The ARMA community has rallied together and set up a site in support of the two Bohemia Interactive employees who were arrested last week after allegedly recording footage of military bases in Lemnos. The website, www.helpivanmartin.org houses a petition and an updated news feed relating to the case.

"Facing up to 20 years in prison for taking pictures of an island," the website reads, "just like countless other tourists before them, the Czech developers are being charged with espionage. Only because they happen to work on a computer game, a game that portrays Greece as a battlefield for a fictional futuristic conflict between the USA and Iran in the year 2035.

"Ivan and Martin are no spies, but passionate community members, dedicated to the game and its experience for the player. Many of us have witnessed Ivan talking in interviews passionately about the progress of ARMA3 and all the new features, also developed by Martin.

"It's time to show our support, not only as a community, but as players and concerned citizens, for two developers, who now face a lifetime in prison for an unfortunate misunderstanding."

Meanwhile, Bohemia Interactive themselves have strongly rejected the accusations of espionage which have been levelled against the pair by the Greek authorities.

It's not the first time that civilians have been detained on charges of espionage in Greece for taking photographs - in 2001 12 British plane spotters were held on spying charges. But they didn't have the wrath of the internet at their disposal - perhaps the ARMA community, and gamerdom at large, will prove vociferous enough to give the Greek authorities pause.

Two Bohemia Interactive employees were arrested by Greek authorities for espionage last week after recording footage of military bases in Limnos. BI have sent over a statement saying that reports claiming that they'd entered military installations and taken footage to support development of Arma 3 are "completely false and without substance."

"These employees - our friends, Ivan Buchta and Martin Pezlar - visited the island as tourists. Their holiday was a product of their interest in the island, triggered by their work on Arma 3 over the past two years of development," they say.

"They took photographs and videos in public areas, as countless tourists arriving to enjoy the beauty and hospitality of Greece may well do. These included a short video as they drove through the main road passing around the international airport, where in one short part of the video off in the distance some hangars and other buildings of the complex can be seen. It's very likely that many tourists may have pictures similar to those taken by Ivan and Martin in their own family albums, without being aware that they put themselves or their families at risk."

The description conflicts with the account that Greek police offered to Czech officials, according to comments from Czech foreign ministry spokesman, Vit Kolar, picked up by The Escapist. "We have a statement from the Greek police saying they were taking pictures and video footage of military facilities on the island on which they were detained, and that they entered the military facilities despite a warning."

BI are using Limnos as inspiration for the fictional island we'll be fighting for in Arma 3. "The in-game Limnos is close to completion, and it’s far from an identical replication of the real place," they explain. "It was heavily modified to fit the game’s backstory, a purely fictional 2035 setting. It was rescaled to only 75% of the real island, and it does not attempt to display any real world military installations situated on the island of Lemnos."

They stress that no military objects were photographed as source material for Arma 3 units or locations. Buchta and Pezlar are currently being held in Mytilene. "The conditions are tough, but the people we meet treat us fairly and correctly," they say in a statement. "It is all a completely absurd misunderstanding that will certainly be quickly explained. We mainly think of you, our families; you have to stay calm and not to worry about us. We hope we will meet soon."

It took us a while to figure out what sort of panel we wanted to put on at PAX. We knew we wanted to do more than a live version of our podcast (we do that every week)! We settled on storytelling as a topic because it's a particularly interesting moment in gaming for stories and storytellers. BioWare released the first fully-voiced MMO, and it responded to fan feedback about Mass Effect 3. "Choice" as a concept is leaking into every genre it can. Story generators like DayZ are innovating with systems rather than scriptwriting. But wait—conventional storytellers like Telltale are finding novel ways of humanizing characters.

To solve all of these creative quagmires in a mere hour, we called in some developers:

Sean Vanaman - Creative Lead, The Walking Dead
Jake Solomon - Lead Designer, XCOM: Enemy Unknown
Greg Kasavin - Creative Director, Supergiant Games
Markus "Notch" Persson - Creator, Minecraft, Founder of Mojang
Dean "Rocket" Hall - Creator, DayZ

http://youtu.be/Qkr_xYRG6bo

Watch the full hour conversation above. Thanks to everyone who came, and to our gallery of sages. Here are more photos from the panel, too.

DayZ creator Dean "Rocket" Hall has been showing IGN his plans to bring dogs to DayZ. They'll act as faithful companions that can track down animals and, eventually, will defend you from zombie attacks. The German Shepherd can be given orders, but the extent to which he'll follow them depends on how experienced he is. A young dog will wander around trying to find you after 30 seconds if he's not well trained.

Of course, owning a dog brings with it the possibility of losing your chum to the zombie hordes. That's a harrowing thought. I love dogs, even virtual ones that sit so still it looks as though they've died and been replaced by a stiff taxidermy replica. Their addition to DayZ will surely make the entire experience that much more fraught. See an early build of the dog update in action in this very video.

The DayZ Arma 2 mod is being updated alongside development of the standalone version of DayZ announced earlier in the month. Evan had a chat with Dean Hall recently about the future of DayZ, we can look forward to much more than dogs.

DayZ is following a path navigated by fellow former-mods Counter-Strike, Dota, Team Fortress and Killing Floor: it's being developed as a commercial, standalone game. I spoke with Dean Hall about what the decision to go standalone will mean for DayZ's design and for its more than 1.1 million citizens.

PCG: From a technical and design standpoint, what does being standalone free you up to do?

Dean "Rocket" Hall: The biggest thing, I guess, that's at the forefront for me—because my Facebook is literally flooded with messages about it—is being able to take on the hacking. It's something that you never completely solve, you just have to keep on at it. Arma, as you know, is a very trusting engine, because that's what it was designed to do. It was designed for a team of like-minded individuals to play. So that's the first thing that we'll be able to push forward with. I don't like to say that we'll lock it down, but we'll get the experience polished for PvP. We'll be able to start dealing with the hacking issues properly, and also lock down some of the key bugs. If we wanted to fix these right now, we'd have to mess with Arma too much. I think Arma deserves to be left alone to an extent, and not have DayZ putting in fixes that might cause it problems.

How big of a team do you think you're going to have at your disposal?

Hall: I think we'll have a very small core team of about six that actually make the game. Beyond that—and this is one of the cool things about Bohemia Interactive—is they have access to have all these different art resources and stuff like that. They've got a lot of experience with an internal outsourcing type of model, which is how they made Take On Helicopters and stuff like that. That's going to allow the generation of new content. It can almost happen independently of the core development. I think it's really exciting. I think that model's going to work really well for us. We'll have the core team, who are sort of locked away doing their own thing, and very collaboratively, without all the big-project types of problems. But they'll have access to resources that a big project would have outside of that.



In terms of the composition of that team, can you walk me through what you expect it to be?

Hall: It's very programmer-heavy. The project, I think... Building on the shoulders of Flashpoint and Arma and Take On Helicopters. That's what we're seeing. All that experience has come in. So it's going to be very programmer-heavy for a start. At the moment we've pretty much got the three programmers: Marek, me, and Matt. That's the core project element. Then beside that you have any artists who are available and so on. And I guess that what's really exciting about: it’s a different style of project. It feels exciting, because we're able to engage so much with people like yourself and people in the community as well. We can be honest about where it's at. It's a small project, a small team. So you don't have all those big problems with big scrums and stuff like that. It feels really collaborative. That's going to help us maintain that experiment, rather than being sort of locked away for three years and then we suddenly come out with a commercial product.

Keeping it small seems more true to the spirit of the project.

Hall: Yeah.

Do you have a target right now in terms of release?

Hall: I had a personal target of October. But I think that was really me just plucking a time out of my head, doing a back-of-the-napkin calculation. I would say this year, definitely. If we don't have something out, say, before Christmas, then something's gone wrong. But when I say "something," I mean a heavily discounted alpha. Minecraft-style. That's why we're so programmer-heavy now. The idea is, let's tackle all those problems and bugs and issues properly, that I've either been hacking through in the mod or just haven't dealt with at all. Let's clear those out of the way now and get that backlog tidied up. Then once we've got that, put a little bit of the extra content with credit in, when we have some people who aren't busy, and put that out there and see what people think. Then we can start getting crazy.

A lot of people have bought Arma 2: Combined Operations in order to play DayZ. Are you going to offer a discount directly to existing owners of Arma?

Hall: This is something I did a lot of soul-searching and thinking on. One of the fantastic things about working with Marek is he's really flexible. I think he just likes the project, because it's fun and exciting. We could make a lot of money going about it in a totally different way. But the project also needs to stand on its own two legs. I think that the idea is to run the mod in parallel with the game. That challenges the development of the game to reach a point where paying a few dollars for a heavily discounted game really becomes a no-brainer. So we just need to put enough into that initial release. It's not going to be the mod tidied-up around the edges. It's going to be a game. It really is... It's not starting from scratch, but a lot of elements are cleaned out and built up around the basic design that was built with DayZ.



Do you think you're going to be able to, and do you want to, make the standalone game moddable?

Hall: That's a definite end state. We've talked about that. It's hard, because you don't want to make something that came from being heavily moddable and then make it not like that. But the issue is, we're making a game that allows players to interact with each other in a competitive environment. So we need some rules. What we're going to start off with... Because it's a small team, because we want to focus the development as we lock it down, the moddability will come later once we've solved that problem. We need to say, “Okay, this problem is effectively solved.” You're never going to completely clear out hacking, so solving that is not getting rid of it completely. But at the very least we should be able to detect it adequately and deal with it adequately and roll it back and such. Once we've reached that point and pushed the game through, that's when we can start doing it. And maybe we can get a little bit creative and make sure it fits within the world. We're going to be able to do a lot more creative stuff with the mod itself. The idea is maybe to open up that a little bit more, to allow quite a bit more experimentation while the game itself gets locked down more. There could be some real synergy there.

So, security is your number one concern right now. That's the thing you want to address foremost.

Hall: Yeah. Look, this whole project has been about sometimes making those hard decisions. Not necessarily ones you want to make. I'd like to be able to turn around and say, yep, we're going to carry on with all this modding and that kind of stuff, but... Every user out there who's played DayZ a bit knows how much of a problem the hacking is. I think even the hackers would say that themselves. So we need to deal with that. And the only way to deal with it is to go back to basics. So we'll go back there and then hopefully claw our way back.

A big, fundamental question for me is whether the standalone version going to use Chernarus, DayZ’s current world.

Hall: It will start off with Chernarus, but more. I guess that the whole approach the project takes is, it will expand on that quite significantly. We're going to try and release some details about what that will be on the Tumblr. But for the moment the only thing I can really give for sure is that we're going to expand the number of expandable buildings. That's really important. Critically important. We're going to knock off those things first. Like if we were to commit to, say, a new environment or something like that, it would take quite a long time. It takes quite a long time to do the environments. We need to get the design right and all that sort of stuff. So we'll definitely stick with Chernarus. But we'll fix Chernarus in terms of DayZ. We'll make something that works really well with DayZ.

In addition to Chernarus, what types of maps do you think will follow that, in terms of theme or feel? How do you feel about a more urban environment?

Hall: I think it was you who was telling me about the idea for the mall , right?

Yeah, yeah.

Hall: That hung with me. I couldn't stop thinking about it on the plane. That sort of ties into what I was thinking about instancing and stuff like that. The underground construction and such. I think being able to do some of that kind of stuff would be really cool. How we would fit it into the world and that sort of stuff. The only issue is that for the standalone game, I really am going back to basics, and saying, we have a really good idea of what the design needs to be. We're going to return to that before we jump in with the content. Let's get the design bombproof.

"Instead of us having to sell hats or something in the game, we could say, 'Okay, here, pay five or ten euros or whatever to access this island.' Something like that."

There's issues like... We've talked about the hacking and all that. The obvious bug fixes, a change in the way authentication happens and all that stuff. How the servers talk to each other. Then we address things like inventory. All those need to be addressed, and I haven't really thought about how the islands will work. Other than knowing that once we get to the point of a lot of users, instead of us having to sell hats or something in the game, we could say, "Okay, here, pay five or ten euros or whatever to access this island." Something like that. If, in a year or so, things are getting a bit stale, or we need to raise some more cash, why not do it that way? I think that additional map packs are something that we can look at later. But for the moment, the focus is on fixing DayZ and nailing that design experience.

I'm curious if you've played Lingor Island at all, which some people have independently modded DayZ into.

Hall: Yeah, I saw that! I wish I'd had a chance to play it. I've been talking with our server admin teams, because obviously we had a very hard line on people making changes to things previously. I think it's worth at least defending that stance. My rationale behind that was... Yes, I come from a military background, but I also worked for a couple of years in the console gaming market. I think anyone who works in the PC development market, they really don't know what a crappy life is until you're trying to make licensed movie games on a console. So I've dealt with game executives before, and a lot of those game executives, they don't care about games at all. They've gotten to their positions by being good businessmen, and that's what makes them keep their companies afloat. So if they saw that DayZ could be run as some kind of dumbed-down, maybe single-player or some other kind of experience, they would have latched on to that and said, let's attach a license to it.

"A lot of those game executives, they don't care about games at all. They've gotten to their positions by being good businessmen, and that's what makes them keep their companies afloat."

Maybe they'd have even offered me a lot of money, and maybe I would have sold out and gone that way. So I didn't want... I wanted the message to be very clear, very clear, that this is what the DayZ experience looks like, and this is the DayZ experience are going behind, so that we can see that. Well, that's happened now. So we don't need to keep doing that. I talk with our server team, and they were in agreement, so... We'll look at opening things up a bit more, and then you can get some creative stuff like that. Lingor Island and that sort of thing. And why not? I think that's why... It's not about "let's turn the mod off and do the game." Let's keep the mod going! Let's open it up. Maybe some really good ideas can come out of that, things that we can feed into the game. I think a lot of people have been a bit like... "Oh, well, I bought the game and now I can't play the mod." I think the mod is going to have a real element of creativity. It'll probably be a bit like the Wild West, maybe, when we open it up a little bit. But I don't know, I think it will be able to get to places that the standalone game development can't. At least initially.



Do you like the idea of community maps potentially becoming official maps?

Hall: Yeah! I guess what I really want to see DayZ become is a non-standard franchise. The thing that excites me most about it is that... You take things like Star Wars or Star Trek, anything like that. The lore and the world behind that is generated by a team of writers. It's generated by that company. What's happening with DayZ is that the lore, the stories, and these player legions... They're being generated by the players. Like the Black Widow and Dr. Wasteland. The Mountain Dew. It's lucky to find it but unlucky to hold onto it or drink it. So all this stuff is coming out. I want to find ways of supporting that. I think growing that element, that initial little genesis of this entirely player-driven story world, is something I really want to see. I guess I see community maps as possibly filling in there. The more DayZ can break out of a traditional model the better. We can try things and see what works.

When you're talking about supporting the way the lore is player-created and those sorts of surrounding concepts, I remember the concept of in-game diaries that you brought up previously. I like the idea of everyone having what’s essentially a giant dog tag that can be sifted through or taken when you find someone’s corpse.

Hall: Yeah. I've got even bigger plans behind that, but I've got to go out and find the people who have the ability to do some of these things. I’m quite keen to go to PAX, to see if I can find some of the people, particularly a whole bunch of artists and things like that. I really want to connect with them. I'm going to try and find these people and give them my ideas and say, can you be part of this? I want to take where DayZ is at now and add more tools, more complexity to it, but every piece of complexity that's added should be intuitive. We might come up with some...for want of a better word, crafting. The ability to build things that make sense. Even things as simple as, okay, to make a torch you need to get some batteries. But whatever that is, it should be intuitive, so that you don't need to look up a manual or look up this page on the internet or something like that. You say, “Okay, I've got this item that doesn't work, what do I do?”

The whole experience of doing that is a discovery in itself. So any element of complexity that we're adding, I think, is going to add more depth to the game. Maybe instead of putting morphine into your leg... You can do that, but you go into a limping animation tree. Or maybe we can give you a splint. Maybe you have to craft a splint. Maybe you have to find someone who's got a doctor skill to help you heal it. I think adding those tools to the world like that, as well as construction, will give players more options. Which, I'm hoping, will mean that less people will just go around killing players, because there will be more challenging stuff to do.

That was my next question. What’s your vision for DayZ’s endgame? What does that look like?

Hall: What I will do is add the caveat that programmers will be screaming at me, talking about... This is vision, so you have to make sure you spell it out. This is vision. We've talked before about EVE Online. The only reason I'll even talk about this with you is because we've talked about it before. I never talk about this stuff in other interviews, because people latch onto it... But I love the EVE Online model, and I would love to see us move towards that. That's a long way off. Short term, with what we're releasing, is going to be not too ambitious. It's going to focus on tidying things up. In the medium term, I'm really big on this idea of some of these elements of construction. Now, I'm assuming you've played Red Faction...

Yeah.

Hall: I love the way they did destructible terrain and stuff like that. I thought it was very visceral. I think we need to come up with some kind of visceral... And I like underground as a method of construction of these player bases. It fits in with the narrative I've been talking about with my brother, in terms of the setting and the virus and all that. I think my vision for where the players can go is, I want to see them building the world after the zombie apocalypse. So your first challenge in DayZ is surviving DayZ, and that's what everyone's experiencing now. It was never really intended to be more than a one- or two-day experience. It's something of a miracle that it's got the staying power that it does. The next stage from that is either banding together or deciding that you want to go off and be a lone wolf or whatever. But maybe you'll have to even visit these player cities are built. Maybe different factions take over these underground cities, and then someone else comes back and takes them over again. They may swap hands several times. But basically having to dig out your city and build it from the dirt is what I see happening.

Digging and underground structures would give you another parallel to Minecraft. Overall, how would you describe the reaction to the news that DayZ will be a standalone game?

Hall: It’s been staggering, really. I didn't think things could get any crazier. We thought things would die down, with the problems that the mod had been experiencing and stuff like that. Things would get quiet for a little bit. We'd do the announcement and then people would say, "oh, that's cool," but things would go quiet and then we'd come out with the product and things would start up. But that's certainly not what's happening now.

That's what I would expect. People would say, “Okay, well, I played DayZ, and I liked it, but there are all these issues, so I'll just come back later when it's ready.” But that hasn't really been the experience?

Hall: No. And that’s great, but it does create a unique problem for us as well. We just have to cross these bridges. A lot of the decisions that I have to make... Sometimes you can end up second-guessing yourself. We just have to try and push forward and see where we’re going. I think the key is just trying to be honest with people, which is why it’s so easy to do these interviews, because you can just say what’s on your mind.

DayZTexas, a fan site, also has a terrific list of changes and ideas Bohemia plans to implement, based on a Reddit AMA.

"That's right, this is actually happening," reads a tweet from the official DayZ dev twitter feed. "DayZ will be developed as a standalone game." A post on the DayZ site from Dean "Rocket" Hall announces that Bohemia Interactive are developing DayZ as a full game, and he'll be heading up development as lead designer.

"Development and updates of the mod will continue in parallel with the development of the game, so anyone who is playing the mod now will be able to continue to do so. The project will follow the Minecraft development model; fast iterations with the community alpha available for a heavily discounted price," he explains.

There's a fresh official site for the standalone game over at DayZGame.com. The announcement follows news earlier today that the DayZ mod has more than one million unique players.

Do you play DayZ? Grats, you're one in a million! One in 1,006,566 to be precise, if the unique players counter on the front page of the DayZ site is accurate. Between you you've played for 1,244 YEARS, you've walked 1,398,879,267km and killed 2,147,483,647 zombies, which is a significant portion of the human population currently living on planet Earth. How many more zombies can there be?

Not bad for a mod that's "two or three hours away from complete disaster at any time," but that's part of the appeal. Dean "Rocket" Hall has been updating the mod regularly with new features to make surviving the zombie apocalypse even more harrowing, like bear traps, and evil ghosts. Okay, there are no ghosts. Yet.

If you fancy trying out DayZ, check out our guide to installing Day Z. For an idea of why you'd want to do that, have a look at our favourite DayZ moments, featuring a mad tractor rampage.

Edit: Fixed Dean "Rocket" Hall's name. It's not Robert. It's not Robert at all.

You know DayZ? Did you know it also has an awesome military shooter called Arma 2 bundled in? Well today the suspiciously zombie free war sim has released a new batch of DLC: Army of the Czech Republic, which, as you might have guessed, focuses on the forces of the Czech Republic.

If you're wondering why that particular nation was singled out, we're sure it has absolutely nothing to do with that fact that that's where developers Bohemia Interactive are based.

Army of the Czech Republic will add a new campaign with fifteen missions, depicting peacekeeping operations in Bystrica. There are new weapons like the CZ 805 BREN, CZ Scorpion EVO III and CZ 75 PHANTOM and new vehicles like the L-159 Alca, Pandur II, and Dingo infantry mobility vehicle. The last of which I assume is used to deliver a pack of rapid wild dogs onto the battlefield. Just like real war.

You can buy Arma 2: Army of the Czech Republic in the Bohemia store today, but a Steam version will be arriving in mid August. If you want to find out what we thought of the original game, check out our Arma 2 review.

The War Z is giving me mood swings. I feel like I have a pair of contradictory spirits on my shoulders; Yes, I would like another open-world, PC-exclusive survival game, Shoulder Ghost #1. Duh. But the promises made by the game's creators (who are so newly-established that they don't have a website) invite arm-crossing and skepticism. Can these guys really execute the tremendous list of features they’ve laid-out? 250-player capacity, PvE/PvP, unrestrictive-but-accessible gameplay, multiple open worlds that will rival or exceed the size of DayZ’s, free content updates, player-owned servers, and stuff like bounties and vaccination?

I got Executive Producer Sergey Titov talking about his studio's lofty promises for The War Z, and poked him for hard details on its systems and what sort of shooter it’ll be.

PCG: The War Z seems an extraordinarily ambitious type of game to design so quickly. Is it accurate to say—from start to the planned release later this fall—The War Z will have taken about a year to make?

Sergey Titov, Executive Producer: Well, actually there is a little more to it. It’s true that The War Z specific features, characters, art, animations, etc. have come about over the past year, however the evolution of the game has really been in process for quite some time. We’ve actually been thinking about and drafting the design for a large, open world, zombie-survival game for the last couple of years. We also already had the technology, solutions and expertise that had been developed over the last few years with our game engine, licensing that engine, and developing/operating War Inc. Battle Zone. So we literally spent several years prepping ourselves for this production cycle.



Is The War Z more of a shooter or more of an MMO?

ST: The War Z is first and foremost a game of survival. Your goal is not necessarily to hunt zombies, or unlock achievements, or shoot anyone. Your goal is to explore the world and survive. It’s up to you if you want to work to rebuild society or destroy it and we really don’t set hardcore goals for you to achieve. As for the game controls and the game feel, it’s more of a shooter. You have a choice between first-person or third-person perspective and you’ll have very tight and direct control over your character and actions. The MMO aspect comes into play because the world will be persistent and populated with many other players besides you.

Will The War Z have traditional quests?

ST: There are no quests or missions in the traditional gaming industry sense of the word. We’re not building an objective based game, but instead building a sandbox with lots of tools that will allow players to create their own experiences. We took a basic theme that we love—the zombie apocalypse/survival genre—and asked ourselves what the world would look like in this scenario? What means of interacting with the world or other players would be available? What would the world economy look like? We built the game design around that. If you think about our feature set with that perspective it makes more sense. For example, we have what we call “safe settlements,” that are really not completely safe at all. They are built by people that survived the infestation and are working to rebuild civilization, so they are taking precautions to make sure that their home remains safe. If you obey the rules, there’s no danger for you, but it’s not a place that you can go anytime and expect you’ll be 100 percent invincible.

The same thing goes for currency. We’ve seen some comments that “gold coins” takes away from the realism. But, if you think about it—gold has been around for ages and, until very recently, it was the ultimate measure of wealth. In the game, Wall Street and other financial institutions have collapsed so we’ve reinstated gold’s value as a universal currency. That said, it is not the only currency in the world and, more importantly, we’re not forcing it on the players. We’re not saying “you either look for gold or you can’t buy anything.” Nothing prevents you from taking ammo for guns and using it as currency when bartering with other players. I don’t even actually remember using gold in the alpha version of the game. I think I used M16 ammo more often as a way to barter with other players for food



One thing that’s unclear to me is how much of—and what sort of—shooter The War Z will be. What will your guns feel like?

ST: Think of Battlefield 3 and think of War Inc. Battle Zone. I think those two examples best depict what the shooting and gun handling experience will be.It’s taking the reloading realism of War Inc., for example, where if you drop a half emptied clip and put in a new one, you effectively just lost all the bullets that were left inside the old magazine. Firing will have similar ballistic characteristics as you see in Battlefield—that is, if you shoot at longer distances, you’ll have to take distance and bullet drop into account.

One thing that I think is quite different is weapons stats. In most games (including our own War Inc.), you have to compromise between reality and gameplay fun. That is, your guns should feel different and fun, even though it doesn’t make much sense in the real world—after all you don’t really expect that two guns built on the same platform and using the same bullets will do dramatically different damage. So this is what’s different between War Z and other shooters—weapons stats are much more in line with the real world. It’s more simulation than just a fun shooter.

That’s pretty ambitious. What weapons specifically are you putting in the game?


ST: All sorts of things you can expect to see in a real world. Starting with “classics” like baseball bats, knives and crossbows and going up to light machine guns and grenade launchers. Yet—gun availability will depend on how hard it is to obtain them in the real world. For example, you can’t expect just to go into any house nearby and find an M16 lying there. You may be lucky and get your hands on a shotgun or handgun there, but stuff that is military grade can only be found near military installations, police stations, military roadblocks, etc.

Same goes for gun attachments—grips, silencers, different types of options—there are dozens of real world modifications available for your gun. Some will be relatively easy to find (forward grip for M4 for example or flashlight), but some—like high quality military grade optics—will be really rare.

Also just to clear any doubts—unlike the War Inc. attachment system, we’re not going to modify weapons stats for “gamification” purposes (i.e., a scope won’t improve a gun’s spread or anything like that). Some attachments like silencers and grips will affect stats: a silencer will slow down your bullet, grip will help you control recoil. Like they do in real life.

Are you using your own engine technology?

ST: Yes, the game is using our own online game engine called Eclipse. It’s been in development for a while and has been tested by millions of players worldwide, so we’re pretty happy with what we have.



About the skill system: will it feature any active abilities? In the IGN interview, you described them as enhancements—unlocks that boost your stamina or the health restored by bandages.

ST: Haha. I’ve actually been criticized over last few days for calling our system a “Skill Tree.” Turns out it resonates well with traditional WoW style MMO players, but everybody else is thinking—okay this must be an MMO with quests, raids, level ups, grinding and a skill tree that will mold you into one of the “professions” available in the game.

This is as far from the truth as The War Z is far from being a traditional MMO RPG game. What we have in the game is a set of “training skills” available and as you progress through the game, you will decide what you want to train. Do you want to spend more on physical training to be able to carry slightly more weight, sprint for a longer time, etc. Or do you want to do more gun training, allowing you to aim better, reload your gun faster, etc. The point is—this is something you would expect from people in this situation in a real world—that they would train themselves to improve certain skills. So in the game, you accumulate “experience points” that you can spend on learning those different skills.

How are you handling maps and navigation within the world?

ST: From the start you will have access to the world map and be able to mark waypoints to assist with navigating. Other than that—it’s up to you to find the best route to your destination wherever that may be.



Will The War Z feature proximity-based voice chat?


ST: As of now, we don’t have solid plans for VOIP communication built into the game. This may change based on feedback we get from the closed beta test, but so far universal feedback we’re getting is “don’t worry, we’d love our teamspeak, we don’t need anything else.”

What do you see as The War Z’s endgame? This is arguably one of the shortcomings of DayZ currently: once you get gear, killing other players for sport is the natural thing to do.


ST: Ultimately we hope that there won’t be an endgame. Our DNA as a company is not to produce “packaged” games. What we’re making is a sandbox service for our players. We create the toolset and set the theme for players to use and build their own individual game experiences. We don’t have a goal like “okay unlock all achievements” or “find all guns.” We’re saying, here’s a world that just survived a viral outbreak that took the lives of most of the population and left a world full of brain-hungry zombies. This is also why we’re allowing players to rent their own servers and create their own private worlds with their own rules. Some will do just that—building their own virtual “strongholds” so to say and inviting other people to join as long as they are going to follow their rules. Some will band together into clans and will fight other clans—either on public or private servers.

So, with that focus on PvE, how are you going to promote something that doesn’t feel like a conventional FPS deathmatch in an open world? What are you doing to build opportunities for cover and concealment, for example?


ST: Find Ghillie suit. Hide in bushes. I think that two things will affect this most—your posture, how you move and lighting conditions. I don’t want to say we’ll be the first game that’s doing this right, but we’ve spent the last couple months perfecting our light adaptation system to mimic how the human eye works in real life. For example, unlike traditional “gaming” implementation of this feature (often called “HDR lighting”) we’re not just making things brighter or darker instantly based on how well the scene is lit. Depending on what’s happening, we simulate real human eye response. So for example if you get out of a dark space into sunny bright day, you’ll only be blinded for a second or so. Yet if you get into a really pitch black dark space—it’ll take up to 10-15 minutes for your eyes to adapt so you can see what’s going on around you. This can give you some advantage at night. Yet if somebody blinds you with a flashlight or flare—you’ll pretty much be a sitting duck…



Tell me more about the significance of the stem cell-carrying zombies mentioned in your first interview.


ST: Oh, they’re pretty special to me and we’re going to uncover more about them in the coming weeks, but let’s just say for now that they hold a key to what happened to the world. More importantly for the player, though, they hold the key to the cure for the virus that nearly destroyed civilization. Visually they’ll look very different from other infected, they’re much more aggressive, fast and agile. They’re rare, they hunt only at night, so the best place to find them will be larger cities at night time.

Gameplay-wise, you can hunt them down, kill them and extract their stem cells, which can then be used to create an antivirus for the zombie virus. This so called vaccine is used to heal you in case you are bitten during a zombie attack. This is why those cells are really worth a lot—and effectively your best, yet super dangerous way to get gold coins. It probably will require a team effort, so the whole thing alone will create lots of interesting interactions between players.
At the same time—finding these zombies will not be your primary goal. As I mentioned before—this is just one of the tools we give you to build your own game experience. Players will decide if they want to go this route or not—it’s totally up to you.

How do you feel about Dean Hall’s comments about The War Z, specifically that you might be making a lot of promises about features that aren’t necessarily developed yet?

ST: Over the last week, since we announced the game, thousands of players have posted comments on various forums, blogs, and gaming websites as to why they think the game will be great or not. We love to read the comments, but in the end it really doesn’t affect our development in any way. When we announced certain features publicly, it was not a wish list that we thought would sound cool in a press release; it was an action list for us. These are things that we are working on and that are concrete enough today that we feel comfortable saying, “Yes this will be part of the game release.” Most of our team members come from very large projects and companies with very strict policies about the announcement of features—so that carries over into how we talk about features for The War Z.

Thanks for your time, Sergey.

Copycatting isn't a crime. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Good artists copy, great artists steal. I did a bit of a double-take when I first heard about The War Z, a zombie survival MMO-shooter with deep similarities to Day Z, the almost 700,000-strong Arma 2 mod.

But how does the creator of Day Z feel about the sudden appearance of a game that talks and walks (hobbles?) like his Frankenstein of permadeath and open-world survival? I asked Dean "Rocket" Hall.

Hall shared this response via email when I asked what his reaction was to The War Z:

"I think competition is a healthy thing, and their list of features is ambitious. I'm have been hoping that the gamer response to Day Z has made a few developers, and even a few publishers, raise their eyebrows and question what we consider absolute truths in the industry. Maybe this is the start of that, in that case it is a great thing."

"But if it is a list of promises, then it's a bad thing. Because those things are hard to do, and Day Z is only possible because it rests on the shoulders of ten years of development in a fantastic engine. It is one thing to speculate for comment, but it's something else to promise a feature that hasn't been developed. Gamers react really badly to that, even when the end result is a good product. They remember and they are harsh critics."

"In terms of Day Z's future, I think the success of Day Z is less in the features and more in the approach. You could take the same features, plop them in any engine and a team with a different approach, and it wouldn't work. DayZ has the great position of already being out there, and (as shown in the IGN interview) everyone will compare and contrast everything about it to this, sometimes quite unfairly. The same thing happened with World of Warcraft and the similar MMOs that came out afterwards. Certainly, the soldier in me relishes a bit of competition, a bit of edge. So I think it's great news, gamers!"