DayZ News: Release Date Likely in 2015, Beta Beginning in 2014

The creator of DayZ has revealed that the game will most likely not receive an official release until the spring or summer of 2015, but the beta version of the game could be revealed by the end of 2014. The game is currently in the alpha phase of development on Steam Early Access.

"The roadmap is end of the year," DayZ creator Dean Hall told Eurogamer, "but we don't want to release the beta on, like, December 12th or whatever. The beta date would either be prior to the end of the year, so November or something, or it would be pushed to January or February with more QA."

When asked what DayZ could look like when it is released officially, Hall stated that the game will be very different from the one enjoyed by over a million people.

"I think it will be very different...It could even be fundamentally different. As some of these new features come on - even some of the things we introduce now - it suddenly changes the whole way the game's played," Hall said. "We finally got it so that ruined objects don't really work any more; that suddenly changed the way players were behaving. If you shoot someone and destroy their gear, it doesn't work any more. Even little things like that can have profound effects."

"Then you add things like barricading, vehicles, companions, much more advanced disease and medical, suturing, all that kind of stuff. We just added heart attacks the other day; it starts to really change the whole nature of the game."

Whether Hall is still around to see these changes is up in the air; Hall recently announced plans to leave the game and developer Bohemia by the end of 2014. However, the creator of the game will still influence the future of DayZ in a variety of ways, including helping decide if the game will appear on consoles. Hall wouldn't reveal if DayZ will be ported to consoles, but he confirmed that he has met with both Microsoft and Sony. The developer also believes that by the end of 2014 Bohemia will have decided whether or not to bring the game to consoles and if so what systems will have access to DayZ.