Basebuilding & Vehicles UpdateAlright, let's start with it right off the bat - if nothing goes wrong during internal testing, we'll be releasing a big Game Preview update on Thursday, November 22 - next week. We're announcing this with a little bit of a warning since there are quite a few things that can still break the build, but hopefully, we should be all good and ready to release what's without any doubt the biggest game update we've done on Xbox so far. Along with bringing new things to try, the update should also be addressing some of the very annoying issues that you've been reporting. Let's take a look:
Content & Features Highlightnew vehicle: ADA 4x4 + parts and other necessary items
base building + necessary items to make it work (tools, planks, nails...)
new shotgun + ammo
tents and barrels for making improvised camps and loot stashes
improved nighttime (don't throw away those road flares everyone! You'll need them
lots of other new items configured for spawning in the Central Economy
slightly increased numbers of infected
Bug Fixes & Quality of Life Improvementsfixes for the annoying hit registration bug
some missing controls should be added, as well as some new options (we'd like to add leaning, switching fire mode, weapon zeroing and switching between multiple user actions)
we've gone through the first round of optimizations improving the performance and stability of the inventory (evaluating the performance will be one of the things we will be monitoring)
changes to Central Economy and item spawning quantity in general
lots of smaller animation and sound improvements
general improvements to game stability
Upcoming Inventory & Usability ImprovementsOne of the things that we'd like to resolve during the Game Preview is the general usability of the game, and the inventory/UI functionality. The DayZ game design team joined forces with our friends and colleagues in the Vigor team and for the past 2 weeks, they have been brainstorming possible new concepts for the DayZ UI and inventory usability. We've done a pretty extensive research in this area and identified a lot of specific things that would be worth taking a look at. This effort should result in a set of specific improvements that we will want to try implementing in order to make DayZ a bit more user friendly.
While it's too early to show any results and the implementation phase is always the hardest one, we're taking this very seriously and will update you whenever we have any concrete results. Your feedback on this will be very important, so get ready to bring it on!
DayZ will support mouse & keyboard!Lastly, at XO, Microsoft announced that mouse & keyboard support is officially coming to Xbox One - and DayZ is one of the games that will take advantage of this new feature! It's good to mention that our intention is to always match players with the same input method, and not mix controller and mouse & keyboard players together. While we don't have a specific day to roll out support for mouse & keyboard input, it's safe to say that we will most likely not be able to do that before we leave Game Preview. Figuring out a good controller experience is the priority for us at the moment, and while it may seem like it's easy to just bring over the PC controls to Xbox, there's actually quite a lot of programming and scripting work that would need to be done in order to support this - and we need our programmers and scripters on other things right now!
With this - let's wrap up today's Development Briefing. Please make sure to jump into the discussion thread on the forums to ask us any questions.
See you all in Chernarus, Survivors!