Dev Update/Brian
Greetings Survivors!
The last few months for DayZ has included a lot of review meetings. Both technical and gameplay design related - and now it's come that time where we have some solid information to share with you all on the upcoming 0.63 Experimental and Stable updates. Where we are with it, what we're looking at it being - and in short to offer some clear transparency to you all looking at it forward.
Some of this information might be frustrating to read, and some of it might get your own internal hype train running. The important thing from the information we will be laying out today is that you all understand where we are with the move away from legacy DayZ, and why we've made the decisions we have.
That said, I'll let Eugen take it away and guide you all through what we're looking at.
- Brian Hicks / Creative Director
Dev Update/Eugen
Hello everyone. Being candid is the core of the relationship we have as a studio with you, our community. That includes openly talking about things that we know will cause a lot of disappointment and negative feelings. I'll start right of the bat with one such thing: unfortunately, there will be no other major release this year (that means we won't be releasing 0.63 on neither Experimental and Stable branches).
PLANS FOR THE REST OF 2017 & 0.63 EXPERIMENTAL GOALS
I'm going to be very straightforward: along with releasing 0.62 Stable, it has been our main internal goal to get 0.63 Experimental out this year (as mentioned in Status Report on April 18) - we have put pretty much all our resources on that task, but as of now, we already know that the scope we will be able to achieve by the end of 2017 does not represent a full DayZ experience, and therefore blocks the 0.63 Experimental release..
Large chunks of the core gameplay loop are just now getting more settled, but there are still core features that are heavily work in progress, or not implemented - for example vaulting, swimming, and vehicles - and unfortunately that means that despite all the progress we've made on the other parts of the game, this is still not enough for a potential Experimental release.
We do understand that all you guys want is to play 0.63 - and while it would be possible to have some Experimental 0.63 release this year that would be relatively stable and enjoyable for a short period of time, just releasing something is not a viable approach this time around. Both 0.63 Experimental and 0.63 Stable (= BETA) are key releases for us, as they are the last steps before we leave Early Access.
And since it's so important, we have a set of so called epic goals that are implemented into everything we're making for the game in the new engine. These goals are:
- Performance
- Stability
- Control
- Balance
We want to avoid any issues from lack of oversight in development or project architecture - for example we just want to make sure that our infected numbers and player numbers per server are as high as possible, and both DayZ client and server apps maintaining good, reliable up-time.
To get a better understanding of what still needs to be done on our end before we can push the first 0.63 Experimental, read through this bullet point overview of our focus areas. All of the listed features are in different stages of development, and a team or person dedicated to its completion. These are the features we want to see finalized before experimental release.
Read more here (we're not posting in Steam directly today due to the formatting):
https://dayz.com/blog/status-report-28th-november
Header picture: MAMAD_NZR