Dean “Rocket” Hall has been trudging away in the trenches of development war, working hard to bring the standalone version of the zombie apocalypse survival game, DayZ, to the masses this year. Well, recently Hall laid out a few more details on what gamers can expect from the alpha test.
In an interview with Gamasutra, Hall stated that...
So what we're doing at the moment is, we gave free keys as a gift to the forum moderators, the Reddit moderators, people who helped out with DayZ development, and stuff like that. I guess there's about 30-100 people involved with that.From here, once we've finished our server/client architecture -- because we're moving it an MMO model -- we're reviewing the situation of that in June, and then we do an alpha, just like Minecraft. People pay X amount of dollars and they get early, cheap access to it, and then once it's beta, price goes up, maybe, say, $10, and once it goes retail, the price goes up $10.
That sounds very reasonable. If you can get into the alpha for about $5 through $10 I would rock that. Bugs, glitches and clipping issues galore, I think I would just want to see how the basic structure of the standalone is setup and run around the new and improved, post-apocalyptic Cherno, especially based on all the cool screenshots.
“Rocket” has also already confirmed that the closed alpha testing is already underway and selected gamers are already playing it up on the single server they have running, and that Valve has accommodated them with a brand new method of updating the game so that fixes and patches come in fast, furious and clean like an F22 landing briskly at the Luke Field Air Base in Arizona...
We are doing content updates all the time. The Steam model is really working well for us. Valve approached us and they said, "What do you guys want, to make things easier?" and we said, "Well, we want delta patching." Luckily they were just about to bring that out. That's where, instead of downloading the whole file when it updates, it just downloads the part [that has changed.]And it's already built into our build process. So the artists, they download the game via Steam, and our internal development process uses Steam to patch their stuff.
Sweet, sweet Mary that's good news.
This means that gamers will be able to jump into the alpha about sometime in early to mid June going by Rocket's comments. I guess a lot of it still depends on the server/client architecture finalization.
If you're excited about the DayZ standalone but can't wait any longer, you can still check out the free mod, which is available on Steam right now. For more information feel free to visit the official DayZ Tumblr.
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