I have to admit, I never thought I would ever see this day come, but DayZ will exit the Xbox Game Preview Program and get its first full console release on Wednesday 27th March, Bohemia Interactive has confirmed.
To celebrate the impending release, the game has also got a new cinematic trailer, which I’m pretty sure features a few tongue-in-cheek nods to the games own, long protracted development, with a character walking past graffiti on a couple of walls that read “4 years and still nothing” and “5 years but I will wait”. Check out the trailer below:
Even the official description under the trailer, which reads: “Even in the most desperate times when all that’s left seems evil and working against you, there is something worth fighting for – if only a distant memory.”, feels like it could be an inspiring quote from one of the games development meetings.
DayZ has had a very long, drawn out development. It began as a hugely-popular Arma 2 mod back in 2012, but that popularity caused it to become its own standalone project, and DayZ officially entered Early Access on Steam in 2013. From there, not much happened, with very little improvements happening to the game. People still played it, and the game was very popular on Twitch, but the lack of improvements (or signs of anything happening) eventually caused players to lose patience and move on. Dean Hall, who created the original mod, eventually left the project to start his own studio back in 2014, which caused many to think that the project was doomed, but the team at Bohemia kept going and DayZ officially joined the Xbox Game Preview Program in August 2018, before entering beta on PC in November and then finally getting its full PC release in December 2018, bringing an end to over five years of Early Access.
Bohemia Interactive says that the full Xbox One release will feature all of the changes made in the PC versions 1.01 update, which means “persistence fixes, better server performance, improved inventory performance, new weapons and scope, and more!”. There will also be some Xbox specific improvements, including:
- improved rendering performance (should prevent many FPS drops in graphics and audio)
- optimized inventory performance (improvements in performance when you have a lot of items around you on Xbox)
- better inventory interaction (changes in UI and better navigation in inventory, bugfixes)
- new controller layout
- introducing some missing controls (hold breath, leaning, dodging, better optics interactions…)
- general improvements to player controls
- night time improvements
DayZ is a post-apocalyptic zombie survival game in which enemy players are just as dangerous as the undead. DayZ is a game that is most definitely best played as a roleplay game, with chance encounters with players throwing up some tense moments, spontaneous alliances, and brutal betrayals. Bohemia probably say it better than me:
“As you probably know by now, some of the best moments in DayZ happen when you fully immerse yourself into the world of Chernarus and just live in the moment. The precious moment when you really care about what’s happening in the game, when your heart is racing because of adrenaline shootout or an emotional, roleplayed interaction with other players. The moment when you’re living your own survival story.”
That statement is completely true. We delved into DayZ’s early access release and had some truly memorable moments, but they were ultimately too few and far between and didn’t make up for the titles lack of polish and improvements. At times DayZ would become incredibly boring and nothing more than a running simulator, with us quite often referring to it as ‘DayZzzzzzzzz’ (we’re such comedians), but we can’t deny that it was, at times, pulsating stuff. We’re yet to check out the full release, but hopefully it has improved on the games issues.
DayZ will get its full Xbox One release on Wednesday 27th March.
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