DayZ was a mod. I know you know this, but bear with us. DayZ was a mod, and was therefore bound by some pretty strict technical limitations which eventually saw players drift off to other, more flexible climes. Meanwhile, Dean ‘Rocket’ Hall and his team at Bohemia have been beavering away at the retail version of the game, trying to work out what’ll keep players stuck to Chernarus like sticky buds.
Sensibly, they’ve turned to Eve Online for inspiration.
“I guess that’s where the whole open alpha approach comes in,” Hall told RPS. “Because we’ve got base-building planned, and I think we’re going to add in a lot of clan stuff and group dynamics. So we’ve talked about something like a clan tattoo. I think a lot of it’s going to be about in-game [user-oriented] content – kind of like EVE.”
Rocket suspects that base-building in particular will merit comparison to CCP’s universe of expensive backstabbings – in April, he compared the new system to capital ships. Now he’s ready to talk specifics – or at least, the half-specifics native to alpha development.
“Like, you walk up to a sort of dungeon and go into a separate instance,” he explained. “There’s two ways we’re considering on the technical side. One is you go inside the area, and it’s Red-Faction-style destructive terrain, so you can use explosives or a pick axe or something. That may present bandwidth problems or restrict the size that we can make those areas. I mean, I envision this being an underground city. You dig out this city, lining the walls with palm trees and that kind of stuff.”
If that first solution doesn’t pan out, Rocket plans to take players out of first- and third-person perspectives entirely in a sort of mini-management game.
“If that becomes an issue, we go with a more Evil-Genius-style interface,” he went on. “You can still run around in it, but you construct from a top-down view. And Arma actually has [that] language built into its engine.
“We don’t use it in DayZ, but we could use it for building security systems, programming your own computers in-game. So you can actually create a security system for your underground base and program it in. So I think that’s gonna be more like EVE’s capital ships.”
There it is again! Capital ships. Do you think the parallels Rocket has tentatively drawn in pencil are justified?