The miserable zombie apocalypse of DayZ continues to shamble along in 2021 and although it took a few months, the developers at Bohemia Interactive have finally shared their plans for the year ahead.
Much like the teams 2020 plans, DayZ in 2020 will focus on a handful of updates throughout the year which aim to bring a few new features alongside plenty of bug fixes to the games "backlog of issues".
The good news, for anyone worried about the future of the game, is that the developer once again reiterated their continued commitment to the survival game.
This will mainly come in the form of "new content, features, balancing, and continual bug fixing".
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DayZ 2021 Roadmap
Whilst the developers have stopped short of giving a specific rundown of when updates will arrive, they have given a brief overview outlining some of the developer's main areas of focus in 2021.
That being said, it is worth stressing that this only outlines "part of [their] focus" for 2021, so it's possible they have more in planned for the game, coming later in the year.
Here's what we've been told so far:
- One thing we’ll continue introducing to the game is new firearms. Unlike previous years, we intend to mix things up more by introducing weapons which weren’t present in the legacy version of DayZ. You can already see evidence of this with the brand new SVAL rifle, which we introduced in the last game update.
- Another area of focus that’s important for us this year is balancing the damage system. For example, we intend to look at how we can improve melee (mainly against infected), including a more consistent way of landing stealth kills (rewarding players for a stealth approach). We would also like to look into differentiating more individual firearms, as well as increasing the chances of PVP encounters ending in an unconscious state (rather than instant death).
- Along with our efforts to improve melee with the infected will be a larger focus on Infected AI reactions to their surroundings. This includes balancing existing noise sources and adding new ones (such as light or doors opening). We’d also like to experiment with some new capabilities for the Infected AI.
- To spice up your adventures, we’ve begun looking into introducing a new type of environmental threat to both of our maps.
- We intend to improve feedback to players on the state of their character. This could include various states like bleeding, hunger, thirst and more through post-process sounds, effects or particles.
- Also being considered is further iteration of the in-game respawn menu.
- We want to focus more on seasonal events, mainly by introducing additional events throughout the year, as well as enriching the events themselves (mostly through new in-game assets).
- Last, but certainly not least, we will continue to support our creative community (i.e. modders and server owners).
More DayZ Server Wipes Coming in 2021
One of the biggest impacts of the DayZ 1.1 update was the introduction of a complete server wipe.
This essentially meant that official servers - and character progression - was reset. If you tend to play on community servers, this isn't a problem, but the wipe did mean players on official servers would have a fresh slate to play the game.
According to the DayZ team, this isn't the only planned server wipe coming in 2021.
"in an effort to breathe fresh air into the official hive, we’ve also decided to incorporate semi-regular wipes of character and server persistence files (bases, vehicles, etc.)" the 2021 roadmap explained.
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The good news is that the team won't be undertaking a server wipe with every update, instead, they're planning another two this year, separated by about "3-4 months" at a time.
This means we can probably expect the next server wipe to occur around June.
Explaining further, the team outlined that these wipes will always be synchronized with game updates and that the reasons for them are "purely balance-related and not of a technical nature."
In the case of the 1.1 patch, we saw an increased number of helicopter crash sites, so we would venture a guess that each server wipe will look to drastically shake up the game and hopefully breath new life into official servers.