Haruspex Games

Here’s part two of my interview with Dean “Rocket” Hall, creator of Arma II mod (and Haruspex Games’ current 2012 Game of the Year) DayZ. Again, due to the death of my dictaphone I wasn’t able to transcribe the interview, so I’ve salvaged the gist of it here:

DayZ and social media:

DayZ’s story is kind of unique: in the space of a few weeks (and with zero marketing) it’s gone from attracting a handful of people on a single server to becoming PC gaming’s biggest talking point, bringing in hundreds of thousands of players on hundreds of servers around the world. I asked Hall why he thought DayZ had become so popular so suddenly. He said that he thinks the game’s success was entirely down to the actions of enthusiastic players, and the stories they told others about their experience with the game.

When people who enjoyed DayZ spoke about it to others they wouldn’t just say they had a good time, as they might with countless other games they’d enjoyed. Instead they would tell people – in person, on Facebook, on forums and message boards – about the time they got chased down by a bunch of bandits in a helicopter, or the time they teamed up with someone only to watch them get torn apart by zombies hours down the line. These kinds of stories, far more than simple recommendations, spurred people to try out DayZ for themselves. And Hall thinks that people don’t feel compelled to tell these kinds of stories about DayZ because it’s mechanically or aesthetically more accomplished than other games, but because it provides them with unique, emergent experiences, something that relatively few games do. It’s more interesting to tell stories about DayZ, he said, than to tell them about your latest session in Skyrim. Because even though you may have done unique things in Skyrim the overarching structure of the experience is the same for everyone. In DayZ, and in other open, emergent games Hall pointed to (such as Minecraft), your story really is your story.

Games Journalism:

Hall went on to talk about what the success of DayZ said about mainstream games journalism. He noted that, while sites like Rock, Paper, Shotgun were quick to talk about the mod, the giants like IGN were far more sluggish. IGN, to take one example, took months to start talking about DayZ, ignoring it even as it became by far the most talked about game on the PC. Hall thinks that this is one of many signs indicating that what he called the ‘old model of games reviewing’ it becoming less and less relevant as time passes.

As Hall sees it, games news and review websites often get into bed with developers and publishers, not because they’re corrupt or incompetent, but because this has always been the best and easiest way of getting important information quickly and reliably. But Hall thinks that now, with the rise of social media and new models of making and distributing games, this way of doing things is under threat. Big sites, used to getting all their information from the industry itself, are routinely missing important stories that are emerging through forums, Twitter, Facebook, and the like.

A commercial release of DayZ:

In his developer session Hall briefly spoke about the possibility of a full commercial release of DayZ. I asked him to elaborate on this, and he told me that he’d intended to make the mod into a stand-alone game for a long time already, and had merely been waiting for the best possible offer from a publisher. When DayZ started taking off he knew he had to be patient, and he apparently ignored several offers from eager parties who wanted to give him the money to make a full game. As DayZ’s player base steadily grew these offers became better and better, and now, after seeing the game’s popularity grow so significantly, he’s in a position where he can demand full creative control for the project from any publisher making him an offer.

Hall said he wants to get a commercial release out as soon as possible. He also noted that the longer he waits the more likely it is that someone’s going to release something similar in an attempt to cannibalise DayZ’s audience. I asked him if he plans to keep the Arma II engine, and if he plans to keep Bohemia Interactive (Hall’s current employer, the company behind Arma II) involved. He said he intends to do both, reasoning that the engine is a good fit for DayZ, and that Bohemia Interactive’s involvement would be a great asset.

When asked about possible business models, Hall said that while he’s toyed around with making the game free-to-play, he’s planning to take the game down the alpha funding route, in much the same way that Minecraft was released in an unfinished state and then periodically updated. He expects to have an alpha, or at least a lot of solid information about an alpha, released by Gamescom in mid-August, and he expects the game to be priced at around $15.

So, I managed to get some time with Dean “Rocket” Hall, creator of hit Arma II mod ‘DayZ’. Unfortunately, my dictaphone broke during the interview, and I wasn’t able to transcribe any of it. So what follows is a merely a summary of our conversation. Read on to find out about the future direction of the mod, his plans for encouraging player-cooperation, and how he wants to give you a dog and then kill it.

Introducing new features to DayZ:

I asked Hall what single feature he most wants to introduce into the game. He gave me two answers – the first based on what would do well from a marketing standpoint, and the second based on what he thinks personally wants to see in the game. The first, he said, was ragdoll physics for both player characters and zombies. Right now, if a player of zombie dies their corpse falls to the ground in a pre-set way, and remains unmovable until it disappears. I never would have thought this would be seen as a big issue, but Hall told me that this was actually a major gripe for lots of players.

The second was the implementation of player-built structures into the game. Players can already set up tents and work towards repairing vehicles, but tents and vehicles tend to be short-lived and both are locked to a single server, meaning there’s relatively little permanence to them. Hall wants to implement player-built structures into the world, giving organised groups the ability to set up a permanent base of operations. These would, he said, hopefully be accessible from any server, but they would likely have to be instanced (cut off from the main game map) for technical and balance reasons.

He also told me about several  features he wanted to implement, but couldn’t make work. Chief among these was weapon degradation – the gradual breakdown of equipment quality through use over time. Due to the nature of Arma II’s engine and the sheer complexity of implementing such a feature, it was eventually abandoned.

Encouraging cooperation:

Hall explained how the player-base of DayZ is generally divided into two camps – those scrabbling around on their own, often along the map’s coast, and those teaming up and making organised raids deeper into the map, in search of better weapons and equipment. But as many players have noted, it’s hard to move from the first category into the second. Since the price of death is so high – having to respawn elsewhere, losing all the equipment you’ve collected – trusting someone you’ve just encountered is almost never worth the risk. People are very keen to shoot you in the back and take your stuff, and so trusting them, while potentially bringing big benefits, also carries huge risk. As such people generally either flee from fellow players, or open fire the second they make contact. I asked Hall if he wanted more players to cooperate, and if so, what he intended to do to make that happen.

He told me that he did indeed want people to feel more able to cooperate with strangers, and he intends to do this by introducing features that encourage players to team up, as well as features that allow people to have more of an impact on the world once they do. The team has recently added several features in an attempt to combat this problem. Removing the starting pistol was intended not just to make the game more threatening, but to give players the opportunity to build trust with others early on. As Hall says: if you don’t have a gun you’re absolutely no threat to anyone, and so people are more likely to avoid shooting you because they fear you’ll become violent. In the long run Hall hopes to encourage cooperation further by allowing players to build up transferable in-game skills. He gave the example of a player who’s character has developed medical skills. If they’re able to not only use this skill to benefit others, but actually teach the skill to other players then there’ll be greater incentive for others to trust them. The hope is that things like this will make the prospect of teaming up so tempting that people are willing to take the risk of betrayal.

Building bases:

I asked Hall to elaborate on the concept of player-built structures in the game, which he said was his major plan to give advanced players end-game content. He said that their construction would require a large amount of resources, and the cooperation of multiple players. In other words, it’ll be tough to build bases, so only dedicated, organised groups of players will be able to manage it.

Bases will also be modular, allowing players to build different rooms as they see fit. He was somewhat vague on the details, possibly because it’s quite a way off yet, but he did mention things such as hydroponics rooms for growing food, generators for supplying electricity, and the production of concrete for reinforcing structures. This seems like the biggest change the team is planning on making to the current DayZ formula, and I’m excited to see where it’ll end up.

Musical cues and subtlety:

At one point I asked him about the music in the game. I had noticed that whilst the game would sometimes suddenly switch from peaceful, ambient sounds to fierce, threatening music, this didn’t seem to be in response to any real danger in the game world. In many games sound cues will trigger to warn you when danger is near, but DayZ seems to do it pretty much at random. He told me that this was a very conscious choice, and that he really didn’t like the idea of having musical cues act as warnings for the player. Originally the music in the game did act as a kind of indication of nearby danger, but he quickly noticed that it changed the way he played the game – he was relaxed when the music was relaxed and he became cautious only when the music told him there was danger around. Now, by making the player feel threatened with musical cues when there’s no danger around people are more likely to maintain a level of caution and fear at all times, and they’re more likely to immerse themselves in the experience of the game.

Dog companions:

In his Rezzed developer session Hall talked briefly about his plans for introducing AI-controlled dogs into the game so that players could befriend them and keep them around for company. He said he’s preparing to see countless stories about the sudden and tragic death of their beloved canine companion. The team is apprently already working on implementing dogs into the game, but they’re having quite a lot of problem getting four-legged animals moving up and down sloping terrain, so it might take a while . There isn’t currently a target date for the introduction of dogs into the game, but Hall seemed confident that they’d be in the game before too long.

Stay tuned for part two, where we talk about the reasons for the game’s success, Hall’s thoughts on games journalism, and an imminent standalone DayZ.