Not for Bohemia the choreographed demos favoured by EA and Ubisoft; instead, they’ve rolled up to E3 with a still-warm build of DayZ, replete with clipping issues and a knockdown feature added just this morning.
In the VG247 demo below, you’ll find Bohemia’s disarmingly media-untrained Matt Lightfoot running (often quite literally) through some of DayZ Standalone’s newer features.
The first thing you’ll notice are the quite yummy third-person animations that put to shame those of similar hybrid-viewpoint games like Skyrim. Beyond that, there’s a new ‘surrender’ gesture that should make for some memorable roleplay, as well as a classic RPG-style looting system which means you can now pick up and drop items from your immediate radius indirectly via your inventory.
The inventory is also home to DayZ’s simplistic new crafting system, in which players will drag and drop one item onto another to combine the two. In the video, Lightfoot shows how purification tablets can be used to make dirty water ready for consumption.
Of course, as exciting as it is to visit the coalface of development, that’s also where the biggest bugs live. Downed zombies regularly half-vanish through walls and floors during the course of the demo, a fact that Lightfoot points out without embarrassment:
DayZ Standalone’s closed alpha stage has already begun, and a paid-for open alpha is expected before the end of the month. Will you be buying in, or waiting for a version that’s less rough, more ready?
Thanks, RPS.