Dean Hall outlines plans for game ‘nobody would dare make’

DayZ creator Dean Hall says that the zombie simulator chapter of his life is closed and that his attention has now fully shifted to work on a brand new title.

He has teamed up with Improbable, who have produced the tech behind Bossa Studios’ Worlds Adrift.

My first meeting with [Improbable CEO] Herman Narula was one of the most surreal I ever had,” Hall wrote. The technology I had always wanted and tried to make was finally here. DayZ was born out of my aborted attempts to make a database architecture to support my wild mass multiplayer ideas. But now, I didn’t need a ten-year plan to make my grand visions of multiplayer come true. I could do it now.

I believe we are on the cusp of a new era in making video games. The old ways we make and release games are tired, old and tattered. They worked when we had a retail focused market where you needed the distributor hyped about your game, in order to get them to stock shelves. I am rejecting these old rules and approaches; the focus on hype, on market research, and cool features. The technology exists now to make the kinds of video game worlds I have always wanted.

Liberated from the constraints of intense community focus, freed from guilt of using other peoples money; I am working with Improbable to make one of the games I have always wanted to make. Already the process of development has been so emotionally rewarding that I consider the entire budget of the project to be money well spent. This is what making video games is about for me. It is about trying new things; being bold.”

So what of the game? Well, for now, virtually nothing has been revealed.

I want to make the video games that nobody would dare make,” he added, vaguely. I want to take the crazy ideas and I want to put the best people and money behind them.

What if the most experienced video game staff in the world collaborated on the most esoteric and hardcore survival games without trying to please a major audience? What if games were made that did not seek to make money? What if we could get an incredibly well resourced team to just focus on making great games with no distractions? In return for creating DayZ, I’ve been given the opportunity to make video games from an entirely economically independent standpoint. I don’t intend to squander that.”