DayZ Standalone Now Available

The site has crashed. Bohemia Interactive has just launched the DayZ standalone and their site – within minutes of the game's launch – has crashed. The alpha release of one of the most highly anticipated games of the year has also made its way onto Steam. Just as well, you can expect an overload of Steam's store.

We're unable to access the site at the moment, but thankfully some resourceful chaps on Reddit managed to grab snapshots of the Bohemia Interactive store page before the whole thing crashed, where you can view the price of the alpha release below if you live abroad. For those of you purchasing via Steam in the Yank counties, the game is available for only $29.99.

Even though you can purchase DayZ from the BIS, the key you receive will be for your Steam account. In a way, this will help dissipate some of the massive surge of users all piling onto Steam to grab their digital copy of the true survival-horror, post-apocalyptic zombie game.

Dean “Rocket” Hall and the crew at Bohemia Interactive have been working long and hard on the standalone release of DayZ, starting during the late summer of 2012 in hopes of getting the game out as soon as possible before the market would become over-flooded with cheap knockoffs and cash-ins, like Infestation, previously known as The WarZ.

The new and improved DayZ includes a completely overhauled inventory system so newbies can get in and micromanagement to their heart's content without accidentally dropping or destroying items like in Arma 2's original inventory setup. The game sports tons of customizable clothing options so you can make your apocalyptic survivor look as snazzy, menacing, cool, collected, crazy or dangerous as you want. I can't wait to see some gas-mask wearing, shirtless, ax-wielding psychos running around. That would be some real Mad Max-esque awesomeness right there.

Despite all the changes, upgrades and modifications, DayZ is still an alpha release. Keep in mind that while the standalone is now available the thing is still a jangily mess and you are forewarned heading in about all the bugs, glitches and crashes you're likely to experience, assuming you'll even be able to log-in due to the high traffic.

I'm going to go out a limb and say that this will probably beat out Starbound as the top selling game of the week come Sunday's Steam reports. I wonder if they'll be able to maintain their record last year when they managed to stay in Steam's Top 10 for months on end? That was some impressive stuff right there.

You can head to the Steam Store to pick up a digital copy of the DayZ standalone, which is available right now in its early alpha version via Steam's Early Access program. And don't forget to watch your back for a few glitches or two.