Standalone DayZ could slip to 2013

DayZ creator Dean Hall has warned that the standalone version of the game could well miss its proposed 2012 release date.

We are still working towards a target for an initial foundation before the end of the year,” he said on the game’s blog. But we will slip this date if needed, we will not compromise the project for the short-term gain of meeting this date.

The reasons for any slippage would be publicly discussed, and would most likely represent a failure personally on my part to plan correctly. We will be assessing the results of our major architectural changes at the end of next week, and reporting the results to everyone when we have assessed that.

Let me make this very clear, our foundation release (targeted for this year), is simply the beginning. We are committed to a period of development of at least 12 months beyond that.”

Hall went on to explain that the scale of the project has increased as it has progressed. So much so, in fact, that the game is effectively running on an entirely new game engine.

Due to the success of the development so far, and the interest in the project in general – we decided we want to do things properly. This means we have been very bold with our architectural changes. We are moving to the server-client MMO architecture model. We are making weapons and items ‘entities”, meaning we can support customization and variables assigned against items.

This is a massive departure from the previous engine. In many ways, once this phase is completed – one could effectively say that DayZ is running on a new version of the engine. While the graphics may look the same (for now), under the hood so much is being completely rewritten.”