Are you playing DayZ? If so, the time you’ve been waiting for has come, well, sort of. The Arma mod that kinda kickstarted this whole battle royale thing is finally entering beta  after all these years!

Over on the official DayZ website, Bohemia Interactive has posted a lengthy message to players announcing the DayZ beta transition!

Dear Survivors,

we are listening. We know the last Status Report has started some heated discussion about DayZ. I’m gonna do my best and touch upon multiple subjects you guys have pointed out and make sure your questions don’t go unanswered. But first, I also want to celebrate a little bit, because today is the day that we updated the Experimental branch with what will become the first BETA update. The update itself contains multiple features and tons of content. Just to name the headliners: all new base building, a new implementation of vehicles, player restraining, leaning and more. I’m excited about this first step to a more polished gameplay experience with more endgame goals to achieve.

The actual patch is set to drop tomorrow, which will bring the DayZ game version from 0.62 to 0.63, which is based on new tech.

Farewell, 0.62 – 0.63 is fully taking the reigns

Not only have we hit Experimental today, but tomorrow, we want to open another floodgate. Since we’re no longer working on old technology, the 0.62 version is now becoming a legacy to look back at and learn from. We believe we are past the point where 0.62 is a good first entry into the world of DayZ. So tomorrow, we will be going through a clean-up in our Steam back-end and shuffle things around a bit.

The current 0.63 will be moving to the default branch (what we call the Stable branch, as in the first thing that installs when you click on DayZ in Steam, and a version that most if not all community servers will run). 0.62, then, will be moved to its own “legacy branch” for future reference. This will make sure that players coming back in will get in touch with the new version of DayZ, and won’t be facing a situation where they start up a game and can’t join almost any server due to version difference. That way, we can focus on what the future of DayZ should be and we will deliver updates straight to you.

DayZ will also be out of its beta phase within the year, or at least that’s the plan. Here’s Bohemia’s explanation why it needs to be out of beta phase by this year.

Why go for a 1.0 release this year?

There were two choices here, either we miss our 1.0 deadline, or we miss content parity. Both are bad no matter how we look at it. I seriously believe for the health of DayZ as a brand, as a game, we have to move in a direction of stable and reliable gameplay. The core DayZ features are already in the game now, and the devil is in the details. We have to make sure those core features work as they should first and foremost. Not only are you missing out on some really cool things in the game because the current implementation of features is simply broken – additionally, we also we have to deal with development on a game platform that is simply not stable enough for us to continue without loosing our minds.

Making a new weapon on a game that crashes or stops shooting bullets every day due to low level changes is not fun for us either. We know that this step is not only important for the game, but also for the team here. While we might have put on a version number 0.64 and just continue development as many of you have suggested, we have to start working with deadlines properly and be prepared to prioritize. We could have spent years polishing and adding to what DayZ is, but to do so, we need to start planning better and that requires a platform where estimations on complexity can be relied upon. That is not the case right now. While we agree that content variety is extremely important to DayZ, we can improve upon that that post 1.0. And the same comes with features like helicopters. We are not abandoning DayZ. We’re taking a deep breath, we’re taking a look back with the aim to properly plan out building on a platform that is fun to develop for.

Read up on everything regarding tweaks, the 1.0 release and more right here.