The team currently slaving away on DayZ‘s standalone version on Steam have announced recently that the game is scheduled to exit from Early Access at some point in 2018 following the stable release of patch 0.63.
In a post published on November 28th, 2017, lead producer Eugen Harton explained…
“As soon as the PC BETA is headed in a way we like, we’re still committed to bringing DayZ to Xbox, where we have a large community of gamers patiently (very patiently!) waiting for a truly hardcore online survival game. All of that will (and must) happen next year – meaning we’re just about to start what could possibly be the most exciting year for DayZ so far. In short: DayZ will be out of Early Access next year, and we’ll also finally deliver it to console players in 2018.
“Make no mistake: this commitment is done taking all of our previous scheduling mistakes into the account. We’re serious about it.”
As much as I would love to assume that the team will whip up a boatload of content and finish off the upcoming build before moving on to 1.00 in a very timely manner, let’s not forget that the game has been in development for four years and had a lot of setbacks on the networking front, the graphics engine front, and the stability front.
Dean “Rocket” Hall started things off but eventually bailed on the project, leaving Brian Hicks in charge of DayZ.
The team has a ton of ups and downs over the years, and their latest push to finish off 0.63 – with the experimental build set to launch in 2018, followed by a stable release – doesn’t look like the sort of thing that could be done within three month’s time. I mean, even if they do manage to overhaul the AI, improve the gameplay stability, improve a large portion of the player animations, tweak the animal AI, add more weapons, fix up the network stability, and tweak the vehicles, gameplay, UI, inventory and special effects, they still have tons more work to follow that before 1.00 would be ready for release.
They have plans on getting 0.63 done and then they’re skipping every other leg of the race and going straight to 1.00, where they have plans on adding in new animations, new pipelines, new particles, new physics, new tools, new localization, new modding capabilities, new network stability, new basebuilding, new dynamic events, improved vehicles, overhauled infected AI behavior, new weapons, new UI, and a new launcher.
Unless they plan on knocking out tons of these features each week, it doesn’t seem entirely likely that they’ll be able to complete 0.63, move into beta, move into 1.00 and then launch a stable version on the Xbox One all in 2018. Judging by the progress the team has been making over the years, I would estimate another two years of development before they complete all of those features. But hey, if they can manage to get all of that stuff done over the course of the next year, then I’ll tip my hat off to them.
You can look for 0.63 to launch in early 2018, and after that the team will begin working on the beta and then finally graduating from Early Access for the release of 1.00.
DayZ is currently available on the Steam store for $34.99.
(Main image courtesy of Gopniklxrd =DD)
