Sloshy receptacles of human fluid have been a part of DayZ for yonks, found in medical boxes near hospitals or crashed helicopters. A Blood Bag will restore a character’s Blood level – the primary measurement of their health – and increase the public standing of the player performing the transfusion, who might otherwise be deemed a dreaded bandit.
Only in development of the game’s standalone edition, however, have Bohemia given players the means to, er, acquire bags of the plasmic stuff themselves. And the implications are quite frightening.
“There’s a lot of [new] player-based interaction,” said Dean ‘Rocket’ Hall as he walked our Tim through some of the game’s newest features. He noted that other players can “actually see a blood bag in my hand”, thanks to a roguelike-influenced emphasis on “texture-based feedback”.
In the standalone game, that blood bag can be connected to an IV starter kit via the new crafting system. And once you’ve done that, it’s good for use in the fleshy appendages of the walking blood banks you’ll share a server with.
“So you’ll get a warning message saying, ‘Such-and-such is starting to take blood from you’,” explained Hall. “And then I get a blood bag in my inventory. I could take an IV starter kit, I could connect that to a saline kit or a blood bag.”
When asked about the range of interactions blood bags could now engender, Hall jumped almost disconcertingly quickly to the idea of human IV farming.
“I can’t show you, because of the age restrictions [at Gamescom] – for some reason you can kill people, but handcuffing and killing them is just abhorrent,” he said. “But the same mechanic applies when you get cuffs [and make players prisoners] – you can still blood them.”
Then it dawned: you could essentially have people as blood slaves?
“Yeah, exactly,” replied Hall.