Premiering a cinematic trailer during the Inside Xbox show, Bohemia Interactive and Microsoft today announced that DayZ — the open world online survival game — is launching on Xbox One on March 27.
With a major game update scheduled for the launch day, DayZ is leaving Xbox Game Preview after 7 months of early access development and close cooperation with the community. The game still has post-launch updates scheduled, but the developers are ready to welcome fresh-spawned console survivors and challenge them to stay alive.
Every day is a new story. This is DayZ — this is your story.
With the need to manage your character’s basic survival requirements and the looming danger of permadeath restarting your progress, DayZ is an exceptionally immersive game. Despite not directly featuring any storytelling mechanics, the post-apocalyptic open world of DayZ presents a unique online sandbox where every decision adds up, creating your own personal story. When all 60 players on a server engage in this completely unscripted survival scenario, the resulting emergent gameplay leads to intense player interactions — some action-packed and short, and some involving long, sophisticated roleplay with very real emotions that you remember long after.
Celebrating this unique storytelling aspect of DayZ, Bohemia Interactive premiered a cinematic CGI cinematic trailer that presents one example of the various stories DayZ can offer. Crossing ways with hostile bandits, overcoming injuries, plotting revenge and improvising during combat are all concepts very familiar to DayZ players. That, and a little bit of imagination — or willingness to fully immerse yourself into the world — will reward you with highly personal gameplay moments very close to this cinematic vision of DayZ.
DayZ is launching on Xbox One thanks to the massive help of the Xbox Game Preview community which shaped the game over the past months. Compared to the current January Game Preview build, the March 27 update will introduce things like an improved controls scheme, better inventory interactions, and general improvements in stability and performance — both on servers and in-game. This should lead to a much smoother overall experience, and should also allow new players to just enjoy the game without the early access hassle. To ensure that everyone starts fresh on launch day, all existing player characters and server persistence data from Game Preview will be wiped.
DayZ will continue in post-launch development with free platform updatesscheduled to drop throughout 2019. These updates will further expand the content available in-game (new weapons and vehicles) and go more in-depthwith some of the existing gameplay concepts.
