GRTV: Dean Hall on DayZ

We caught up with Dean Hall, creator of the popular DayZ mod for Arma II and project lead on the new standalone DayZ game to discuss the game and the industry in general.

On the need of PvP players in a co-operative environment:

"I'm a real co-operative player I may be quite a carebear so that was what I wanted to play that style. I remember back when I was at uni I used to play a lot of Aliens vs. Predator, the original edition not the latest one, and I used to end up playing that co-operative mode a lot and you'd end up playing with random people you'd never met on the internet and you'd be like hours in the co-operative mode just killing wave after wave of xenomorphs as they came at you. And I really enjoyed that, there's was something quite cool about it. What I felt like was that as a co-operative player I needed the PvP focused player to be a challenge for me so I think that's what DayZ is. In order for it to be exciting and compelling for those who want to do co-operative play you need that harsh terrible side of of humanity as well."

On what the success of DayZ has been like:

"I've basically been in crunch mode since about April. You know working weekends just all the time, if I'm not working on it, I'm trying to negotiate something, if I'm not doing that I'm doing interviews."

On the risk of losing the character of DayZ with a more polished standalone product:

"That is a definite danger you know. There's almost a humour that has developed around some of the bugs in it. I saw a really funny Youtube video of the graphical glitches set to dubstep. And I couldn't help but laugh as much as it pains me, cause the graphical glitches just drive me completely crazy. But I had to laugh cause it was kind of funny. So you know there's sort of something about that, but I think we need to tidy it up. It's totally at the point now where people are just getting sick of a lot of the problems. I'm sick of the problems. So we have to fix those."