DayZ has left Early Access, and you can play it free for the weekend

The prophecy has come to pass: DayZ has left Early Access. The patch bringing it to version 1.0 is now live on all servers, and as an added bonus, the multiplayer survival game is free to play from now until December 17. See the launch trailer—wow, it really, actually launched—above.

"Over the past days the team has come closer together and worked more passionately than ever to make this important leap happen," reads a post on DayZ's site. "And of course, we have seen the support from our community, be it in Tweets, PMs or via Reddit. We want to thank every single one of you for your patience and endurance through the years."

I suspect there may be a hotfix in order: I've been watching TheRunningManZ as he's been streaming the 1.0 patch on the experimental server today, and his framerates have been much lower than usual, around 20-25 fps at best from what I've seen. Hopefully that will be sorted out soon: a tweet from the DayZ account says the issue is being looked into.

Update: A fix has arrived that will hopefully solve the fps issue. Restart Steam to see if it helps.

Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.