How can we stay alive? "Have a plan".
It was my final act at Gamescom: hunt down and interview Dean Hall, the creator of the latest indie PC phenomenon, DayZ. This I did, and these are his words.
But first: the dude’s a Kiwi! Even if you knew that already, it’s worth ramming it into your skull again, because I think it’s very important to make a big deal of New Zealanders doing well for themselves, whether they’re at home or on the other side of the world. Plus, in a sea of interviews with Brits, Americans, and Frenchmen, hearing a Kiwi accent that wasn’t my own was weird. But in a good way.
So what is DayZ? It’s a mod for military sim Arma II, a PC-based first person shooter by Bohemia Interactive. Stripping away much of that game, DayZ deposits players onto a beach with practically nothing to call their own, and they must learn to survive in a harsh world filled with zombies, hunger, limited resources, permanent deaths… and other players, who can often be your biggest threat. There are few ingredients, but they combine to create an absurdly high level of tension and excitement as you play — and that’s why the mod (and by extension, Arma II) has seen over a million downloads, and why Hall is now heading up a team to create a standalone version.
So tell me a bit about your history: what’s your path been to DayZ?
This is going to sound progressively more random: I was in the NZ army, then the Air Force, and then I took some odd jobs for a while. After that I ended up working at Sidhe Interactive with Alan [Bell, the editor of NZGamer.com]. I quit that too, and then re-listed in the Army of all things!
I did that for a couple of years, and then decided that I wanted to take a break. I’d been talking to Bohemia for a long time, and I came over to help them out on Arma III, and was working on my own mods in my own time, and that’s where DayZ came from.
So what inspired DayZ? What was the genesis?
I really like persistent world games, and having a character that continually comes back for you. It can change your psyche and your mind.
When I was re-enlisted in the army, I was sent to Singapore on an exchange program for military training. As part of that I went to Brunei and did this crazy survival course. I got really badly injured — my insides fell out and I had to have them sewn up. Basically I got malnutrition, I’d run out of food and my intestines stopped working, and when they started working again, they tore everything else up.
So I spent a lot of time in the hospital! But the survival experience stuck with me, and made me really interested in emotional tension. I wanted to make a game that had no story at all, that was just you completely doing what you wanted to do, but with all these layered tensions. So rather than looking at mechanics, I just thought of what tensions I wanted to put on the player.
So what ingredients in DayZ do you think work the best? Why do people respond so well to it?
It’s all about the tension. I looked at all the keynotes at Gamescom this year, and the companies seemed to all be talking up mechanics — like, “Look how impressive this mechanic is!” None of it really talked about how the player feels.
In DayZ, feeling is really all there is. If you look at the base mechanics, there’s really not much there — and a lot of the time, they don’t even really work properly! But there’s a lot more going on in the player’s mind — they’re freaking out over something that’s really not that scary, because they’re going, “Oh my god, I need to get food, I’m losing blood, I don’t have enough ammo!”
You know, they’re coming up to a farmhouse, and they’re actually desperate — they’re not thinking, “I need 80 more points” or anything. They’re actually desperate, because they’re going to lose their character, and maybe they’ve worked on that character for a week. So they have to think, as they approach that farmhouse: okay, I’ve only got three bullets, I really have to — like, really have to — hit that zombie inside.
That’s the most exciting part of the whole project. If you look at big licenses like Star Wars or Star Trek, the stories and lore made by teams of writers belong to a larger studio. In DayZ, the stories belong to the players, in absolutely every sense.
So there’s a standalone version coming. How easy would you rate it right now for a new player to get the game up and running, and how much will this be addressed in the upcoming version?
I think it’s probably easiest to say that DayZ, right now, is inaccessible! With the standalone version, we’re ripping out a lot of basic components [that are in there now]: everything from the infantry system to the whole UI. We’re replacing a lot of the things that currently act as barriers to getting into the game.
But in terms of providing tutorials and all that: no, we’re not going to do that. That feeling of disorientation of when you first come into the game, where you just have no idea, that’s something we need to keep.
When I first released the mod, I didn’t announce it — I just put up the download link and the server address. And I remember this moment when the first random player ever joined the game, and he must have been totally confused! You can imagine that: he knows nothing about the mod, and gets thrown into this world with no instructions, not knowing anything. And that disorientation will always be part of the game.
Now, it’s almost a rite of passage, either learning how DayZ works, or having it taught to you by friends.
So my biggest worry with consoles is, will they demand a tutorial? We don’t want to do a tutorial! But you can always negotiate — I’m pretty sure they didn’t go back to Notch and Minecraft and force them to add every single thing they wanted!
So there are plans to get this onto consoles? Or speculative ideas in that direction?
Yeah, but I guess the caveat on that is we wouldn’t even look at it until we hit two million in sales on the PC. Look at Minecraft, they waited until sales were very solid before [moving onto the Xbox].
It’s definitely technically possible, at least for the 360 — and there’s console experience within the company too. But PC will be our driving platform, and beyond that we’ll see. At Bohemia, PC will always be number one.
So what else can we expect to see in the standalone version?
We’ve got very ambitious plans with, for example, player construction. That’s not something that will come in the short term — next year is more likely.
We looked at above ground structure creation, but we ran into many problems. Minecraft can do it, but that’s because it’s quite stylised. Arma and DayZ, though, aren’t stylised at all: the graphical level and the way the world is constructed makes it very difficult to add a robust construction system.
So then we thought, why don’t we go underground? It’s like Skyrim: you can walk up to a grate, click ‘Go underground’, and you get taken to a new instance. And I’m a real fan of the Red Faction-style geo-modding they have, so we could have you digging out the terrain yourself to make your own bunker and structures.
And finally, what would you say to curious players who are maybe interested in seeing what all the fuss is about?
The first thing I’d want to say to new players curious about DayZ? Probably “Good luck!” And maybe “Have a plan!”
And I’d say that it’s about player interaction, and people are more likely to have fun if they know some friends who are playing as well.
At the moment, it’s in a Wild West stage. It’s always evolving, and only part of the game is actually in the game — the rest is outside of it, in the player’s head and in forums and so on. So embracing all of that is really recommended.
