DayZ, the emergent gameplay based massively multiplayer zombie shooter that started out as a mod for Aarma II before it became its own thing, has been a very popular fixture of PC gaming for a while now. And while the game is already really great for what it is, it will soon become even better, and these changes range from a complete overhaul of the engine and tech powering the game, to new mechanics, as well as refinement of existing ones. “Implementing DirectX 10 or 11 will have a dramatic, instant visual difference and quite a significant performance difference,” Dean Hall told Gamespot, when discussing the graphical and technical improvements we can expect. “The big benefit we get is being able to implement dynamic lighting so we can have dynamic shadows, If you’ve got a good computer, you’ll be able to play with more lights. If there’s a lot of people using torches in the distance, you’ll be able to see their lights.” He also discussed some of the planned gameplay changes, and how he sees those manifesting in general gameplay, specifically. “We’ll say there can only be, for example, a hundred night-vision goggles in the whole world across all servers. Then, once your character dies, or that item gets destroyed, it makes a new one available to spawn on a server. “What we’d see is, particularly when we get into vehicles, or components for helicopters that are very rare and are controlled centrally so there can only be a certain amount of helicopters in every server in the whole world, that would mean that if you hear there’s a working helicopter on a particular server, you’ll want to go to that server.” DayZ, the standalone game, launches… well, sometime soon. We don’t actually know when it launches, it feels like it’s been in development forever now.
