If you wanted evidence of a game that shows off the best and worst of Early Access, you need look no further than Bohemia’s DayZ. The zombie survival game has been sauntering around in pre-release since 2013, incrementally updating the experience without ever looking like it was willing to take the huge next step to a full release.
Almost four years later, Bohemia have finally announced that DayZ will be leaving Early Access in 2018 with an Xbox One Game Preview version to follow and even a much-vaunted PS4 version at a later date. This comes a little out of leftfield, but it seems as if Bohemia’s hand may have been forced by another similar game’s meteoric rise.
The success of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds is well-documented by now. It’s regularly breaking records and shows no signs of slowing down, especially with its console counterparts not too far away. While it didn’t single-handedly start the battle royale revolution, its mainstream success that far outstripped the likes of King of the Kill has made a lot of AAA developers and publishers sit up and take notice with plenty of takes “inspired” by PlayerUnknown’s brand of murder now in the pipeline.
But it should have been DayZ. Everything was right there for them, down to PlayerUnknown himself working on a battle royale mod for the game before the scene really exploded. For their complacency, Bohemia are now paying the price by playing catch up.
Despite sharing a lot of similarities, there are some stark differences between the two games. DayZ is more of a slow-paced, sometimes laborious affair featuring zombies while PUBG leans towards action and freedom of play. However, they’re both about lasting the distance on a huge island by scavenging and playing tactically; they are cousins. But one came first.
DayZ’s stint in Early Access is one of notoriety. Despite being (supposedly) polished and updated, the game is as unstable as ever, regularly crashing and refusing to move with the times. I sunk forty hours or so into DayZ before I called it a day three years ago, wishing that Bohemia would make enough progress so that I could return and actually play the game without running into constant brick walls. When I booted it up again today, I played a game that had improved in depth but somehow stayed static from a technical perspective. It was still a mess.
Compare DayZ’s situation to PUBG, which was in development for a year before hitting Early Access and announced as coming to console with a firm release date not long after, and it looks even worse. PUBG is by no means a perfect game, countless “weird moments” videos on YouTube will attest to that, but Bluehole and PlayerUnknown seem keen to tweak and polish while adding content and regularly follow through on their promises. There’s clear ambition from everyone involved to get the game to the point where it can be a real eSports contender. For the last four years, it’s seemed as if Bohemia’s only ambition has been to sit on the money or siphon it into other projects.
The full story behind DayZ’s long and fractious development will make for interesting reading one day, but one aspect of the story will ring as true then as it does today. They missed their chance.
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