Interview with Dean Hall on the DayZ development process
DayZ's popularity far exceeded the expectations of its creator, Dean Hall (Dean Hall). Now he, together with the ARMA development team from Bohemia Interactive, is engaged in a radical transformation of the popular mod into an independent game, moving to server technology from MMO and adding a large number of innovations to the gameplay. He connects his success with the personal histories of the players and the way the specific design of the game touches people’s innate instincts regarding losses and acquisitions. In an eclectic interview, Hall talks about all sorts of things: from how his army career inspired him to create the game, to integrating Steam into the development process within the team and hoping for a successful release of a Minecraft-like alpha version (already after this interview taken in May 2013, in early access Steam sold a million copies of the alpha version four weeks after the release ).
Now that you have time to reflect on this, what do you think about the reasons for the popularity of your game?
')
It seems to me that the main reason was a carefully thought-out mixture of permanent death - giving you a sense of value, since you can really lose something - and a sense of ownership. Persistence means it will be there tomorrow. These two sensations mixed up and gave rise to a lot of really interesting stories happening to the players.
For example ... imagine that I gave you my hat for 10 minutes. You will react completely differently than if I said "this hat is yours forever." In the case of a “hat forever,” you have very different feelings. Same with DayZ - we add a feeling of permanence, you know that your character will be waiting for you tomorrow. And since you can lose it, you appreciate it.
I think this is an integral part of human nature. We hurt her and people have very strong emotions, crazy stories happen to them, and since they are unique and not scripted, people talk about them on the forums, 4chan and similar places.
Permanent death is very rare in games and causes a lot of controversy. Can you tell me in general about its value ?
It seems to me that all people understand losses very well. This is the cornerstone - even children understand death. It seems to me that it is in our nature to appreciate what we can lose. If we know that we cannot lose something, we look at it in a different way and experience other feelings in its attitude. Thus, the final tension — when a sense of ownership is added to the above — makes people treat the game completely differently.
If you play Hotline Miami and you know that before you can begin a new mission there will be a certain delay, you will not rush headlong and try different things. All player behavior changes and more interesting stories are happening to him.
It seems to me that our brain is tuned to such things. By accepting this, players get into different situations and hear the sound of their hearts, because they know that if something goes wrong, they will lose everything. It is the element of risk that adds these sensations.
When you talked about a tool for training soldiers, did you mean ARMA as a serious game?
Yeah. ARMA is being sold as a serious Virtual Battlespace game, but I did work as a soldier in the army when I was offered a contract with Bohemia. In my free time I tried to use the game to train soldiers. In ARMA, you usually complete a mission, and if you are shot down, you die, and the rest continue. But this poorly reflected the reality of my workouts. So I wanted to create a system in which people on a mission would have a slightly different feeling. The army was not interested in such a thing, so I, in a sense, of the word, played myself with this idea, adding zombies.
So where did the zombies come from? After all, you took the real sensations and added zombies to them, right?
These are easily accessible opponents. It may take a long time before you meet other people. And such opponents are well understood by people. It seems to me that people are annoyed by the fact that zombies are such an easy target for hunting, but they are easy to handle, easy to understand and accept, so it seems to me that they turned out to be good opponents.
You mentioned the profitability of zombies, with which it is easy for all developers to work with - and we all understand the reasons for this state of affairs. But how do you combine it with the goals set earlier to achieve realism?
I just wanted zombies to be a threat when searching for prey. Not a particularly strong threat. DayZ is all built on such unobvious voltages. Some of them are very, very thin and we will definitely continue to move in this direction in a separate version of the game.
For example, you need to remember the hunger and thirst of your character. This is not the main concern, but it becomes more important with time. The more you run, the more you need food. The colder, the more you need food, the hotter, the more you need water. All this is unobtrusive, but constantly affects your mind.
All this accumulated tension dramatically increases the sense of horror of the player. At first glance, there is nothing particularly scary about DayZ. But all these unobtrusive voltages ... For example, you found prey. You do not have much space in your backpack, so you can take only a part. And these hardly noticeable tensions arise again: “Should I take food? Or water? Or ammo? ”Much of this works on a subconscious level. And that is why it makes such a strong impression.
A whole generation of people watched as high-budget games became easier and more continuous - auto-save every five seconds. But in the last few years we have seen games like Dark Souls and even Spelunky, aggressively complex games that have gained some popularity, at least in their niche.
It seems to me people have always played them. For me, this attempt to return to the childish sensations of the Amiga, where I met a truly furious complexity, as a child. I remember the first time I played X-COM on a PC. My brother took over a computer from a friend from the university, and I was just on vacation. I just looked through all the directories in a row and accidentally stumbled upon an .exe from X-COM.
I knew nothing about him. We did not have the Internet, it was the 90s. So I started to play it without manuals or anything like that. I made discoveries, real discoveries. It was an incredible feeling. Having met sektoidov I really wanted to conduct an autopsy, because I did not understand at all who they were. This complexity brought tremendous sensations, I always wanted to feel something like this again in games.
Even when my friends and I play something like Company of Heroes, we always add a bunch of AI at maximum difficulty. As a result, we lose in 99% of cases, but those feelings and passions — when we shout at each other demanding to protect this area or cover that one — this is the real game for me.
It is for these unique sensations that I play games. I play a lot in the Kerbal Space Program. I play it like crazy and take it very seriously.
Another example is FTL. Everyone tweets "I play it, but I can't get past X moment, Z moment, Y moment". It looks like these games are coming back. Personally, it seems to me that without difficulties ... Do not get me wrong. Have you ever heard the term “gaming tourism” (content tourist)? The idea that you play games to look at different beautiful landscapes and to travel on them.
This is completely alien to me. I like Skyrim, but the longer I play it, the simpler it becomes. And I do not want this. I want to — I really liked Morrowind. Morrowind is the right Elder Scrolls for me. Visually, Skryim is incredible. I liked just walking along the banks of the rivers and looking at the rocks.
But I need an environment. I need to feel that my decisions are valuable, and the value in many cases comes with risk. If you know that there is a risk of failure, you think more carefully about your decisions. And this is precisely for me the gameplay - in making decisions. If these decisions have no value for the gameplay, then why should I take them? I just make decisions for their own sake.
Your mindset helps you make games. Have you ever heard from people "I have never played such games"?
Yes, I heard it many times. For me, this is a bit strange, since I try to play such games in ordinary games. I always thought that I had very strange tastes. It seems to me that I was very lucky in my life and career and the games I played played led to this special type of game that people now liked so much.
But speaking at GDC and communicating with people, I realized that we were right here (gesturing is something far to the right of the center), and most people are here (gesturing the center, smiling). So let's see what happens next.
Dark Souls is also interesting in this regard - its author made the games back in the era of the PlayStation 1, but only in the middle of the era of the PlayStation 3 did his games become high-budget hits. It is like the spirit of the times.
Yes, definitely. I think people want it. Perhaps a certain role is played by social media. In the case of DayZ this is indisputable. People started playing in DayZ and great stories happened to them. This is completely different from the stories from Mass Effect 3, since in the latter case they happen to everyone. These same stories only happen to you.
As humans, we, by our very nature, love to tell stories. So people wanted to talk about their experiences. They went to 4chan - where DayZ was a great success - and they posted their little story. Other people heard these stories and thought, "I should try this game too." The same thing happened on Reddit and Facepunch. That was where it all began. Social media helped us a lot - we could not succeed without them.
How do you design a game for user stories? Do you do it consciously?
I would not say that we purposefully think about them. Here is an example: we will soon add to the standalone version of the radio. I'm playing Space Station 13 now. Did you play it? This is a PC game - truly eclectic. It is free. This is a bagel, with a top view, a multiplayer, in which about 50 people simultaneously participate. They all play certain roles on the space station - with intrigue and the ability to interact with anything. She is very complicated.
You have a walkie-talkie and you can turn the microphone on and off. When we invented the walkie-talkies for DayZ, we thought, “Okay, let's do this.” And here you can turn off the microphone and use the radio as a spy bug.
We do not deliberately consider such things purposefully, do not plan situations in which players can do something special, we simply create tools that players can use for various purposes.
How do you design tools? You exemplified the idea of ​​walkie-talkies and I can imagine how this happened. Is this your way: “I am inventing tools that can be added to this world”?
Yes, we do, for the most part, invent tools, and then look at how they can be used. From the point of view of technology - let's take for example our craft system, we simply make a list of all possible tools that we can think of and consider them from the point of view of design: “What can you do with these tools? Will players think about what they can do with them? ”
Probably the most important thing for the next question: what kind of feelings do we want to cause our players? What challenges do we want to offer them to the mind? This is very different from the “gaming tourism” or “cool cannon” you described. We are closer: “We want players to think about the resources they have — like food — we want them to think about their diet. So we need canned food, fresh food, meat ... ”This is what we are guided by, considering the game in terms of sensations.
If I understand everything correctly, you create a lot of tools and discard less interesting ones or combine them with each other. How exactly do you get rid of unnecessary things?
In many ways they help us - and most actively this process will go in the very near future, when we release the alpha version, because at this moment we really need feedback from our players. It was at this time that the development diaries, events like PAX become important, because there we can directly interact with the players.
We get some feedback directly from the players on PAX. Then Reddit - there they do the most detailed analyzes of the equipment projects I have laid out. This is a great source of user reviews. It seems to me that 90% of my ideas were terrible and it was social media that made it possible to get rid of them.
I always wondered if developers use information from online communities. I'm playing Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate right now and if you check out Wikia, you'll find incredible, crazy amounts of information. The monsters in this game are huge, they have a lot of vulnerabilities and someone made a picture in which these monsters are disassembled in parts and an assessment of the degree of security of each vulnerable zone is given. By itself, people from Capcom know these numbers - but to have such a resource at hand ... Even game designers could refer to it.
As it seems to me, players sooner or later begin to understand the game better than its designers, especially in multiplayer modes. I’m a bit of a chauvinist with regards to the single player mode and I’m focused entirely on multiplayer. I played some singles, but they are very limited and tied to a particular style. It seems to me that in multiplayer games, players definitely begin to understand the game better than its creators, and this is absolutely true for DayZ.
I do not like the phrase "community management" - we are rather engaged in "interaction with the community." It sounds a bit marketing-friendly (business-speaky), but we really treat the community that way. We are not going to tell them any advertising tales (informational PR).
Not to be unfounded, I will give an example. Right now we are developing a new control scheme. We say: "we have such a scheme, such and such." They discuss them. We read the discussion. This is not a vote, but they are very helpful. They give arguments, we study from and this gives us a starting point, "Okay, to balance these moments we will do this and that."
How will you attract players to alpha? Like in Minecraft?
At the moment we are distributing free keys to the moderators of the forums, Reddit, people who helped us with the development and the like. This is about 30-100 people.
Having completed our client-server architecture - we are switching to the MMO model and are planning to finish it in June - we will launch the alpha version according to the Minecraft scheme. People pay X dollars and get an early, cheap access, with the release of beta, the price rises, for example, by 10 dollars, and after the final version is released, the price rises by another 10 dollars.
And when the owners of those keys that you have already given, will join the alpha?
They are already in it. They are already playing it. It's good. So far we have only one server and we are constantly updating the content. Stimovskaya model very well suited for us. Valve employees contacted us and asked, “What would make your job easier?” And we replied, “Well, we would like a delta patching”. Fortunately, it was almost ready for them. And now, when updating, we can not download the entire file, but only the changed part. "
And we have already embedded this in our development process. Artists download the game via Steam and we use it to update the game during the development process. So when players join alpha, they see a small drop-down list with two assemblies - right before the game starts - in which you can choose either stable or experimental. And people themselves choose which assembly they will play. If they want to see the version that the developers are working on right now, they simply choose an experimental build.
We do not always know how successful innovations will be. Many of them are pure experiments. But these are cool experiments and we are very lucky that we can deal with them, because the success of DayZ and the sales of Arma 2 gave us a kind of blank check for experiments. Most likely we will make a lot of mistakes, and we make them, but this is good. This is good for the game and good for us.
Do you worry that you may lose your users' credits due to errors?
As it seems to me, I have to focus on being extremely transparent. Transparency is most important. It seems to me everything will be fine, as long as we are transparent, I mean completely transparent - this is not the state in which it can be partially located. It's like cheating your wife. Once we fool users and no one will ever believe. So we are completely transparent.
It seems to me that people easily forgive us for mistakes, because we honestly recognize them. After all, we made a lot of mistakes. Something not very pleasant can always happen, like a situation with a release date that we have changed very drastically, so that it has gone into an uncertain future.
Of course, this was a very big disappointment for the mass of people. But we honestly admitted that we made a mistake when planning. Initially, we just wanted to release a standalone version of the mod, for which we announced the release date, but in the middle of the development process, we realized that we really wanted to make a full-fledged game.
Now that you have time to reflect on this, what do you think about the reasons for the popularity of your game?
')
It seems to me that the main reason was a carefully thought-out mixture of permanent death - giving you a sense of value, since you can really lose something - and a sense of ownership. Persistence means it will be there tomorrow. These two sensations mixed up and gave rise to a lot of really interesting stories happening to the players.
For example ... imagine that I gave you my hat for 10 minutes. You will react completely differently than if I said "this hat is yours forever." In the case of a “hat forever,” you have very different feelings. Same with DayZ - we add a feeling of permanence, you know that your character will be waiting for you tomorrow. And since you can lose it, you appreciate it.
I think this is an integral part of human nature. We hurt her and people have very strong emotions, crazy stories happen to them, and since they are unique and not scripted, people talk about them on the forums, 4chan and similar places.
Permanent death is very rare in games and causes a lot of controversy. Can you tell me in general about its value ?
It seems to me that all people understand losses very well. This is the cornerstone - even children understand death. It seems to me that it is in our nature to appreciate what we can lose. If we know that we cannot lose something, we look at it in a different way and experience other feelings in its attitude. Thus, the final tension — when a sense of ownership is added to the above — makes people treat the game completely differently.
If you play Hotline Miami and you know that before you can begin a new mission there will be a certain delay, you will not rush headlong and try different things. All player behavior changes and more interesting stories are happening to him.
It seems to me that our brain is tuned to such things. By accepting this, players get into different situations and hear the sound of their hearts, because they know that if something goes wrong, they will lose everything. It is the element of risk that adds these sensations.
When you talked about a tool for training soldiers, did you mean ARMA as a serious game?
Yeah. ARMA is being sold as a serious Virtual Battlespace game, but I did work as a soldier in the army when I was offered a contract with Bohemia. In my free time I tried to use the game to train soldiers. In ARMA, you usually complete a mission, and if you are shot down, you die, and the rest continue. But this poorly reflected the reality of my workouts. So I wanted to create a system in which people on a mission would have a slightly different feeling. The army was not interested in such a thing, so I, in a sense, of the word, played myself with this idea, adding zombies.
So where did the zombies come from? After all, you took the real sensations and added zombies to them, right?
These are easily accessible opponents. It may take a long time before you meet other people. And such opponents are well understood by people. It seems to me that people are annoyed by the fact that zombies are such an easy target for hunting, but they are easy to handle, easy to understand and accept, so it seems to me that they turned out to be good opponents.
You mentioned the profitability of zombies, with which it is easy for all developers to work with - and we all understand the reasons for this state of affairs. But how do you combine it with the goals set earlier to achieve realism?
I just wanted zombies to be a threat when searching for prey. Not a particularly strong threat. DayZ is all built on such unobvious voltages. Some of them are very, very thin and we will definitely continue to move in this direction in a separate version of the game.
For example, you need to remember the hunger and thirst of your character. This is not the main concern, but it becomes more important with time. The more you run, the more you need food. The colder, the more you need food, the hotter, the more you need water. All this is unobtrusive, but constantly affects your mind.
All this accumulated tension dramatically increases the sense of horror of the player. At first glance, there is nothing particularly scary about DayZ. But all these unobtrusive voltages ... For example, you found prey. You do not have much space in your backpack, so you can take only a part. And these hardly noticeable tensions arise again: “Should I take food? Or water? Or ammo? ”Much of this works on a subconscious level. And that is why it makes such a strong impression.
A whole generation of people watched as high-budget games became easier and more continuous - auto-save every five seconds. But in the last few years we have seen games like Dark Souls and even Spelunky, aggressively complex games that have gained some popularity, at least in their niche.
It seems to me people have always played them. For me, this attempt to return to the childish sensations of the Amiga, where I met a truly furious complexity, as a child. I remember the first time I played X-COM on a PC. My brother took over a computer from a friend from the university, and I was just on vacation. I just looked through all the directories in a row and accidentally stumbled upon an .exe from X-COM.
I knew nothing about him. We did not have the Internet, it was the 90s. So I started to play it without manuals or anything like that. I made discoveries, real discoveries. It was an incredible feeling. Having met sektoidov I really wanted to conduct an autopsy, because I did not understand at all who they were. This complexity brought tremendous sensations, I always wanted to feel something like this again in games.
Even when my friends and I play something like Company of Heroes, we always add a bunch of AI at maximum difficulty. As a result, we lose in 99% of cases, but those feelings and passions — when we shout at each other demanding to protect this area or cover that one — this is the real game for me.
It is for these unique sensations that I play games. I play a lot in the Kerbal Space Program. I play it like crazy and take it very seriously.
Another example is FTL. Everyone tweets "I play it, but I can't get past X moment, Z moment, Y moment". It looks like these games are coming back. Personally, it seems to me that without difficulties ... Do not get me wrong. Have you ever heard the term “gaming tourism” (content tourist)? The idea that you play games to look at different beautiful landscapes and to travel on them.
This is completely alien to me. I like Skyrim, but the longer I play it, the simpler it becomes. And I do not want this. I want to — I really liked Morrowind. Morrowind is the right Elder Scrolls for me. Visually, Skryim is incredible. I liked just walking along the banks of the rivers and looking at the rocks.
But I need an environment. I need to feel that my decisions are valuable, and the value in many cases comes with risk. If you know that there is a risk of failure, you think more carefully about your decisions. And this is precisely for me the gameplay - in making decisions. If these decisions have no value for the gameplay, then why should I take them? I just make decisions for their own sake.
Your mindset helps you make games. Have you ever heard from people "I have never played such games"?
Yes, I heard it many times. For me, this is a bit strange, since I try to play such games in ordinary games. I always thought that I had very strange tastes. It seems to me that I was very lucky in my life and career and the games I played played led to this special type of game that people now liked so much.
But speaking at GDC and communicating with people, I realized that we were right here (gesturing is something far to the right of the center), and most people are here (gesturing the center, smiling). So let's see what happens next.
Dark Souls is also interesting in this regard - its author made the games back in the era of the PlayStation 1, but only in the middle of the era of the PlayStation 3 did his games become high-budget hits. It is like the spirit of the times.
Yes, definitely. I think people want it. Perhaps a certain role is played by social media. In the case of DayZ this is indisputable. People started playing in DayZ and great stories happened to them. This is completely different from the stories from Mass Effect 3, since in the latter case they happen to everyone. These same stories only happen to you.
As humans, we, by our very nature, love to tell stories. So people wanted to talk about their experiences. They went to 4chan - where DayZ was a great success - and they posted their little story. Other people heard these stories and thought, "I should try this game too." The same thing happened on Reddit and Facepunch. That was where it all began. Social media helped us a lot - we could not succeed without them.
How do you design a game for user stories? Do you do it consciously?
I would not say that we purposefully think about them. Here is an example: we will soon add to the standalone version of the radio. I'm playing Space Station 13 now. Did you play it? This is a PC game - truly eclectic. It is free. This is a bagel, with a top view, a multiplayer, in which about 50 people simultaneously participate. They all play certain roles on the space station - with intrigue and the ability to interact with anything. She is very complicated.
You have a walkie-talkie and you can turn the microphone on and off. When we invented the walkie-talkies for DayZ, we thought, “Okay, let's do this.” And here you can turn off the microphone and use the radio as a spy bug.
We do not deliberately consider such things purposefully, do not plan situations in which players can do something special, we simply create tools that players can use for various purposes.
How do you design tools? You exemplified the idea of ​​walkie-talkies and I can imagine how this happened. Is this your way: “I am inventing tools that can be added to this world”?
Yes, we do, for the most part, invent tools, and then look at how they can be used. From the point of view of technology - let's take for example our craft system, we simply make a list of all possible tools that we can think of and consider them from the point of view of design: “What can you do with these tools? Will players think about what they can do with them? ”
Probably the most important thing for the next question: what kind of feelings do we want to cause our players? What challenges do we want to offer them to the mind? This is very different from the “gaming tourism” or “cool cannon” you described. We are closer: “We want players to think about the resources they have — like food — we want them to think about their diet. So we need canned food, fresh food, meat ... ”This is what we are guided by, considering the game in terms of sensations.
If I understand everything correctly, you create a lot of tools and discard less interesting ones or combine them with each other. How exactly do you get rid of unnecessary things?
In many ways they help us - and most actively this process will go in the very near future, when we release the alpha version, because at this moment we really need feedback from our players. It was at this time that the development diaries, events like PAX become important, because there we can directly interact with the players.
We get some feedback directly from the players on PAX. Then Reddit - there they do the most detailed analyzes of the equipment projects I have laid out. This is a great source of user reviews. It seems to me that 90% of my ideas were terrible and it was social media that made it possible to get rid of them.
I always wondered if developers use information from online communities. I'm playing Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate right now and if you check out Wikia, you'll find incredible, crazy amounts of information. The monsters in this game are huge, they have a lot of vulnerabilities and someone made a picture in which these monsters are disassembled in parts and an assessment of the degree of security of each vulnerable zone is given. By itself, people from Capcom know these numbers - but to have such a resource at hand ... Even game designers could refer to it.
As it seems to me, players sooner or later begin to understand the game better than its designers, especially in multiplayer modes. I’m a bit of a chauvinist with regards to the single player mode and I’m focused entirely on multiplayer. I played some singles, but they are very limited and tied to a particular style. It seems to me that in multiplayer games, players definitely begin to understand the game better than its creators, and this is absolutely true for DayZ.
I do not like the phrase "community management" - we are rather engaged in "interaction with the community." It sounds a bit marketing-friendly (business-speaky), but we really treat the community that way. We are not going to tell them any advertising tales (informational PR).
Not to be unfounded, I will give an example. Right now we are developing a new control scheme. We say: "we have such a scheme, such and such." They discuss them. We read the discussion. This is not a vote, but they are very helpful. They give arguments, we study from and this gives us a starting point, "Okay, to balance these moments we will do this and that."
How will you attract players to alpha? Like in Minecraft?
At the moment we are distributing free keys to the moderators of the forums, Reddit, people who helped us with the development and the like. This is about 30-100 people.
Having completed our client-server architecture - we are switching to the MMO model and are planning to finish it in June - we will launch the alpha version according to the Minecraft scheme. People pay X dollars and get an early, cheap access, with the release of beta, the price rises, for example, by 10 dollars, and after the final version is released, the price rises by another 10 dollars.
And when the owners of those keys that you have already given, will join the alpha?
They are already in it. They are already playing it. It's good. So far we have only one server and we are constantly updating the content. Stimovskaya model very well suited for us. Valve employees contacted us and asked, “What would make your job easier?” And we replied, “Well, we would like a delta patching”. Fortunately, it was almost ready for them. And now, when updating, we can not download the entire file, but only the changed part. "
And we have already embedded this in our development process. Artists download the game via Steam and we use it to update the game during the development process. So when players join alpha, they see a small drop-down list with two assemblies - right before the game starts - in which you can choose either stable or experimental. And people themselves choose which assembly they will play. If they want to see the version that the developers are working on right now, they simply choose an experimental build.
We do not always know how successful innovations will be. Many of them are pure experiments. But these are cool experiments and we are very lucky that we can deal with them, because the success of DayZ and the sales of Arma 2 gave us a kind of blank check for experiments. Most likely we will make a lot of mistakes, and we make them, but this is good. This is good for the game and good for us.
Do you worry that you may lose your users' credits due to errors?
As it seems to me, I have to focus on being extremely transparent. Transparency is most important. It seems to me everything will be fine, as long as we are transparent, I mean completely transparent - this is not the state in which it can be partially located. It's like cheating your wife. Once we fool users and no one will ever believe. So we are completely transparent.
It seems to me that people easily forgive us for mistakes, because we honestly recognize them. After all, we made a lot of mistakes. Something not very pleasant can always happen, like a situation with a release date that we have changed very drastically, so that it has gone into an uncertain future.
Of course, this was a very big disappointment for the mass of people. But we honestly admitted that we made a mistake when planning. Initially, we just wanted to release a standalone version of the mod, for which we announced the release date, but in the middle of the development process, we realized that we really wanted to make a full-fledged game.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/212857/
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