DayZ leaves Early Access next week

Survival game DayZ entered Early Access in December of 2013. It's taken six years, but DayZ 1.0 will be released on PC next week. On December 13, DayZ will finally leave Early Access behind.

Here's a thirty second trailer that probably won't knock your socks off because it's terrible, but hopefully it signifies that Bohemia Interactive is simply too busy working on the actual game to edit an awesome sizzle reel together:

#DayZ 1.0 is launching on PC on December 13th! pic.twitter.com/gTik8Upr7KDecember 6, 2018

Bohemia has said DayZ 1.0 isn't the end of development, especially since a number of expected features won't make it into the launch version of the game next week. For instance, grenades will be a no-show in 1.0, which would seem like a pretty standard feature in a survival shooter. Base-building, on the other hand, which has been tested on experimental servers for the past couple of months, will be included.

It's been a long road for DayZ, which midway through development switched game engines, slowing things down considerably. It also saw the departure of creator Dean Hall in 2014, as well as creative director Brian Hicks earlier this year.

Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.