DayZ Looking A Lot More MMO These Days

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Steve Anderson
The Video Store Guy
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DayZ Looking A Lot More MMO These Days

There's some interesting news about the DayZ conversion to more of a full-MMO model, which is at last report still on track to launch sometime by the end of the year, though there's some room for interpretation on that front. Apparently it's still proceeding apace, and has made some fairly significant changes as a result.

For those not already familiar, DayZ was a kind of mod package originally released as part of ARMA 2 and its later expansion pack Operation Arrowhead. Players join a zombie apocalypse already in progress where they go forth and search for food, water, and better weapons to survive the invasion of the walking dead, as well as other players out for an opportunistic load of free supplies.

But where it was previously a mod, now it's looking more like a full-on MMO, with a new server-client architecture model. It's sufficiently extensive, at last report, to make it almost a completely new game, running on a new version of the old engine.

Naturally, any question that comes up whenever there's a new MMO in the making is: "Can it beat World of Warcraft?" While for the most part the answer has been something along the lines of "No. Seriously, what are you thinking about? No one's actually managed to pull it off yet; what makes you think this one's going to do the job that pretty much everyone else hasn't?".

However, this has two critical points in its favor. One, DayZ already has a fairly substantial user base behind it that's already very fond of the game, so it should have a ready-made user base ready to go from day one of DayZ the MMO. Two, it has an unusual focus, the kind of thing that hasn't been done anywhere else. The closest thing out there to a horror MMO right now, at last report, was The Secret World, and that's actually nowhere near the kind of zombie-killing mania that a lot of gamers have been looking forward to for some time.

Still, only time will tell if the Day Z MMO can do the primary job: taking on World of Warcraft and surviving. Those fond of action games and RPGs should do all right here, and I'm certainly looking forward to taking on the zombie hordes.
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