Dean “Rocket” Hall revealed that the team at Bohemia have already begun a closed alpha test for DayZ’s Standalone release with the forum moderators and active members of the Reddit community. All told, there’s between 30 – 100 non-developers testing the game as we speak.
If you feel jealousy boiling up your gullet as you read this hopefully you can take some solace in the fact that the alpha is opening up to all and sundry this June.
Speaking to Gamasutra in an interview about the development process of DayZ’s Standalone release, Hall said “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.” They’re testing the game, seeing how stable it is with a limited number of players in a single server, all as prep for the gradual launch beginning this June.
“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.”
When Rob spoke with Hall back in March the lead developer spoke about how the studio planned to have a subdued release and ramp up the number of servers slowly, they would be actively trying to oppose the traditional MMO release issue of too many players for too few servers by cutting back on marketing the game’s launch.