PC Gamer’s Evan Lahti‘s got a super-long interview up with the creator of DayZ, Dean Hall, along with Bohemia Interactive head honchos Jay Crowe, Ivan Buchta and community guru Dslyecxi.
If you can make it through their babble about Italian food, you’ll find a lot of fascinating bits about DayZ‘s development and stories about how things didn’t go always as expected.
On their surprise at how well the mod has been received:
Hall: And it’s difficult to install. It’s buggy as hell. The servers don’t work properly. I mean, what else can you screw up? The graphics are a little bit dated in some ways. Yeah, I think so. The mainstream impact of it is obviously a big surprise.
Comparisons to Left 4 Dead:
Lahti: The mechanics in Left 4 Dead are all driven by reaction, right? Identify threat, solve threat… But that’s what I admire about Day Z, the way that needs naturally drive my goals. I need this, I need that, and it drives me out of my comfort zone. I need blood. I need to go to this terrifying city to retrieve it, and on top of that, I need to make friends with another survivor to do the transfusion.
And Skyrim:
Hall: I’m standing in a river [in Skyrim], I’m running up in the snow, and then I was like… It means nothing…
Dslyecxi: It’s freezing cold out and it doesn’t matter.
Hall: And I just instantly felt completely disconnected from my character.
Which inspired the notion of environmental conditions and diseases, which got a little bit out of control:
Hall: It started on Chicago One because Chicago One was one of the first that we released. And Chicago One was raining and it was night. That meant that about 60 people, because it was the two Chicago servers, suddenly come down infected. Now, what do they do? They instantly disconnected from Chicago to move to a daytime or non-raining server. They carried the infection with them! The infection just spread like wildfire, and before we knew it we had 1,000 people infected.
There’s a lot more, so if you’re a DayZ fan, take the time out to read the whole interview. Just don’t order the calzone.
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