Brian Hicks, the creative director on DayZ, says he will be leaving Bohemia Interactive after five years at the studio.
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Hicks made the announcement in a developer update on the DayZ website. He says that, “I feel DayZ has reached a point in which I – much like how [game creator] Dean Hall felt years back – am no longer needed”. Hall left Bohemia in 2014 to found his own studio RocketWerkz, which is currently working on early access title Stationeers.
Hicks says that, over the last year, he has been taking “more and more of a back seat” to other developers on the team. “Peter Nespešný and the design team have a rock-solid grasp of what DayZ is, and what it needs to be. All of our systems have been discussed, documented, and discussed again.”
He made this decision after he was sure the big upcoming 0.63 update for DayZ was ready – although he admits he was unsure “about how .63 would be received, or how it would perform under a full-scale load. I don’t want to be a broken record – but I am so happy that all of those concerns have been washed away.”
He plans to return home to the United States and pursue opportunities there, although he says he will keep his promise of doing a 24-hour livestream once DayZ hits version 1.0 – which, the last we heard, was going to happen sometime this year.