again experiencing this with the digital age; open platforms such as the PC do not have the restrictions of consoles leaving it up to gamers to trust developers and publishers that they will not be screwed over, whether it be purchasing a complete product or simply making sure they received their pre-order bonuses.

This doesn’t excuse Hammerpoint, however. The studio should have fully advertised what it was selling, just as Minecraft developer Mojang did during the early days of development. We may be in a state of change and uncertainty in the industry, but that does not give developers and publishers the right to play semantics and essentially, sell gamers an incomplete product.

It takes a certain level of transparency to gain gamers’ trust, and that’s exactly why DayZ creator Dean Hall needs to be applauded. The standalone title, which started off as a mod for ARMA 2, has been in development limbo for the past few months, and fans are growing concerned. Thankfully, however, rather than keep fans in the dark, Hall went to Reddit to shine some light on the issue.


“I know I have been very quiet lately. So this will be really all I’ll say for the moment. I’ve been pretty depressed about the whole situation. From a personal standpoint, this whole “saga” of the development made me seriously question if I wanted to be involved in the industry and I gave serious thought to cutting my losses and not being involved in the project.

At my Army Discharge medical this week, they noted I now have high blood pressure. Some things in life just aren’t worth worrying about. I’ve been getting hammered by a massive amount with requests for information about DayZ release, interviews and my reactions to this and stuff and such – but for my own sanity I retreated and have kept to myself.

Right now I’m just at home doing bits and pieces on the DayZ development. The rest of the DayZ team is doing the same. I realize that I went back on my word about releasing an update, but went back into my shell for a bit last week, and I’ll come out when the dust is all settled.”

In an age of digital uncertainty, Hall did the respectable thing: he was honest with fans. He did not treat DayZ customers poorly; he shared his experience, he gave an update and most importantly, he apologized. There may be quite a bit of pressure surrounding development of DayZ, but Hall has certainly earned the trust of his fans by being honest and upfront, rather than taking the route Hammerpoint chose to.

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‘Halo 4′ Multiplayer Rewarding Microsoft Points; ‘DayZ Bounty’ Offers Real Cash [Updated]

With the 2012 Presidential Election officially in the books, Red vs. Blue can finally return to its less divisive connotation: Halo multiplayer. Tuesday’s highly anticipated and acclaimed release of Halo 4 (be sure to read our review) has fans flooding the game’s new Infinity multiplayer component across Spartan Ops and War Games.

And sure enough, the Xbox Live Rewards program is taking advantage.

Announced today by Microsoft, between now and November 30, any Xbox Live Rewards member is eligible to receive Microsoft Points as recompense for their time spent in Halo 4 multiplayer. Addiction seems to be the only requirement: 35 hours will earn players 100 Microsoft Points ($1.25); 70 hours will earn 300 points ($3.75); and 140 hours – nearly six full days throughout the month’s remaining 23 – will earn 600 points ($7.50). Additionally, spending 1500 and 3000 points over the Xbox Live Marketplace on Halo content will award a rebate of 100 and 200 points, respectively. 800 points is the maximum total reward a player can receive throughout the life of the entire offer.

Clearly (or at least we hope) this won’t be a moneymaking endeavor for most gamers, but rather a fun bonus to support any inevitable Halo 4 bender plans. It’s a small step in the right direction for the Xbox Live Rewards Program, which has a well-established reputation for its paucity of actual, you know, rewards. And at any rate actually playing Halo 4 for prizes beats awkwardly loitering at your local 7-Eleven.

Fortunately for those who enjoy cash incentives infused into their video-game experiences, the potential to play for real money, won through hard-fought competition and the laborious development of gameplay skills, seems to be growing by the day. In this case, the DayZ.

Detailed today by PC Gamer, an independent group of developers has taken the wildly successful ArmA II mod and initiated a project called ”DayZ Bounty.” Founded by Jake Stewart, James Ortiz, and Andrew Defee after a “rouge” clan session of merciless killing and wagering on each other’s lives, DayZ Bounty is a monetary program (which, ideally, be integrated though DayZ’s eventual mod support) that awards cash for killing zombies and the other human inhabitants of post-apocalyptic Chernarus.

The project has yet to reach its alpha stage, according to Ortiz, but the team has already developed a basic rule set. Players will purchase “packages” of lives and standard equipment – right now there are four set at $5, $10, $15, and $20 – and enter into the DayZ Bounty servers where they’ll encounter zombies, survivors, bandits, and an outlaw – the bandit with the most kills. Money is won (and wired through PayPal) by killing, well, anyone else in the world, with the prize value varying by class. Below are the mock values used so far during DayZ Bounty’s testing phase:
Zombies: $0.10 per 10 killed
Survivors: $0.05
Bandits: $0.25
The Outlaw: $5.00, with value on their head increasing $0.25 per hour of in-game time

Not surprisingly, DayZ Bounty is still trying to sort through a myriad of issues relating to legality – mainly, whether or not it constitutes gambling, whether not charging players gels with ArmA II’s terms of service, and whether or not developer Bohemia Interactive would approve the component regardless (so far, they haven’t expressed an opinion). Should it ever come to fruition, though, it might just attract a brand new, wallet-wielding audience to DayZ – a mod that, itself, plans to release as a standalone game some time in 2012.

[Update: Bohemia Interactive and the original creators of the DayZ mod, who are developing the official version of the game are none to happy about the real cash server, stating that it undermines the original vision by DayZ creator Dean Hall.]


“While we fully support modifications created by the community. to improve the gaming experience for players of DayZ and ArmA II, we do not support their creators putting a cost on them. As commercially exploiting their small additions to DayZ undermines the work done by the original team.”

“We believe that the elements of gambling that DayZ Bounty introduces challenges the basic game design aspects that DayZ is built upon. It changes the focus of DayZ from being a creative, enjoyable, gritty gaming experience to a game that is based almost solely on financial gain and that is not something we want to be associated with.”

“We will be contacting the owners of the DayZ Bounty website directly over the coming days, to ask that they cease their activities in their current form.”

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‘DayZ’ Creator Talks Release Plans, Maps & Eventual Mod Support

DayZ has become the latest example of community-driven game design and its popularity continues to increase ever since it was recently announced that theARMA 2 mod would become a standalone game. Bohemia Interactive andDayZ creator Dean Hall are hard at work with their six-person team of programmers (supported by Bohemia Interactive’s other internal departments) planning out and developing the first build of the game with plenty of features new and old built from the scratch.

The most exciting part about the rapid success and evolution of DayZ is that the first playable alpha build will be available for players before the year ends. The sky is the limit for Hall’s upcoming game and the biggest challenge for him may be to narrow down the list of ideas to determine what makes the cut in the early versions of the game.

In chatting with PC Gamer, Dean “Rocket” Hall excitedly shared what can only be described as an unlimited amount of potential for the future of DayZ. In the interview, Hall discusses the issue of hackers in DayZ and the importance of making the standalone game more secure, the Minecraft-style release plans for the game, a target date for the first playable (and purchasable) build, running the standalone game alongside the DayZ mod for ARMA 2, the eventual addition of mod support and ideas for destructible (and constructible) environments.

“I had a personal target of October. But I think that was really me just plucking a time out of my head, doing a back-of-the-napkin calculation. I would say this year, definitely. If we don’t have something out, say, before Christmas, then something’s gone wrong. But when I say “something,” I mean a heavily discounted alpha. Minecraft-style. That’s why we’re so programmer-heavy now. The idea is, let’s tackle all those problems and bugs and issues properly, that I’ve either been hacking through in the mod or just haven’t dealt with at all. Let’s clear those out of the way now and get that backlog tidied up. Then once we’ve got that, put a little bit of the extra content with credit in, when we have some people who aren’t busy, and put that out there and see what people think. Then we can start getting crazy.”

Even though DayZ built its success as a mod itself, albeit a buggy and incomplete one, as a standalone game it understandibly will not be releasing with mod support of its own at first because of the fixes, programming needs and release plans for the title. It will however, support mods eventually once the game is fine-tuned.

“That’s a definite end state. We’ve talked about that. It’s hard, because you don’t want to make something that came from being heavily moddable and then make it not like that. But the issue is, we’re making a game that allows players to interact with each other in a competitive environment. So we need some rules. What we’re going to start off with… Because it’s a small team, because we want to focus the development as we lock it down, the moddability will come later once we’ve solved that problem. We need to say, “Okay, this problem is effectively solved.” You’re never going to completely clear out hacking, so solving that is not getting rid of it completely. But at the very least we should be able to detect it adequately and deal with it adequately and roll it back and such. Once we’ve reached that point and pushed the game through, that’s when we can start doing it. And maybe we can get a little bit creative and make sure it fits within the world. We’re going to be able to do a lot more creative stuff with the mod itself. The idea is maybe to open up that a little bit more, to allow quite a bit more experimentation while the game itself gets locked down more. There could be some real synergy there.”

Hall later explains that DayZ was initially intended to be a short-term experience simply about surviving as long as possible, but it’s grown beyond that where clans have formed, legends have been made, and stories have been shared. The goal now with DayZ is to explore what happens beyond simple survival after the zombie apocalypse.

“I love the way they did destructible terrain and stuff like that. I thought it was very visceral. I think we need to come up with some kind of visceral… And I like underground as a method of construction of these player bases. It fits in with the narrative I’ve been talking about with my brother, in terms of the setting and the virus and all that. I think my vision for where the players can go is, I want to see them building the world after the zombie apocalypse. So your first challenge in DayZ is surviving DayZ, and that’s what everyone’s experiencing now. It was never really intended to be more than a one- or two-day experience. It’s something of a miracle that it’s got the staying power that it does. The next stage from that is either banding together or deciding that you want to go off and be a lone wolf or whatever. But maybe you’ll have to even visit these player cities are built. Maybe different factions take over these underground cities, and then someone else comes back and takes them over again. They may swap hands several times. But basically having to dig out your city and build it from the dirt is what I see happening.”

As for the setting of the standalone DayZ game, it will begin much the same as the mod in that it’ll be based in an augmented version of Chernarus, but could grow to include things like villages, malls, underground structures or even islands, some of which could be purchased as map packs.

In the long, long term, Hall would ideally like to see DayZ continue to grow and evolve into something like EVE Online has where the players control the universe and the stories that happen within are generated by the players just as they are currently with the community already embracing the ARMA 2 mod.

DayZ represents an exciting experiment as its being shaped by what the community has embraced and what they’ve voiced as desired features, fixes and updates for the game. More on that later!


“I guess what I really want to see DayZ become is a non-standard franchise. The thing that excites me most about it is that… You take things like Star Wars or Star Trek, anything like that. The lore and the world behind that is generated by a team of writers. It’s generated by that company. What’s happening with DayZ is that the lore, the stories, and these player legions… They’re being generated by the players. Like the Black Widow and Dr. Wasteland. The Mountain Dew. It’s lucky to find it but unlucky to hold onto it or drink it. So all this stuff is coming out. I want to find ways of supporting that. I think growing that element, that initial little genesis of this entirely player-driven story world, is something I really want to see. I guess I see community maps as possibly filling in there. The more DayZ can break out of a traditional model the better. We can try things and see what works.”

Hall plans to go to PAX to do some recruitment for artists and other devs who can help program specific ideas he has into the game so stay tuned for more in the coming months as we learn more about the plans and progress of DayZ.

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What ‘DayZ’ Could Look Like if Built on ‘ARMA 3′ Engine

Bohemia Interactive’s 2009 military sim shooter ARMA 2 has been given a second life thanks to the community embracing a user-made mod for the title, calledDayZ. The mod itself has over a million players, many of which went out to buyARMA 2 just to get in on the zombie-infested action.

The popularity of the mod has had DayZ earning more media attention and buzz than Bohemia’s own next shooter, ARMA 3, but with DayZ now in development as a standalone game by Bohemia, they can benefit each other.

DayZ creator Dean “Rocket” Hall promised that as they develop DayZ as a standalone game – that could launch in beta as early as this fall – they will continue to update and support the mod version that requires ARMA 2. Part of what he promised to include in a standalone DayZ title is improved physics, buildable bases and other features, many of which that ARMA 3 will have built-in. Let’s take a look at the latest ARMA 3 screenshots from 

Gamescom 2012:

The screenshots hold true to the words shared by Bohemia creative director Ivan Buchta who mentioned during E3 that “improved graphics and related features contributing to the visual impression (e.g. animations or physics) were identified as priorities.”

ARMA 3 makes uses of the latest variant Bohemia’s own Real Virtuality, and engine that’s been vastly improved over its predecessor. Most importantly, it has a lot of what DayZ arguably needs:
Ragdoll physics
Physics for vehicles and environmental objects
Underwater environments
On-the-fly weapon customization
Uniform customization
Destructible environments
And much, much more

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if they used their latest and greatest engine to develop DayZ from the ground up with new features, while at the same time hopefully hammering out the bugs of the mod – and those ARMA 2 was notorious for at launch? While DayZ ironically won’t launch with mod support, ARMA 3 will and we can’t wait for to see the creativity of the community once again.


“The success of DayZ certainly proves that modification support is the right thing which may prove the game’s true value. DayZ’s popularity is exceptional because it reaches out of the milsim niche, but to us, every mod is important because it means someone had fun modifying our game, and brought something interesting to some more Bohemia customers.”

As for what DayZ will be built on, Hall said this on Reddit:


“It will be using its own branch of the Real Virtuality engine incorporating the best elements of all products – that’s the awesome thing about the BIS flagship engine.”

Excited?

ARMA 3 releases sometime in 2013 for the PC.

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