DayZ 2020: Review and outlook for the hardcore survival game

In the DayZ Year in Review, Tim Pulsmeier, Associate Producer at Bohemia Interactive, gave an update on 2020 achievements and an outlook for 2021. In addition, Bohemia presented interesting facts and figures about the past year.

• Updates 1.07 - 1.10
• New Content
• New Features
• More stable game experience
• Many new mods

Year in Review 2020 for DayZ

This is what happened: According to the developers, they were able to release all but one update on time despite the pandemic. 2020 was focused on new content, fleshing out survival features, and a more stable gameplay experience.

The video of the DayZ developers to review the year:

By loading the video, you agree to YouTube's privacy policy.
Learn more

Load video

Always unblock YouTube

Bohemia's goal was also to support modders and server operators even more. The survival features should finally get their attention, but not make the game unfairly difficult. According to Tim Pulsmeier, it was especially important to Bohemia not to drive away new players.

Among mods, the release of DayZ Namalsk, a modification by Bohemia employee Adam Francu, is said to have been a big event in particular -- overall, modders would have had time to get familiar with modding tools this year.

Content that was published in 2020

• 5 new / reintroduced weapons
• You can have broken legs again
• The M3S Truck is back
• Great update in the areas of cooking, cold temperature survival
• Upgrades of the map
• New basebuilding flags for base persistence
• Continuation of the modding support

DayZ 2020 in numbers

• Major updates: 4 (patch 1.07 - 1.10)
• Most concurrently active players on PC: 40,545 in February (highest since February 2014)
• Best monthly average of simultaneously active players on PC: 20,700 in the last 30 days (highest value since February 2014)
• From January to November 2020, DayZ gained 4.1 million active players. 2.5 million of them picked up the game for the Xbox
• Most viewers in Twitch streams: 107,352 in August (all-time record)
• BattlEye Bans: 24,000 and rising (In comparison, only 10,000 BattlEye bans are reported to have been conducted in the last 4 years combined).
• 9,000+ mods published by players in the workshop

Outlook for DayZ in 2021

This is planned: Currently, a roadmap for the new year is being worked out.  According to the content of the blog post, there should be information about the next year's plan early next year. We will of course keep you up to date as soon as something becomes known in this direction!

Bohemia Interactive wants to increase the team in order to be able to work even harder on DayZ next year. Currently, the developers are starting to test the hardware of the next-gen consoles, since console players have been struggling with heavy performance drops so far.

Even AAA titles like Cyberpunk 2077 have performance problems on consoles:

Optimization of vehicles in DayZ

The new members of the DayZ team are supposed to improve the server-client synchronization of the vehicles in particular, and fix problems in the area of physics. With this, DayZ could fix a problem that has accompanied the popular hardcore survival game for years.

Your opinion: Has DayZ developed positively or negatively in 2020? What do you think of the new features that have been added to the game this year? Will you still be playing DayZ in 2021, more than 7 years after its Early Access release? Tell us what you think about these questions in the comments!