Over the last month, an unusual game has stepped up to dominate the gaming media buzz and gamer curiosity. And it's not even really a game. We're talking about DayZ, the early build of a mod based on ARMA 2. Since reporting on the title in mid-July when a competitor announced The War Z zombie-themed MMO, DayZ managed to grow very quickly by several hundred thousand players to cross the 1 million milestone. And when it did, the inevitable announcement came that DayZ creator Dean "Rocket" Hall would be working with Bohemia Interactive (developers of ARMA 2) to officially develop a standalone DayZ game.

Now there's talk from the man behind DayZ that at Gamescom they're already meeting with developers to discuss console versions of the title. Are we getting ahead of ourselves?

In chatting with Joystiq briefly at the German-based video games convention, Hall discussed the idea of the PC zombie shooter expanding out on to other platforms.

"You're not going to put it on the consoles if you're only going to sell 100,000 units or something like that. DayZ will be driven by its PC development and it will innovative on that. And, once we're at a point, we'll take it and do a Mac version, 360 and PS3."

I think we're reaching that point in DayZ's lifecycle where the excitement about the mod becoming a standalone game is becoming a concern. As it currently stands, DayZ is a pre-Alpha mod that's essentially broken. While fun, there's a lot of work that needs to be done to the mod to make it stable, and then for the standalone game to clean up the physics, animations, UI, etc., in addition to adding new features such as bases. As Hall says himself:

"In order for people to not feel ripped off we need to have a load of new content; so, things like base-building, tidying and cleaning up animations and add ragdoll physics as the like."

So before we delve into console ports, let's get the mod cleaned up, the standalone game created with all of the promised features, and then they can add in mod support (which won't be there at launch). Then we can chat about console ports. From Hall's quote above, that sounds like what they're doing and we're excited to see the game at its full potential.

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Source: Joystiq