Why Are People Playing Dayz Again
For hundreds of days, Brian Hicks battled to finish DayZ and didn't quite get there
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This article first appeared in PC Gamer magazine issue 361 in August 2021. Every month we run exclusive features exploring the world of PC gaming—from behind-the-scenes previews, to incredible community stories, to fascinating interviews, and more.
You may non exist able to encounter them, but there are cloak-and-dagger PC gamers hidden deep within the bowels of the major console companies. Back in 2013, Brian Hicks was a project director at Microsoft Studios—a professional Xbox evangelist. But behind the scenes, he was working to build relations betwixt his bosses and the makers of a quintessential PC game he had fallen in dearest with: DayZ.
"Yous know, I'm doing this so much," Hicks wrote in 1 email to DayZ creator Dean Hall, "y'all should but hire me." Asked to fly out to Prague for a two-calendar week working interview, Hicks was shocked to observe that the DayZ team, as development on the standalone game began, was roughly five people.
"It was a very, very barebones team," he says. "It's hard for me to overstate how garage development it was."
That turns out to be literally true. At Bohemia'south Mnisek campusa collection of countryside cabins 30 kilometres south of Prague, in one case used for weekend retreats during the communist era of Czechoslovakia—the garage was converted into a motion capture lab. The DayZ team was squeezed into 120 square anxiety above the laundry room.
"I was very overjoyed past this small hamlet life," Hicks says. After a couple of awkward months dorsum in the United states awaiting monetary blessing from Bohemia, he got the thumbs upwards, took an fourscore% pay cut, and packed a couple of suitcases.
"I remember walking out of Microsoft on my last day at 11pm, because I didn't want to leave annihilation undone," Hicks says. "There was a big LED clock in the lobby, counting downwardly to the launch of the Xbox One, and there was less than 48 hours on it. The next morning I flew to Prague and started working after possibly a four-60 minutes nap."
Wake up dead
DayZ's development was no less hectic. Hall and Hicks spearheaded the march to launch on Steam Early on Access, which came sooner than expected. "I call back Dean telling the team that the word from on loftier was that if we didn't get DayZ out onto Steam before the cease of the year we might not take a job," Hicks says. "Information technology was crisis, I won't lie about it. It was a fucking tornado, there was so fiddling time to breathe."
The launch build of DayZ was held together by "duct tape, wooden matches, and prayers". The squad watched for spikes in resource consumption and, over a 12-hour bridge call with server hosting company Multiplay, optimised where they could. Valve pulled down a trailer that showed a character committing suicide, infuriating Hall, who had been up all night making it.
Hicks was pulling tardily nights himself. Due to a misunderstanding of how Valve Anti-Cheat worked, DayZ launched without any protection from hackers. Hicks filled the gap by watching streams to observe cheats, waiting for them to log off, and so moving their characters into the sea and then that they'd freeze to death.
The consequences of sleep deprivation became clear when Hicks accidentally deleted the game's live database during peak hours. "I remember realising what I had done," he says. "I recollect the feeling of all the blood in my face up leaving." Thankfully, Multiplay had backups, and the game was restored to an earlier version past the time Hall had returned from an interview—the same in which he announced his departure from Bohemia.
"I am a grenade," Hall told Eurogamer. "I have a specific use. I can talk people up to the ledge and become them to jump off it. Just somewhen, that'southward the bad person to have." Through the showtime half of 2014, the DayZ team toured the earth's biggest game shows, addressing its millions-stiff playerbase from Rezzed and PAX E. And then, in the summer, Hall transitioned to an advisory part, having already stayed at Bohemia far longer than planned.
Catch-up crew
The consequences of sleep deprivation became articulate when Hicks accidentally deleted the game'south live database during elevation hours
Hicks took over, and a new construction set in. He pushed for regular status reports to the DayZ customs, which was enormous but sceptical. Considering of the rushed launch, the Bohemia squad had started off on the back foot—DayZ's alpha was bacteria than the gratuitous mod that had preceded it, and fans knew it. "Information technology was me trying to get to where I knew we wanted to be when we started," Hicks says. "I wanted to reach feature parity with DayZ Mod, before information technology started splintering off."
Because the game was already in move, some aspects of DayZ'south evolution—similar the engine it ran on, and the new renderer Hall had promised as a tonic for its miserable performance—were set in rock past the time Hicks picked upward the reins.
"I stand backside those decisions," Hicks says. "I practice wish we could take done more traditional closed door development on the core technology before launching the game. It'south easy to say that knowing that 5.8 one thousand thousand copies were sold. Information technology's a lot of money to be able to sit up here and become, 'Nosotros should have done it differently.' Realistically, maybe we couldn't take."
It'due south of import to remember that Bohemia was capitalising on a phenomenon, and didn't know how long it would terminal. Holding off on the Early Access launch of DayZ would take been like shutting downwardly the fidget spinner factories in the summer of 2017. The contest wasn't so much hot on Bohemia's heels equally stomping on its toes—Rust, inspired past Hall'south mod, came out several days before standalone DayZ. "There's blood in the h2o," Hicks says. "There'southward this new genre and everybody wants in on it. It'south chaos."
Every small victory was viewed in the context of how far the game notwithstanding had to go. In a 2022 PC Gamer encompass feature, Hall had spoken about his dreams for underground bases, gangs with matching tattoos, and communities of players working together in specialised disciplines, like the corps of Eve Online. But by 2017, those players were even so waiting for bones features like smooth animations.
All the same, Hicks realised that, in his words, all the artistic direction had been done. "Systems that weren't even yet in the game had been completely prototyped out, whiteboarded, written down in design documentation," he says. "It was all at that place. More and more, my job was less having to guide the ship, and more than going out and evangelising for the brand."
Travel Homo
The creative director spent increasing amounts of time on planes, and realised he was homesick. Following the success of early battle royale game H1Z1: King of the Impale, he managed to convince Bohemia to purchase the IP for Survivor GameZ—the 2012 mod that had made Hicks' proper noun in the first identify, and laid the groundwork for the genre now dominated by Fortnite and Warzone.
"Marek [Španel, Bohemia CEO] was sold on information technology," he says. "We were gonna carve up development between Bratislava and a Bohemia Interactive Seattle office. I was really excited about that, existence able to continue to work on things I was passionate about back home."
The Survivor GameZ would have been DayZ'due south pitch for the battle royale crown, and the timing was right—Bluehole hadn't yet begun development on PUBG. In fact, Bohemia was in talks to hire Brendan Greene, who at the time had just finished consulting on H1Z1.
The Survivor GameZ would have been DayZ'south pitch for the battle royale crown, and the timing was right
"In that location was a lot of hemming and hawing, for some reason, that he wasn't technical enough to bring on," Hicks says. "I was like, 'Are you kidding? He did DayZ Battle Royale. He knows our engine.'" Bohemia's interview process was just as drawn out as it had been at the nascency of DayZ, and while discussions were ongoing, Hicks got a telephone call from Greene. "Hey man," Greene said. "I don't know what to do. This company is offering me the creative director office on my own game." The visitor was Bluehole, and the game was PUBG. Hicks advised him to have the chore. "I can't match that," he replied. "There'due south no way I tin get Bohemia Interactive to put you in that senior of a role. You'd be stupid to laissez passer this up."
The plans to open a Survivor GameZ studio in Seattle, meanwhile, had grown complicated. Bohemia was already opening a new function in Amsterdam, and that project was taking up all of the visitor'south authoritative bandwidth. When the fourth dimension came to renew Hicks' residence visa in the Czech Republic, he instead rented a firm in Redmond, Washington, intending to be the advance force for an army of Survivor GameZ developers.
The not bad irony was that, though he was dorsum home, he never saw it—instead working during the night to friction match Czech hours, his windows covered by cardboard boxes and gaffer tape. Worse, it proved much harder to be DayZ's leader from some other continent.
DayZ'd and confused
"I had strong disagreements with some input of people on the corporate side, and I didn't seem to exist able to pull the same weight that I did when I was in the office for all those years," he says. "In previous situations, if it was really bad, I could just drive up the hill and get knock on Marek's door."
Hicks felt heard past the evolution squad, merely the problems kept recurring. He was peculiarly upset when Bohemia began planning to release DayZ'south 0.63 build as the game'due south official one.0. "This is a bad idea," he said. "We don't accept the feature set in the game right at present that our store page has said is our target for the last four years."
Despite the protests, DayZ left Early Access in Dec 2018, subsequently half a decade of open development. "I was not able to change any minds," Hicks says. "I got to this point where I was really stressed about DayZ all the fourth dimension. I was angry, and would get into actual arguments. I wasn't designing new stuff. We were feature locked, and if anything we were scoping dorsum, and that was what I was concerned about. I was like, 'Why am I doing this?'"
Hicks wrote his last DayZ status report from InXile's office in Newport Beach, California, where he'd taken a new chore. Survivor GameZ, originally intended to be a standalone release, ultimately fizzled out later on a few months as a way for DayZ. Brendan Greene'southward star rose, and it became apparent that the era of survival games had finally given mode to boxing royale—a genre that made DayZ wait deadening and old- fashioned, even as it paid homage to Bohemia'southward open exploration and high-stakes scavenging.
Today, you can find Hicks where he began: streaming one-time builds of DayZ on Twitch. Merely now he has the distance to curiosity at how much the game has transformed. "It was a approval to come up into my life," he says, "and it's a phenomenon that so many developers are not lucky enough to experience."
Source: https://www.pcgamer.com/for-hundreds-of-days-brian-hicks-battled-to-finish-dayz-and-didnt-quite-get-there/
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