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DayZ shooter mod reaches 500k users
What do you get when you cross a hyper-realistic open-world shooter with a zombie-driven third-party mod? A certified phenomenon with more users than your average MMORPG, according to our friends at Joystiq. "Congratulations everyone, with your support through tough times, mistakes, troubles, and technical problems, we now have over 500k users," DayZ dev Dean Hall tweeted yesterday. The mod has taken the shooter world by storm with its blend of realism, unforgiving gameplay, and brain-munching undead. The project turns Bohemia Interactive's Arma 2 into a desperate fight for survival in a world ravaged by zombie apocalypse. While the mod isn't technically an MMO, its persistence and massive world are certainly MMO-like. DayZ is on track to overtake the sales of the game on which it is based. "Currently we're running 22,000 concurrent at full peak, and 10,000 off peak, which is pretty huge numbers considering the original data structure and system was designed to handle 100 concurrents and two servers," he said.
UK Ministry of Defence finds modern shooters more realistic than its sims
Apparently the UK's Ministry of Defence has some pretty unexciting war simulators. So unexciting, in fact, that the MoD's Science and Technology lab - the folks responsible for managing said simulators - is looking to the likes of Battlefield and Call of Duty to help up its game. Speaking to UK newspaper The Guardian, technical team leader Andrew Poulter ran down a brief history of the UK's past with simulators, and detailed the current predicament he believes the MoD is facing. "Back in the 1980s and 1990s, defence was far out in front in terms of quality of simulation. Military-built simulators were state of the art. But now, for £50 [$77], you can buy a commercial game that will be far more realistic than the sorts of tools we were using." The MoD has been employing a simulator known as "Virtual Battlespace 2," which, strictly from a sequels perspective, is way behind pretty much every video game that exists. The simulator was originally created by Operation Flashpoint dev Bohemia Interactive, which itself is not exactly considered at the forefront of game development. According to Poulter, that'll be changing in the coming months, with a reinvestment in his team from the MoD to bring in new technology from more modern shooters. "The weapons need to be credible. If they fire a rifle and the bullet travels three and a half miles, then that is not right. If they are steering a vehicle, then that has to be right too. Realism is more important than entertainment. Levels of immersion are very important," he said. And it definitely doesn't hurt that the soldiers tend to be more engaged with virtual simulations than paperwork. "It is certainly a lot more fun than going through lists of checks and box-ticking. We want them to think 'I would quite like to do a bit more of that kind of thing'. So they might spend 10 minutes [on a simulation] after reading papers in the morning, or in their spare time." And let's be fair, wouldn't soldiers be playing games like these in their spare time anyway? Why not direct that attention to something that could potentially save their lives? Poulter seemed to agree, as he concluded, "It has been invaluable. It is being taken seriously. It's not just a game." We feel the same way about our Battlefield 3 sessions, but don't tell anyone.
Check out Bohemia Interactive's watery FADE anti-piracy
We're so inspired by Bohemia Interactive's new implementation of its FADE anti-piracy software, we've decided to adopt it ourselves. See, FADE is designed to cause illegally downloaded versions of Bohemia's titles (starting with Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis back in 2001) to experience a rapid decline in performance. The latest game to feature the safeguard is Take On Helicopters, which gets all wiggly and wobbly as the game progresses, as seen in the screenshot above. We're still figuring out how to get that safety protocol on our website, but we're pretty sure it's going to have to involve getting the pirates to spread Vaseline on their monitor. We'll have no way of enforcing that, of course: It'll be on the honor system, which should go pretty well.
New Prague-based dev studio, Warhorse, is ready to rock your RPG world
Four eminent 2K Czech and Bohemia Interactive employees have split to form Warhorse, a new development studio in Prague, and are now working on a previously unannounced RPG. Mafia and Mafia II creator Dan Vávra is heading the team at Warhorse, co-founded with Martin Klíma, author of Dragon's Lair. Viktor Bocan, designer of Operation Flashpoint, and Mafia animator Zbynek Trávnivký complete the fearsome foursome.Combined, the Warhorse crew's games have sold more than 11 million copies. They are hiring now for work on this mysterious RPG, requesting people who are willing to move to Prague to work with talented, successful, laid-back developers, which we're sure will be nearly impossible to find.
Codies' new Operation Flashpoint 'not a sequel,' original dev insists
We've all heard this story before: Boy meets girl, boy and girl fall in love, boy and girl produce child, boy decides to create next child by himself, girl sues boy for infringing on legal rights of girl ... alright, so maybe this is a little different. Bohemia Interactive, creator of Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis, this week posted a press release on its company forums, stating that Codemasters' upcoming OFP sequel (Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising) isn't a true "sequel." Leora Hermann, a lawyer representing Bohemia Interactive, states in the release, "In the license agreement, Bohemia Interactive expressly reserved the exclusive right to develop sequels to the original OFP game." Hermann expands upon the agreement between Codemaster and Bohemia Interactive, claiming, "Codemasters also acknowledged that Bohemia owns all the intellectual property in the game -- except the words 'Operation Flashpoint.' Since Codemasters has no right to use the Bohemia Interactive game engine or any other component of the Bohemia-developed game, how can it rightfully claim to produce a 'sequel'?" Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis, a Cold War-era FPS, was developed by Bohemia Interactive and published by Codemasters for PC in 2001. Codemasters has since developed a sequel (in name only, according to Bohemia Interactive) internally as Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising; while Bohemia Interactive has continued using updated versions of the original Operation Flashpoint game engine in its ArmA series. We've seen this kind of franchise catfight before (see: Call of Duty and F.E.A.R.), though this one seems likely to bare some deeper scars. We've put in word to Bohemia Interactive and Codemasters for comment and will update as necessary.
