When Dean "Rocket" Hall started working on the zombie-themed DayZ mod for Bohemia Interactive's ArmA II, he figured it would get a decent response from the few thousand people in the game's devoted modding community. But now that DayZ has broken through to mainstream gaming success—recently crossing over the one million player threshold—it's starting to outgrow the game that it was initially built on top of.

That's why Hall, now a full-time project manager at Bohemia's Prague headquarters, is leading up the development of a standalone version of DayZ (currently planned for release later this year). It's a move that will help directly monetize what has, until now, just been an extremely effective marketing tool for the core ArmA II game. It's also a move that will free DayZ itself from some design constraints imposed by building on top of the structure of a very different, pre-existing game.

"ArmA was designed for a pretty broad purpose, but it was designed as a military simulator," Hall said in an interview with Ars. "The purpose of DayZ is very different, so that's why it needs to make the transition."

No more compromises

Working on top of ArmA II's pre-set canvas led to some compromises in the design of DayZ, Hall said. The zombies in the mod, for instance, are simply altered versions of ArmA soldiers. This means they run directly at players at full speed, an artifact of the host game's pathfinding AI.

That doesn't exactly fit with the vision Hall has for a wide variety of zombies in the final game, ranging from shambling, starved undead to well-fed monsters that have become more threatening as the virus has continued to eat away at their brains (Hall says he'll be working with his brother, a virologist in his native New Zealand, to integrate that kind of world-building narrative context into the final game, and reveal it to players as they play).

"The way I look at DayZ as a mod, it's really a bit of a hack, and not very clean," he said. "When you make it a standalone, you can actually say, 'How do I want zombies to behave,' not just 'What are the options?' In a lot of cases I was left with not too many options, so now I have options."

A lot of the perceived "weaknesses" in the ArmA II engine DayZ is built on are just a reflection of the zombie game's very different focus, Hall said. "The inventory system is a good example. Inventory isn't really a key part of ArmA, because you generally play with what you've got... [but] inventory and gear are key to DayZ—it's DayZ's leveling—so that's why that's very important."

Keeping the edge

The war with The War Z

Anyone with even passing familiarity with DayZ will find a lot that seems pretty familiar in Anyone with even passing familiarity with DayZ will find a lot that seems pretty familiar in The War Z , a zombie-themed survival horror MMO that has already attracted over 100,000 beta signups since being announced last month. Despite the similarities, though, Hall doesn't seem too concerned about being ripped off. "I'm not gonna say I'm thrilled about it—I'm not going to invite them over for a cup of tea," he said, "[but] I don't think you can steal an idea. Competition isn't a bad thing... If they take that idea and make something awesome out of it, great. That's the ultimate form of flattery." And just because DayZ and The War Z share some surface similarities doesn't mean the former game is going to be so easy to copy wholesale, Hall says. "I believe, maybe kind of arrogantly, that DayZ is innovative, and DayZ is always going to be innovative, and anybody who tries to clone it is going to be in a difficult position, because they have to go so much further. That's why DayZ is in that fairy tale position. It's ours to lose, basically… "Let's see what the game is before anyone passes any judgment. I'd hope that people would buy the one that's best when it's out."



Changes to things like the inventory interface and even the basic installation process will make the standalone DayZ a bit more accessible than the existing mod, Hall said. But improving accessibility doesn't mean Hall wants to mess with the mod's unforgiving core design, which drops players into its zombie-filled world without weapons or any real guidance or direction.

"A difficult edge and a steep learning curve is part of that disorientation," Hall said. "I think the community does a pretty good job of educating itself. I think making the game intuitive to the point where it doesn't need a tutorial would be the aim that we're looking for. If we have to provide complex tutorials, we're not only breaking the immersion but we've also failed at our development job."

But there will be some changes to playability brought on by the move from mod to game. Rebuilding from the ground up with the latest version of Bohemia's Real Virtuality engine (which was shown to great effect powering ArmA III at this year's E3) will also allow the standalone DayZ to have more diffuse nighttime lighting, rather than the practically unplayable near-pitch-blackness of the current mod.

"[ArmA II] wasn't really designed to not have any lights at all in the world," he said. "DayZ rips all the lights out of the world [at night] except for the odd torch and some flares that didn't exist in the base game, so it's not able to cope very well. These are the kinds of issues that are very easy to look at as a standalone, because we know what needs to be fixed so we go in there and change it in the source."

For the standalone release, Hall said his team is also looking into changing the mod's odd, hybrid server structure. Currently, this stores a player's current location, inventory, and status on a central server and maintains those attributes even as that player hops between independently maintained game servers. Hall said a more unified, central, MMO-style cloud server would be "the holy grail," and cited EVE Online's servers, full of uncharted space and plenty of PvP action, as "the fantastic example I can think of."

Release early, update often

While Hall says the core design of DayZ won't change in the move from mod to standalone game, it might expand a little. "The design is just a husk, the idea is to expand the design with base building, more sensible crafting... more control over the world, group play; those things are definitely areas we want to expand."

But a lot of these features are currently being planned for the longer term. The immediate goal for the DayZ development team, Hall says, is fixing the bugs and hackable exploits that make the current mod a bit unstable at times. After that point, he says, the game will follow the Minecraft model, with lots of small, iterative updates that add new features in response to the community's desires.

That could lead to some frequent changes in the way the game is played, if the history of player reactions to the mod's development are any indication. "We see a lot of butterfly effect in the data," Hall said. "Even the smallest change released in a patch has big impacts. There's an initial golden period after an update is released where we see a lot of anxiety in players... people go in fairly gingerly and aren't killing other players and are cooperating. Then after a couple of hours of the update being released, they suddenly go nuts and start killing each other. It's almost like a rubber band; after time it oscillates back down to its more stable form of grouping up based on real-life friends."