Usually, nothing is worse than playing a game that comes out
into the world with random bugs, rough-hewn ideas and a lack of polish. But
those same things have arguably made DayZ a chart-topping success story—more than a million
copies sold in a month— ever since its standalone alpha version hit Steam a month ago.
Part of the fascination with DayZ over
the last two years has been in watching the game learn how to walk. Dean
Hall’s creation started as a mod to ultra-realistic military shooter Arma II
and eventually became its own self-contained release. Like the Walking Dead comic books and games
before it—which themselves follow in a long lineage—DayZ re-works typical zombie genre conventions by drawing tension
from humans’ interactions with each other, not the ravenous undead. The most interesting
things in the game revolve around how players
treat other players.
https://kotaku.com/this-might-be-the-greatest-zombie-game-ever-made-5908753
But the other big reason that DayZ’s found such a zealous
userbase is because people want to be inside the house as it’s being built. Hall recently told MCV that players know
what they’re getting into:
Being very open with the release helped a great deal. We
were as honest as we could be with people about the state of the Alpha so that
people could make their own minds up. Our customers are smart, so they are
going to figure out the state of the game quickly
Even at this early stage, you can see players on
the official DayZ forums asking
for some features to be fast-tracked and for others to be fixed or tweaked. There’s
a drive to know that—maybe, just maybe—one’s feedback will influence part of
the final release.
The minimalist take on zombie apocalypse survival spurs some
of the behavior in question, which people record and share and talk about. That
in turn gets more curious people to pick DayZ
up, forming a nice little loop that pulls more people into its world’s-end
scenario. The developers have said that beta probably won’t happen until
the end of 2014 but it’s a safe bet that folks will keep showing up to
experience the game whether it’s finished or not.
