In a special interview during E3 , DayZ creator and lead designer Dean Hall sat down and answered questions submitted and voted on by the r/DayZ community. Reddit user DrBigMoney compiled the questions and sent them around to media outlets, and VG24/7 managed to get Hall on camera to answer.
Since r/DayZ is one of the most active segments of the DayZ community, the questions all concern hotly anticipated and wished-for features as the wildly successful Arma 2 mod transitions to becoming a standalone game.
One of the earliest questions tested Hall's devotion to the survival-horror theme: will suicide be allowed?
“Suicide will be an option, most likely in the form of right-click on a weapon and then click 'suicide,'” Hall said. “Obviously there's some controversial elements to that, but we really felt that it's a major part of the apocalypse. If you read a book like The Road you can see that it's very important there. And I think if it's alright for a literary work then it's something that we need to seriously consider.”
Hall also discussed players building bases: “What I really want to do is an instance-style, like Skyrim, walk up to a grate in the ground, go into a cavern, and then from there Red Faction-style digging out the cavern. It might not be possible for technical reasons with multiplayer.”
Some of the other features Hall discussed were:
- Clothing and equipment degradation: being injured will damage clothing, and walking will damage shoes. Walking without shoes will cause injury.
- Random public game events: the team doesn't want to manufacture anything in the game, so what happens in the game will be caused entirely by players.
- Barricades: barricades will be included, but they aren't implemented yet.
- Safe zones: zombies will not respawn once they've been cleared from an area, but wandering zombies will reinfest a zone if it isn't secured.
- Players who jump from server to server will be warned and then stopped.
“One of the things we're doing is really going back to basics,” Hall said. “The overarching theme of this is we're going to tidy up what is in the alpha at the moment and actually allow people to give us feedback.”
The DayZ standalone version is currently in development. We recently covered news of diseases in the world of DayZ and explored some footage of the new game.
