The holiday season is over, and as everyone is getting back to work (sigh!), we’re seeing increased developer activity from the guys behind the DayZ Standalone. On the official DayZ dev-blog, the makers of DayZ took the time to thank the community for the continuing support and shed some light on what the future plans for development hold.
Here’s a list of the upcoming, high priority additions to the game:
- Server performance, stability and security
- Animals & hunting
- Cooking & gathering resources
- Playable user customizable vehicles
- Player created constructions in the environment
- More complex interactions with the environment and crafting options
- Streamlined user actions and interface
- Control and animations expanded and improved for fluidity
- Upgraded graphics and physics engine (including ragdoll, etc.)
- Support of user mods and more flexibility for user hosted servers and game types
In addition, Rocket’s team also underlined a few weeks ago that increasing zombie count is a top priority. They aim to improve zombie path-finding, animations, make zombies a higher threat and create a zombie and loot respawn system that does not affect server and client performance.
Speaking about performance, recent tweets from Rocket himself revealed that some additional bugs were discovered, affecting fps and server stability, and causing rubber-banding and desync. These issues will be solved in the next updates.
Big performance bug discovered that sometimes affected servers, creating rubber-banding and other bugs. Pos fix in testing. #DayZDaily
— Dean Hall (@rocket2guns) January 7, 2014
Lastly, the devs have announced that DayZ will not enter a beta stage before the end of 2014: “Please keep in mind that we do not expect to reach Beta status sooner than the end of 2014”. This means that there’s still a lot of work ahead, but it also means that there’s plenty of time for development, and given the amount of success the game has had financially, we can only be optimistic regarding the future of the game. You can read the full announcement on the DayZ devblog.