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Rocket-powered: DayZ Standalone release now held up only by pesky performance issues

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Imagine DayZ as a squeaky bike, trundling down one of Chernarus’ eerily quiet roads. After many months on stabilisers, it’s ready to run on its own two wheels – but for a particularly gravelly section that wasn’t visible on the development roadmap.

A recently-solved server optimisation problem has given way to reveal another, probably with three heads.

“This is why we are not out,” said Dean ‘Rocket’ Hall of the issue on Reddit. “We need performance. Today it almost looked like we had reached the performance target, but the bug we fixed had a more subtle bug hiding behind it.”

“We don’t foresee any delay in release once performance has been achieved,” he added.

While DayZ Standalone will release in alpha via Steam Early Access, Rocket wants to ensure these deeply-embedded bugs are squashed first.

“As much of a relief and morale booster as the release will be for the team, it also means all hell breaks loose,” he explained. “It means we will become very focused on the low-hanging, obvious bugs. Now we need to ensure the basic core architecture functions correctly – without any dodgy bugs or unexpected behaviour.”

The game runs “very, very smooth” as it stands, right up until players enter cities, where things can get choppy. But testers have suggested that performance is “much smoother than with the mod”.

Soon, then, but not quite so soon as that Steam database update might have had us believe. Still – better to wait than spend Christmas screaming at the server performance, don’t you think?

Thanks, VG247.