DayZ is one of those games that attract an unusual amount of interest. The game, originally a mod for ARMA II, has become a monster of its own, despite not being technically finished. When creator Dean Hall stood on the Gamescom stage two years ago and announced the zombie survival game would hit consoles, the monster grew bigger fangs and threatened to eat everything it saw.
Since the announcement, console owners have been salivating at the thought of playing DayZ for themselves. That salivation has turned to consternation, as no word has been heard since that announcement. Creative director Brian Hicks has recently spoken about the game and it’s progress, hoping to convince console owners that the game is still on its way.
“No it’s not dead at all,” Brian Hicks recently told Eurogamer. “It’s not dead at all.
“The PC is our flagship platform for DayZ. That is where 99 per cent of our development resources are focused. And while there was a lot of push from Sony and Microsoft to get up on their stages and say ‘yes, we’re coming’, our focus has been exclusively (I want to say exclusively because there’s about a one per cent development resource trying to keep those platforms at a point at which, once we get to our beta and our bug fixing, we can start pushing forward on that) on the PC. We can’t really move DayZ over to these platforms, at least on a playable level for consumers, until the base engine, Enfusion, is complete. Or if not complete, feature-complete so to speak – the core tech is there.”
Needless to say, without the Enfusion engine is completed and bulletproof, there’s no need to consider porting to other platforms. Many experts in the field pen early 2017 as the time Enfusion is ready and ports can be worked on. First on the list is Microsoft, given their support of early access via the Xbox Game Preview program.
“Microsoft has been very eager – I’ll say this much – for us to get it on their platform, the Xbox Game Preview program,” Hicks said. “We do keep a small group of programmers on making sure that our PS4 and our Xbox One version are at least, tech wise, it’s running on those platforms. But we’re not going to be releasing any announcements on dates for those and I don’t think we ever have.
“Once we get to a point with the PC that we’re comfortable and we can start dedicating a little resources into catching up those [console] platforms then we’ll look at doing some announcements and talk about the Xbox Game Preview program, which is what I would imagine is the first place we’ll get to since Sony doesn’t have something similar.”
This news will help assuage DayZ fans on console, but not too much. It’s a waiting game; let’s hope the wait isn’t much longer than already anticipated.
