DayZ Getting Special Release On PS4, New Details Revealed

DayZ will be arriving on the PlayStation 4. We've known for a while that Dean “Rocket” Hall and Bohemia Interactive wanted to port over DayZ to consoles. We've been hearing and reading about the possibility of a port for quite a time, but it always seemed like something that was so far away and far off that it seemed more like a pipe dream than a possible reality. Well, it turns out that DayZ on the PlayStation 4 is a much larger reality than a lot of gamers may have anticipated.

During this year's Sony press conference at GamesCom in Cologne, Germany, Dean “Rocket” Hall was invited on stage to talk about the upcoming release of the open-world, zombie survival game coming to Sony's latest generation console.

Dean explained that over the course of the past year the team has been working hard to bring DayZ to the PS4. Some of you might have remembered that back when Hall explained his intentions to move on to a new studio, they had ramped up the team size to deal with the growing load of the standalone release. Well, technically, they weren't just raising the dev count for the PC version of the game, but they were actually growing the team size for the PlayStation 4 release, too.

This would readily explain why the progress of the standalone has been so slow after launch, even with more people working on the game. Time was being split with what they were trying to get done on the PS4 (and presumably, setting up pipelines for the Xbox One version of the game, too).

One of the biggest obstacles that Dean and crew have been seeking to overcome is overhauling the game's core graphics renderer. They've actually managed to outfit the base game with a new base that will be shared between the PC and the home consoles. They've overhauled the engine back in June, which will allow Bohemia Interactive to update the game faster and patch in new content quicker. This will be key for getting things up and running on the PS4 in a timely fashion.

According to Hall, the new renderer that they're using for the console version of the game will help improve the optimization and performance of DayZ's standalone on the PC as well.

Of course, DayZ is known for being a buggy mess and I'm terribly curious to know how well the devs will address and deal with stabilizing the game on the PS4's fixed hardware. One of the biggest issues they've had so far is getting the server to deal with handling players, item spawning, zombie counts and other active-world properties that can really wreck havoc on a system's performance.

Dean didn't give a release date or even a release window as to when we can expect to see DayZ launch on the PlayStation 4. It's expected given that there's still no release date as to when we can expect the standalone version of the game to become available on PC.

Now I wasn't expecting Hall to give any details on the Xbox One version, but he focused mainly on the game being made available for the PS4. I'm sure we'll get more details on the Xbox One version at a later date, as well as a potential launch window as to when console gamers can expect some version of the title to launch on their systems.