RaptorM60

Just out of curiosity, what's your channel name? I'd like to follow everyone who streams DayZ on Mixer :)

We're still coming to both Xbox One and PS4, no worries - as suggested, we have the opportunity to participate in the Game Preview program on Xbox, but we're in talks with Sony regarding our PS4 release.

Hi, as @Dancing.Russian.Man suggested, we'll be releasing on Xbox Game Preview this year - we're still in talks with Sony about how we should proceed with the PS4 version, but hopefully we'll follow up shortly with a PS4 release.

Haha my apologies, although that's about everything that I can share at this moment - both because I personally don't know the details of the current intended game design of the medical system, and that recently, we usually cover only things that are the immediate topic in the design team - as was the case with the ambient spawning this last Status Report, it's been only very recently implemented into the game. That said, I'll talk to Peter and ask if we can perhaps cover it, or if he just wants to wait until there is something playable for you to try,

Ultimately all the outlined major features of DayZ should be "settling down", as Eugen likes to say, during BETA, when our designers want to get back to iterating the overall balance of the gameplay while watching people actually play the game, or post feedback. We'll all be better able to tell how deep our designers can / want to go with things like the medical system. First, we need to have the "final" game where we can iterate fast, and that's waiting on some of the elementary parts of player movement/representation still being work in progress (new ladders, new vaulting, finishing touches to the melee system etc.).

We have a Project Lead (David) who's the "captain of the ship" - ever since Dean's official departure (or shortly after) it's still the same person. He's got the entire team and all of its deliverables as his responsibility, practically working with Eugen and all department leads taking ownership of their parts of DayZ development. Brian's role has, over the past couple of years, shifted more towards being a guardian of the original DayZ creative vision, working together mainly with the design team on maintaining and expanding that vision, and as we're getting closer to leaving Early Access, some of his communication responsibilities were also handed over a team of Eugen, Baty and me

Just to perhaps clarify re: Steam reviews - it’s not that we’re completely ignoring our overall review score, of course we don’t take it lightly that we’re in the mixed/mostly negative area, it’s not helping the DayZ brand, but at the same time, that’s to be expected of a game with some nasty issues and work in progress gameplay. We know that the game is pretty far from being a great experience, so until then, the idea of making reviews is sort of weird.

Most definitely, as I certainly did not say anything along the lines of “not needing your money” (nor not needing feedback for that matter - we do need it, but Steam Reviews are a terrible place for that).

1) We don't know. When we do know, you'll know. I know it's a lame answer but that's the reality. If we could set a concrete date (= if we knew we're able to deliver 100%), we'd set that date. We're still not 100% sure we can, so there is no date, and no estimate (because those were quite disappointing in the past). 

2) Multiple reasons: using our own technology enables our dev team to create some things exactly the way we want them to be. It's also very beneficial for our extensive modding support plans, and ultimately, it allows us to be completely independent on 3rd party solutions. Bonus reason: we have some badass programmers at Bohemia that are capable of such things as engine programming, it would be a shame to lose them or not use their expertise. Good programmers are hard to come by, and often they don't even care if you offer them a gold mine, they just need something that they'll enjoy doing ;)

 3) Assets are relatively not-so-hard to produce, while different types of animals require more than assets: different behaviour controlled by AI, more complex animations, and possibly other things that are happening on the back end of the game. As outlined in our BETA / 1.0 goals, we'll be adding animals as we progress further.
 4) DayZ is a sandbox survival. One of the design pillars of DayZ is the freedom of choice, being able to pick your own play-style out of a variety of play-styles. While some of those items are not useful to you, some people love to have them around (I'd have to disagree that cooking tripods are useless at the very least!). Also, some items in the game don't really have the intended use just yet, or we had to revert some of the features where you could previously use them, but they are ready as assets, so they stay in the loot configuration. Although I think in 0.62, there are no items that have absolutely no use in-game. 5) That's the tone we set for the game. That's a massive part of why everybody loved the mod, and that's what we at Bohemia do well. Also, we're not aiming for realism, but for authenticity. The sort of "I believe all of this could be happening, but I also know it's not real" kind of thing. Bonus answer: the infected are not zombies. DayZ is not a zombie game, these are inhabitants of Chernarus struck by a nasty virus that made them blood lust, dumb weirdos. But they are still alive, that's why you don't need to headshot them in order to kill them :)

 6) If the work needed was really to take 2 day of the week, we'd do it in those 2 days, test it all on Friday and release the thing next week. If updates took months, moths of everyday work went into them. None of our major updates that took "several months to develop" contained "few graphical/glitch/bug fixes and a handful of re-hashed items/gear". That's just not true.

 7) I'm sorry but I'm not going to answer this question because of your implication of us having people that don't work, and just sit on Reddit and talk in YouTube videos. That's nonsense, and outright rude (to say it with a pinch of understatement), and I personally think you would not have the courage to say such things if you saw the team here in the office every day. Our people work hard, and DayZ development is pretty tough and exhausting for them as much as it is for you as a fan to wait. In case you're really interested in finding the answer, the real number is here in Eugen's intro, but you already know that I think.

 8) We're actively talking to our community, I think Baty's been doing a great job over the past year. It's tough to keep the comms flowing, for quite some time (about 2 years now at least), we've been in a stage of development where we have to be careful and manage expectations, as every word we publish is being watched carefully. As soon as we have a better game in our hands, and we're confident about it, we'll be more confident in our communication. We're also busy planning the things ahead of us. 9) Jailhouses specifically spawn no loot because we want to encourage people to not go inside them - in legacy versions of DayZ, these buildings are prone to glitchers, and unfortunately that's something we can only solve when we merge in a larger chunk of our new tech. Central Economy as a whole will also work quite differently in 0.63 - again, something that only makes sense to be implemented in 0.63, not on the legacy versions of DayZ, unfortunately.

 10) That mostly depends on the overall balance of our core gameplay loop to a degree, and 0.63 will be a massive step forward in evolving our core gameplay loop.
 11) We do this: we're continuing the development of the game in order for it to become an enjoyable experience that people want to play. That's pretty much everything that we can do at this point, as unless we have a good product in our hands, we won't have satisfied, active community of players.

 12) Despite the fact that you don't want to hear that, developing an engine AND a game on that work-in-progress engine at the same time is not an easy feat. I totally get that it may seem hard to believe, but it's the reality - and I don't think our dev team is any worse or better than any other team out there that would be in the same situation.
 13) It's simply just not possible to estimate the development work we do in detail - the level of detail we feel confident estimating now (taking all of our hard earned experience into consideration) is that we'll be out of Early Access by the end of 2018 with the feature set and content that we defined publicly. That's our life - it sucks, but we know why we took the hard, long road. We'll benefit from those Early Access years in the future. 

14) Our office policy is 8 hours a day, 5 days a week unless there are public holidays or you're on a sick leave. Every employee at Bohemia has 5 weeks of paid vacation per year on top of that. The reality is that sometimes some of us work 10+ hours a day occasionally, and we take our work home from time to time. Adding some personal experience here - I am writing this on a Friday night on a train from Prague back to my family, after a full workday, and I still have 5 days of vacation left from the last year. But I'm not complaining, despite DayZ probably being the toughest project here at Bohemia in terms of work/life balance, I love my job! It's probably a bit more challenging for the actual dev team though, I am a marketing person.

 15) Dean was the creative power behind DayZ, a person that you need to kick start a project and send it in the right direction. It was his own decision to step down as a Project Lead of DayZ as he felt that his role on DayZ was complete, and I believe (I've never actually met him in person, as I joined Bohemia only about 3 years ago) his life-long ambition was to be an independent developer with complete creative freedom - and that can only happen if you start your own business really. But this also has a bit of my personal opinion in it, so take it with that in mind.

 For DayZ losing a bit of a momentum when he made that decision, I PERSONALLY that's kind of true for two reasons: a) Dean was a public figure, he was flying all around the globe, passionately talking about the game, and this is purely a part of his personality that has no substitute unless you're Dean Hall. So naturally, when Dean stopped publicly talking about DayZ, and shifted his focus onto his new projects, DayZ lost his personal touch and his public presence, so to speak. That’s mabye why it seemed like things stopped moving. There is no doubt that apart from his creative ideas, Dean was also giving DayZ this exciting public spark that made it a popular game. 

b) I think the momentum was also a bit lost because the team started the really tough part of DayZ development when Dean left, the part where exciting ideas need to be turned into a real, functional, decent product. That part’s publicly pretty not-cool, and we're still there. 

 Personally, again, I think Dean is now happy back home in his own company, and on both sides, we're not really considering any official cooperation on DayZ or other projects.

 16) We do read carefully the reasons provided when people refund DayZ, but as far as Early Access reviews on Steam are concerned, in the DayZ team, we don't pay that much attention to them. It's a bit flawed on the very granular level that there's even the possibility to review a product that has not reached an end of its initial development phase, and Steam reviews are infamously ignoring the intentional, organised attempts to review-bomb a game, so that's really not a relevant channel to us. 

 We pay attention to feedback on our own feedback tracker, here on the forums, and occasionally on Social Media and things like Reddit, and we will pay attention to Steam reviews when DayZ leaves Early Access.

 17) Again, this sort of content is not as hard to produce as a major feature like base building, and artists can create art/animations while our other teams are doing their thing (not mentioning that we just couldn't event do base building right on the legacy versions of DayZ without redoing it again later in BETA). And again, I dare to disagree, gestures/emotes are a very popular addition to DayZ!

 18) The concept of developers being happy that they can "take ages to produce things" in Early Access development is just completely wrong. There is no benefit in making things progress slower than you are realistically able to, especially not for a company like Bohemia. The longer you stay in development, the longer you bleed money, and with every day, month and a year gone by, the motivation of the team vanishes more and more. If our dev team could do things faster, they’d do things faster, because OH BOI, do we all really want to have 1.0 out already! :)

 19) DayZ team is ultimately “Bohemia”, and the devs here are the most passionate critics of their own work. I often hear how some of the people here on the team wish things would go faster, we all wish that DayZ had less problems along the way and we're all (including the Bohemia management, which is ultimately just 2 owners of the company) very much aware of the reality of things - we're arguably on the edge of keeping DayZ relevant, but the only thing we can do is to keep working until DayZ is the game the dev team wants to create, because that’s the only way how we can make things better. I hope this helped.

Hello everyone! The special BETA Status Report is out - please read it here (we're not posting in the forums directly today due to the formatting). We know you'll probably have lots of questions, so please ask here - we'll do our best to answer as many of them as possible. Thanks!

This is actually a correct assumption, right now, our plans are 0.63 Experimental, 0.63 Stable (= BETA) and 1.0. All that's in between is just different 0.63 builds, but no 0.64 etc.

Thanks for noticing this, we fixed it the day after publishing the Status Report. It was quite hectic to put it out, sorry about the occasional typos and wrong CTRL + C / CTRL + V. And whoa, I got some reading to do - sorry for keeping this thread silent for over a week but there was just too much to handle :) I'll start talking to @eugenharton and we'll get you some answers!

No. Don't get too excited guys. Our goal for the initial release of 0.63 (in terms of firearms) is to stay within the already familiar arsenal. Now let's get back to the original topic, we're still talking about 0.62 here. Thanks :)

Oh yeah absolutely, I mean moving to a different country is certainly a bold thing to do and needs to be well considered, no doubts about that.

Can't speak for life in Bratislava but Prague is seriously cool, and as I said, we'll help with the relocation :)

I just want everybody to know this: there are not that many things that we DO NOT share with you guys. I know it may be hard to take my word for granted, since I'm technically on the developer side of of things, but regarding what content makes it into updates, regarding major design decisions... as soon as things start taking some concrete shape, or when we know when and how we want to deliver them in the game, we share that information with you. Sometimes literally on the day we make those decisions, or exactly on the day when new features are finally implemented in our internal build. Based on the past negative experience, the team is no longer sharing detailed, longer term roadmaps, especially not those that would mention (be it only estimated) dates when players can expect certain features. Based on the previous experience, we're also more careful with our ambitions for delivering cool, extra features that don't necessarily add up to the core gameplay, and we're generally more careful when estimating time needed for major technology changes. But that's it. Other than that, we really do make sure we communicate as openly as possible - as soon as a plan, or a design intention is at least somewhat solid, it is communicated in Status Reports, or as a forum post, or as a video on our YouTube channel. When we face a dilemma, or a problem that we think may use your input for, we share that with you. While we may have some deficit in the overall detailed definition of what exactly will the 0.63 experimental, BETA and 1.0 updates bring to DayZ, the up to date progress always makes it out the moment we achieve that progress. More than often, you have the chance to learn about our progress faster than most other teams and people within Bohemia that are not directly involved in day-to-day DayZ development tasks (that includes our company management, for example). Our community, and our existing player base are of the utmost importance to us. All of you who keep engaging with us over official channels are of the utmost importance to us. We don't hide things from you. We don't intentionally confuse you, and most important of all, we do not lie. Ever.

Let me assure you, you're seeing conspiracy where there's none. Peter has produced a lengthy text expressing his thoughts and motivations on resolving his game design dilemma. We're as honest and open as it gets. No final decision has been made, and all the arguments for and against a complete removal are still on the table. Accusing our developers of "lies" is completely out of place, and I would like to ask you to review your text next time you intend to hit the post button - you may find out that your comments come across as quite rude.

This week's Status Report will mention that topic ;)

Hold your horses guys, it's too early, nothing is set in stone! I think it's fair to say that we all appreciate feedback from long time DayZ players, but the time to get serious about things will be when 0.63 drops on Experimental. Peter is on vacation now, but @eugenharton mentioned he might want to comment on this one, and he might provide an interesting perspective on the topic of evaluating this sort of feedback.

Again, we have not received any message from you since the end of June. I stand by that statement. I will go the extra mile and check the email logs with our IT - in case I find any mishap on our side, I will let you know here. Until then, the thread is closed. Please do contact [email protected] again today to have BattlEye re-enabled on your servers within 24 hours. As for donations, you are more than welcome to receive voluntary donations via your own community website - as long as all that you provide your community with is simply just running the servers and your community website, excluding additional game-service like unbans etc. That's of course none of our business ;)

Good catch, either I was wrong or they updated that recently with some returns - so I guess see you in Cologne then? :)

We're there all the way through, but Gamescom is sold out now man, sorry about that.

You haven't been in touch with our Monetization Department since June 26. Please communicate with them directly, as only they can resolve this with you, nobody else can - especially not our CEO, any DayZ developer, DayZTV (not associated with Bohemia in any way) or Jan Hovora (not working at Bohemia for... I don't even know how many years). If you no longer monetize unbans, and comply with EVERYTHING that our Monetization team requested of you, do let our Monetization team know - and BattlEye will be reactivated on your server(s) promptly. As for the situation in general, you've been granted an exception, or more precisely allowed to be an edge case of our monetization rules. As long as that setup did not cause issues in the community, we had no reasons to revoke your license to monetize the way you do. Unfortunately, there were issues reported to us, and that's why this monetization model is no longer sustainable for you. You have to understand that this is not a court room where you present evidence - as soon as we believe the monetization license no longer creates a healthy community environment, we can, and we will revoke it. We appreciate your effort to try and create a very tightly controlled community, but it did not quite work out that way. Please comply with the requests of our Monetization team, and try to look for other ways to fund your servers. There are communities that can serve as an example to you - I'm sure you know them, as they are either listed as approved DayZ monetizers, or acquire funds as voluntary donations. I will let you reply in this thread one more time and then will have it closed for further replies. Please do not create any more threads on this topic on the official forums again, they will be deleted immediately (and you can get yourself banned, even though that's not something we want to do).

Thanks for reporting this, there should be a character limit applied now :)

I'm always excited to learn a couple of PR lessons, feel free to drop me a PM ;) As @goateswyn just wrote, this was all about honesty. If you don't appreciate that, then, welp, we ain't got nothing better in store I'm afraid. Thanks everyone for the understanding and support, Baty will share news when it's ready!