But this is where Dean Hall conceived of DayZ, the ArmA II apocalypse-survival mod that’s one of the most popular PC games in the world right now.
Brunei environment
Hall was dropped into the jungle while serving in the New Zealand Armed Forces, a 30-day infantry-survival exercise that strained he and his team-mates’ endurance. They foraged for food and water and tried to survive a relentless environment. As the heat began to take its toll he became malnourished, suffered an injury and, when it was over, spent months recovering in hospital.
The idea for DayZ came from that experience. Hall, aka ‘Rocket’, tells IGN, “I became very interested in a survival-type game, in the levels of subtleties and decision-making that's forced on you based on an emotional context. What happened in Brunei made me really reflect on those elements of the training exercise that brought out an emotional response in me. That's what DayZ is all about.”
DayZ Environment
He adds, “Brunei was a fantastic, life-changing experience for me, definitely. But with a bad element to it as well. I ran out of food very quickly and I was malnourished. So when I came back, my insides hadn't been working properly, my hair had started to fall out, my nails had turned yellow, and so when the whole pipe-works started up again, it tore itself to pieces.”
The game’s attraction is its purity in depicting a primal struggle to stay alive, to forage, avoid danger and stay healthy. It’s set in a tough world of zombies and spartan resources. But any player will tell you, the biggest danger is other survivors.
When you strip away the conventions of our society, of our civilization, this is what ‘post-apocalyptic’ survival really means. People mostly behave like bastards. Every now and again, they offer help, they group together, they create usefulness from the knick-knacks they find. DayZ is a simulation of how people behave in extraordinary circumstances.
It’s the game’s roots as a survival sim that persuaded Hall and the team to significantly change the rules. Previously, players would spawn with a gun in their possession. Now, they spawn entirely unarmed. Only a significant time-investment and deep risk-taking will yield up a rifle and a few rounds, or a blade. The use of these weapons is far from being a guarantee of survival. To zombies, gunshots sound like dinner bells. Any form of combat is extremely risky.
Hall explains the decision to spawn new characters without any defense. “When I originally scoped the mod out, I wanted it to be very brutal, and I wanted the finding of your first weapon to be a real event for the player. But that wasn't possible because of the way zombies were scripted to work. They basically chase you forever. Recent options made that change possible.
"Now, when I sat down and analyzed the numbers, I realized that a lot of new players were being killed by seasoned players, simply because they represented a risk. They were walking around with their Makarov, the little pistol, and they presented a risk to these veteran players. What we found is that a lot of veteran players won't shoot new players who don't have a weapon, because they present no risk. Obviously there's some people who will shoot you no matter what. But we've definitely found that there are people who don't.”
The game isn’t really about zombies, it’s about you, the choices you make and the skills you have.
Dean 'Rocket' Hall
Hall says, “We're all scared of natural disasters and big changes. Zombies are easy for us to explain in a narrative. The real part of it comes from the subtlety of its tension. Your character gets hungry, your character gets thirsty. There's no easily-definable mechanic that you can turn around and say, you have to eat every four hours, or you have to eat every three hours. The answer is always - 'well, it depends'. It depends on how much you're carrying, how often you're running, what the weather's doing, how injured you are. The idea is to create these subtle but intuitive tensions, and I think that's really what delivers for the players.”
He adds, “Your character is your character. For example, the stars in ArmA II are mapped to the time, location, and season that your mission's set in. If you can read the stars in real life, to figure out which direction is north or south, then you can do so in the game. There are no instructions, there's no manual, there's no tutorial, it's just you waking up on the beach and having to figure it out for yourself.”
Of course, the mod has been an enormous success. ArmA II, which is required to play the mod, has been on Steam’s top-five list for weeks. Prague-based publisher Bohemia Interactive had almost 500,000 registered players at the beginning of July, a number that is now touching one million. The mod is a hot conversation piece in the media, on Twitter and Reddit. This is the sort of success that points towards a standalone launch and perhaps even console releases.
Hall says, “I've made no secret, right from the start, that I want to see this as a stand-alone product. There are a number of people who are definitely interested in doing that. I'm 100 percent confident that we will be coming out soon and telling people that it's going to happen. But obviously, there are a lot of things that we need to line up to ensure that it's in the right place."
DayZ is, he points out, an experiment, and the team are learning new things all the time. The mod is entirely free-to-play, though you still have to purchase ArmA II: Combined Operations.
“The experiment needs to continue," he says. "In terms of consoles, look, I think how Minecraft did it is really good. They nailed down the experience, then they looked at it. But that would really depend on the structure of which development team made DayZ as a stand-alone. There are issues with running such a broad game like ArmA on a console although it's been done before.”
Meanwhile, Bohemia is still developing ArmA III for release later this year, a game Hall was hired to work on early in 2012. Newly transplanted to the Czech Republic and unable to speak the language, he found plenty of free time to work on DayZ, before its success made the game his entire focus.
He says, “It was sad to not be working on that, because it is going to be a really awesome game, but for me I want to see DayZ become its own thing.”
Colin Campbell is a games journalist, based in Santa Cruz, California. You can join him on Twitter or at IGN.
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