Each Monday, Chris Livingston visits an early access game and reports back with stories about whatever he finds inside. This week, survival horror in DayZ’s experimental branch.>
While nearly two million players have paid to act as DayZ’s beta testers, there’s a much smaller subset of lighthouse customers acting as beta testers to those> beta testers. On a handful of DayZ experimental branch servers, changes are rolled out and played with weeks before being introduced to the early access game at large. This week I opted into the experimental branch, keen to inhale the future of DayZ before most players even get a whiff.
Mid-way through Rezzed, I decided that somebody must have cloned Dean Hall. The DayZ creator was everywhere. One minute he was talking about the most frightening moment of his life – hanging off the side of Everest, I hear – and the next he was playing games on the showfloor. If he wasn’t admiring Maia with an excited twinkle in his eye, he was telling interested parties about how much he digs Project Zomboid. The man loves games and since he has so many interesting things to say about them, we should be thankful that he enjoys talking about them quite as much as he does. One panel involved The Indie Stone folk and Hall talking about zombies. They offer a defence of the oft-maligned enemy and it’s often compelling. Behold.