The latest dev blog post reveals the DayZ teams hopes and plans for 2015, including many player requested features.
The zombie wasteland is a cold and dark place. Many of us are still in limbo in Chernarus, waiting for features that could be considered ‘end game’ content. Survival is one thing, but rebuilding is a part of the concept of surviving. DayZ so far has a lot of amazing features that cover survival, whether it is making splints out of sticks and rags to fix a broken leg, or decontaminating water to save yourself from illness, figuring out your blood type so as to not die from blood poisoning from a fellow survivors good will, or hunting for bucks to ensure you keep yourself fed.
Fans all have their own ideas of what the game needs to become more than a game about surviving for the sake of surviving, and a lot of those features are on the planned roadmap for 2015, listed below.
Q1 2015
Basic vehicles
Central economy (advanced loot distribution)
New renderer
New Zombie AI
Basic stealth system (zombies, animals, …)
Diseases
Q2 2015
Advanced vehicles (repair, modifications, …)
Advanced animals – life cycle, group behavior
Player statistics
New UI Stamina / fatigue
Dynamic events
Q3 2015
Traps
Barricading
Character life span + soft skills
Animal predators + birds
Aerial transport
Console prototype
Q4 2015
BETA version
Animal companions (dog, horse)
Steam community integration (Achievements, Steamworks modding, etc)
Construction (building shelters / walls / …)
Whether it is wishful thinking, or is actually possible to add that much content in a year is obviously unclear and will be until 2016. With the actual progress compared to their previous goals, it would be understandable for us fans to be slightly skeptical of them actually achieving that much in such a short period, but either way it is good to at least know what to expect from the game. Even if only a few of those major features are added, it will bring a whole new level to an already deep gaming experience.
Also outlined in the blog post is the plans for increasing the price of DayZ. A topic that I am sure nobody really wants to think about, but as an inevitable part of the newly conceptualised idea of early access games. We pay a cheaper price early on to help development of the game, but as the product gets closer to completion, it is expected for the price to raise. However the DayZ team have raised the price and then immediately dropped it back to the previous price as part of a sale. Technically it isn’t really on sale at the moment, but it has prolonged how long the price will remain at its current point for at least a few more days. So basically if you were waiting for DayZ to drop in price, you may be waiting a long time and snatching it up now before the price grows any more is probably advisable. It is the nature of Steam to discount the products for sale on their marketplace, but as the game won’t be complete for quite some time, you may be waiting a very long time before those kinds of discounts are found.
