When will DayZ be finished? It’s a simple question, but there’s a good reason Dean Hall and friends can’t provide a simple answer: the idea of what a finished DayZ might look like grows bigger all the time. It might still be in Early Acess, but our DayZ review suggests that if you pick it up now you’re gonna have fun.

“I think to a certain extent it’s a case of ‘beware what you wish for’,” Hall told PCGamesN. “When you look at the evolution of plans of DayZ, there’s been more plans than days in the year, you know? Every time it can’t get any crazier or bigger than this it gets bigger.”

Much of DayZ’s increased scope has related to ambitious plans for underground base architecture.

“Any game development is making decisions as you go along,” explained Hall. “As we’ve gone along some of the reasons why we felt we couldn’t build above ground have disappeared.”

Standalone DayZ now uses optimised multiplayer code and 64-bit servers, which means the Bohemia dev team aren’t restricted by RAM. And once they get multicore and multithreading working, they’ll be able to support hundreds of thousands of items above ground too.

The team are also developing a brand new engine for the game, designed to accommodate dynamic lighting, physics, and all the benefits of DirectX 10 and 11.

“Scope creep is a problem,” admitted Hall. “But I think there’s been such an investment from everyone that we had to go back and make sure the scope fitted accordingly.”

Between all that and weekly release windows which require “a whole lot of things to align for an update”, DayZ is going to be a game that takes time.

Hall says the community are just as ambitious in their feedback – part of this is a matter of meeting their expectations as early adopters. Where would you like to see DayZ end up?