Some games are announced onstage. Others just sort of slip out in conversation. It transpires that DayZ’s Dean Hall is making at least two games, with two different companies.
One is Ion, the isometric sci-fi MMO he’s building in London with simulation specialists Improbable. The other is a virtual reality game his New Zealand studio RocketWerkz are building for SteamVR.
Hall has agreed to make the second game, which he mentioned in charmingly offhand fashion to Eurogamer at E3, for Valve’s holodeck-like VR hardware.
The DayZ designer was impressed by his ValveVR experience with the HTC Vive headset – and convinced to develop for it by Portal and Left 4 Dead writer Chet Faliszek.
“He contacted me very early on in DayZ’s development and he’s been all through everything,” said Hall. “He’s been a huge mentor. And I actually got a chance to see him speak, and I spoke myself, at [gaming and VR conference] Slush Play in Iceland. And, to be honest, that was the final convincing for me. So I really liked what he had to say.”
Hall said his team at Rocketwerkz was currently working on a “much simpler game” than Ion – but it’s not clear whether that’s the SteamVR effort or something else again. Busy busy!
While we’re here – what do you make of a single-player DayZ?