DayZ , the increasingly popular ArmA II: Combined Operations mod that turns the military shooter into a hardcore zombie survival game, has a surprisingly large number of players. Mod creator and multiplayer designer at Bohemia Interactive Dean ‘Rocket’ Hall is as surprised as anyone, commenting "We released the alpha in April...and next thing you know we have 420,000 unique players."

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While Hall and the rest of the people working on the mod currently make no money from the project, it's clear that he's proud of the amount of people playing DayZ. At peak hours the mod sees over 20,000 concurrent players, with 10,000 during off-peak hours and over 100,000 players every day. That's a pretty amazing growth for just over three months of an alpha release.In the future Hall says that he wants to game to transition from being a "mod" to a fully-fledged video game. According to Hall even buying ArmA II helps, since it sends a "really clear message not only to Bohemia but to the industry itself." To continue the game's progression, Hall says that the long term plan is to try and turn it into a standalone game, using the Minecraft model of releasing a paid alpha that nets early adopters free updates. In the short term Hall wants to develop an "end-game" for DayZ, focusing on group content. Also planned is better website and forum integration, "pushing statistics more," increasing the game's stability and dog companions.Other places Hall would like to see DayZ grow include more survival skills and changes to construction. Hall wants people to be able to play based on their playstyles, "if you have certain skills in real life, then those should be transferable in real life." Hall would really love to see survival aspects extended, giving the example of a person who can read the stars in real life using that in-game. Construction, too, is something Hall wants to change. Currently he says that construction above ground can cause performance problems, so he's looking into a way that makes sense with the narrative to have the player build underground, perhaps even in an instanced environment.For more on DayZ you should check out our latest impressions. Source: Eurogamer