Dean Hall explains the six changes that will improve DayZ

Progress on DayZ seems to be moving slow, it's out in Early Access form but there is still a long road ahead before it is officially done. However, changes are coming and Dean Hall has gone ahead and listed six upcoming features that will change the game for the better.

Speaking to Gamespot, Dean Hall first went on to describe the game's upcoming engine changes, which will switch out the old Direct X 9 effects for new DX 11 ones, which will allow for all new lighting effects: “We lose a lot of time. But implementing DirectX 10 or 11 will have a dramatic, instant visual difference and quite a significant performance difference.”

In addition to this engine change, the team behind DayZ is looking to bring in new server technology, which will allow for more zombies than ever before. “It allows us to use a lot more RAM, which helps us a great deal with spawning in thousands more items into the world. It means we can have more zombies. It means we can have more loot items.”

The third game improvement helps new players, the spawn points in the game have moved so that instead of survivors spawning in the south and traveling to the North, you will now spawn in the east and have to travel west. Item spawns have also been ramped up: “Each building type has hundreds of places that items can spawn, and hundreds of different possible items. The problem is, the system goes through the buildings one by one. When it gets near the end of the list, it can often run out. Unfortunately, the last items in the list are the new areas.”

Next on the list is global loot rarity, which will change up the in-game economy a bit: “We'll say there can only be, for example, a hundred night-vision goggles in the whole world across all servers. Then, once your character dies, or that item gets destroyed, it makes a new one available to spawn on a server.”

The fifth upcoming improvement adds more realism to the survival aspect of the game, hunting will be added in and the weather will have an impact on how you play and what you need to do: “At the moment, it means you'll use more calories when it's cold, and you'll use more water when it's hot. But we want to expand that dramatically–hypothermia, and things like that.”

The final upcoming game change is all about fixing the clunky controls. The control system in DayZ is the same as it is in Arma, which is bad. Hall wants a new control scheme implemented which could be inspired by the simplicity of Minecraft in addition to Skyrim's Frostfall mod:

“What's cool about Minecraft is it's very visceral. ou walk up to something and you bang it. The Frostfall mod, if you want to light a fire, you place your fireplace, equip a torch to your hand, and then you bash it with your torch. So I think that's where we want to go. We want to have your different stances, and depending on your item, it will do different things.”

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KitGuru Says: So DayZ is due to receive a fair few changes, I still won't be buying it until the final release but this should make the game better for the people who invested £2 million in to the game once it launched on Steam Early Access. Do any of you guys still play the DayZ standalone? Or are you holding off until the final release? 

Source: Gamespot

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