The Spotlight on Brian Hicks - Part 1

Yeah, I haven't heard anything up here except for chickens. And I don't know if there are wolves around on this build.

I've been alright. I've been alright. I keep myself busy.

I don't know what the fuck it was. A funny thing about it, I don't thing about it is, so on Friday I left work, got myself a cigar, had the cigar and I was fine on Friday. And the final thing is, my girlfriend went to the doctor and she was for something unrelated. I don't remember what it was. I think it was just like a pain, get checked out, and they gave her a flu shot. Just like, just because, you know, you should have it. But it's been years since I've had a flu shot. And I was like, flu shot? No, I don't need a flu shot. And the very next morning I woke up and I had a sore throat. Wow. Every time I've had a flu vaccine, I end up getting the flu real bad. I don't fuck with it anymore.

Right, well, I'm 35 right now, but if you ask me about two weeks from now, I'll be 36.

Well, yeah, I do have a girlfriend, a partner, as I like to reference her. We've got a family as well. Between the two of us, we have three of them.

Yeah, we have a beagle. For those who follow DayZ, I'm sure they've seen pictures. He was kind of like the office dog for a while and had a bit of a romance going with Peter's dog Roxy. And then I've got a German Shepherd. She's all black, purebred, female. And I named her after my mother, actually. Not specifically my mother's name, but my mother's nickname. Yep. And then the girlfriend has, well, we're not exactly sure what she is. She's a bit of a mutt, which the best dogs always are. I think there's a little bit of terrier. It's like a terrier Chihuahua mix. Wow. Little tiny, actually not too tiny. About the size of Athos or Roxy. And scat, the floppy ears of a terrier and definitely got the terrier body, much bulkier than a Chihuahua, you know, like that kind of stout. But she is, she's not a dog my girlfriend likes to describe her as a fiasco. Ha ha ha. I love that. She's got the aggression of a Chihuahua. She does, she definitely does. But she's got the anal retentive sniffing of a terrier. Smell everything, all the time, everywhere.

Oh, golden retrievers are just beautiful dogs. Yeah, this one's scared of his own shadow. I think I've got the only golden retriever in the world too scared of water. Just gonna say, they're water dogs. Yeah, none of my dogs are, which I wish they were because, you know, I live on the beach. Yep. Okay, so what are you doing for a living now?

Exactly the same thing I've been doing for a living for the last ten years, which is to say I am developing video games in the same role I was over at DayZ. Yep, just with a different company on a different project that I can't quite speak about yet because, much like DayZ, often those who make the games don't necessarily own the IP. Yep. So more news to come on this front. Yes, yes. Once we get to a point in which the title is announced and the company is acceptable to talk about, then I look forward to managing the hype but sharing my personal excitement.

I'm sure I'll slip up. I'm sure I have slipped up. Yeah. But I could say this much: I had a lot of opportunities presented to me during my time at Bohemia, after my time at Bohemia, and I was very picky about what I picked. I'm fortunate enough to be at a stage in my life in my career where I can kind of pick what it is I want to work on. Yep. And this is definitely something I want to work on.

I can't recall if Australia has area codes.

Oh, post codes are for the post, though. Area codes for phones? Do you mean?

You really, I think the only person that would know that is the type of person that, well, if you're from Australia, it's the type of person that knows Blar because that's the community that I built up around. Actually, you know, I'll make this short and sweet. 775 is shorthand for my personal community that, essentially, if you trace its lineage back, it's my stream community from when I first started streaming on Twitch in 2012. I rented an official DayZ mod server, and the number I was issued was 775. So I just kind of stuck with it. Yeah, no, yeah, just kind of stuck. So every time I launch a DayZ server, it's 775. Every time I watch any server, really, yep, it's 775. And I think, I'm not sure, but I think my sub badge is just the number 775, at least it was at one point. Yeah. Which, that is okay. So who or what got you into gaming? How long have you been gaming for?

1987, I think. Yeah, 1987. The Apple 2e version of a title called The Oregon Trail. Never that. I'll be damned. I can recall getting into... I'm not sure if you're taking the piss.

Oh, it's gotta be DayZ mod. Specifically. Yep. Yeah, DayZ mod, followed up with, you know, tied with Ultima Online, classical UO, circa 1997, 1998, yep, and Star Wars Galaxies. Now, I preface this just to be clear, because I know someone's gonna fucking say something. I did not put DayZ up there because that's self-congratulation, I think is the term, and two, because DayZ is not where I've wanted it to be yet. It's not where Peter wants it to be, but it's on the path. I gotta tell you, a little tangential. Oh Jesus, I hit my mouse. A little tangential. I was making my way up here today and just consistently stopping and taking screenshots and audibly saying out loud in my office at work, 'Holy fuck, this is a gorgeous game.' Keep in mind, I play at 2 to 4K, everything turned up, so that might be why someone might have different visuals, but it's just... I remember what this title looked like before anybody had seen a public video of it, and it has come a long, long way. Some amazing things have been done. And having, you know, seeing the scripting language evolution and the animation system, the damage system, all just slowly come together from the drawing board to where it is now, the infrastructure... There's so much potential. So much potential to be everything that Dean wanted it to be, that I wanted it to be when we first started it. So I just... I love DayZ, but you know, DayZ is a little different when I play DayZ because it's, you know, I helped build this. Yes, yeah. So it's not as much a game for me as a part of my life. So when I say my favorite games, I'm thinking things that I didn't work on, that I picked up off a shelf and played. Yeah, that's definitely DayZ mod. I didn't pick up off the shelf. Ultima Online, Star Wars Galaxies. Star Wars Galaxies, to be clear, pre-NGE, pre any changes. Like the launch Star Wars Galaxies was just fucking amazing. I love that title.

This one ever owned would have to be... I might classify this as in my personal possession, not like a baby one, yep. Yeah, the first one I got that was my own PC was an Intel 8086. And I got it because it was being chucked out from, I believe, a women's shelter, a battered women's shelter in Oregon. And we were leaving, and I saw it, and I asked, 'Can I take that?' Of course. At this point, this is right about when the first generation Pentium processors started hitting the market, right about Windows 94, Windows 95 was released. And yeah, that was my first PC. I took it home, and it took me several months to figure out how to make this thing do anything, but I have very fond memories of it. Yep.

Well, I grew up... Let's just say there's a saying in the States, or maybe it isn't, maybe it's just in my own social circle, but we grew up eating government cheese, so to speak. You know, food assistance from the government. And I'm not talking like just food stamps. I'm talking like actual having to go and pick up packaged food that looks like it actually did come from the US Department of Agriculture. Yeah. So consoles weren't really a thing for me until I was an adult. Yep. And the first console I was able to purchase, I'm thinking back, would have been an original PlayStation. And it wasn't actually when I was an adult. It was, however, after I was making my own money. I had my first job. Yep. I believe I was 16.

Oh, I delivered custom door and trim hardware for a shop that made doors and trim and stair parts, stair components. It was a family-owned business of a good friend of mine. Mm-hmm. And he was working under the shop because, you know, his mom and his dad owned it. And we were good friends. We were pretty much inseparable. I don't know if you have a friend like that from childhood, but I spent pretty much every waking moment between the ages of 14 to 17, maybe even 18, with this guy all the time. And yeah, we would... He was a year older than I was, I think, and he had his driver's license. And come to think, maybe I was allergic, I don't recall, but somehow we were legally driving. He was driving this big-ass Ford F-250. It was like a 1986 Ford F-250, manual, four-wheel drive. And it was... We delivered the doors in a very large horse trailer. This was a mom-and-pop shop. And that's how I was paid under the table. Actually paid under the table, you know, cash in hand. Yep. And I used that to buy a used PlayStation 1. And, oh, actually, funny enough, this is what got me into post-apocalyptic content. Because I never dabbled or even seen anything post-apocalyptic prior to this. I picked up the PlayStation. This was in a used game store back, you know, before GameStop was a thing, when there were tons of mom-and-pop used game stores. And I picked it up, it was used, and I was looking at the used games because I wanted to get a game because I hadn't ever really played anything on the PlayStation. And there was... They had this little tiny TV doing the demo loop for Resident Evil 2. Oh, which was brand new. And I picked that sucker up, and I don't think I slept for the first two or three days. Resident Evil is an amazing game. It really is. Especially Resident Evil 2. I honestly believe it was the apex of the series. And you bet your ass I am dripping with anticipation for the remake, as it looks fucking amazing.

Oh, I just upgraded this thing. I am running, I believe it's an 8700K, an i7-8700K. I believe that's it. It's definitely 8 series. And 32 gigs of RAM. I still have the 1080 I got a couple years back when we were demoing the new renderer. And then just a stack of SSDs. I do, however, have a really bad... I don't know if it's a bad habit or not, but it requires a lot of desk space. I do rock a three-monitor setup. I've got one flipped on its side so I can view long scripts. Yep. And then I've got a 1080p one on the opposite side. In the middle, I'm running a Dell 4K. What is this, like a 40 inch, 42? I don't know. It's a larger Dell 4K monitor that I picked up also shortly before the new renderer launched so that I could see what DayZ looked like in 4K on point.

I'll have to see whether or not I can convince Nvidia to give me one in exchange for something. I don't know. Usually, it's very difficult to get their bleeding-edge stuff. The 1080 thing, I pretty much had to completely rearrange my E3 schedule to do that interview on there in their media booth. I doubt I can get the 2080 for free, but if I can't, I'll just buy one. Yeah. Yep. So, a long, long time ago, you used to stream. Why did you start streaming?

I started streaming because some friends of mine who later on helped me create the Survivor Games, the Hunger Games and the Survivor Games... Well, let me back this up a little bit. Actually, I was living in Redmond, Washington, working on campus, Xbox campus, over at Microsoft. And I had read in PC Gamer some stuff about this new mod called DayZ mod for ARMA 2, which is a game I had never touched because it looked so fucking complicated. And I told myself, because of that, at that time I was working on the publishing end of the business, that I wasn't going to touch something that was, as described in this little snippet in PC Gamer, very much early alpha, still in development, has lots of issues. Like, I don't want to go home and see the same unfinished state of titles that I see at work. You know, like, I'm not gonna do that. But I had heard about, I don't know who I had heard it through, I heard about Twitch, this new thing. And I was like, well, you know, I could probably watch some DayZ on Twitch. And I went to Twitch and I searched for DayZ, and I saw some folks streaming it. Puddin, Thinkin, PC Gamer individual, Ghosts, QN, Lou, Summer, to name a few. And I had messaged a couple of them. I messaged several of these streamers who were pulling huge numbers. Huge numbers for 2012 meant like hitting triple digits on your viewers at all. If you could cross over to 100 to 300, you were big time. 700 viewers, you were at the top of fucking Twitch, kind of the way it felt back then. And yeah, I messaged a couple of them because it seemed to be just regular dudes playing video games, and I really liked the adventures they were having. And I wanted to offer, you know, like, maybe PAX was coming up, maybe I can help you guys out as an insider in the industry. And I got a response from QN, who was the leader of... Well, it wasn't actually the group that didn't exist at the time, but had a group of friends, Soma and Lou for example, that were playing DayZ together. And he was really interested in any advice I could give him to get through to like sponsorships, that kind of stuff. And I knew a lot of folks on that side, having spent the time I did volunteering for PAX. So we started talking. I was giving advice back and forth, you know, as a regular viewer. And he told me, you know, you... Well, first he invited me to start playing with him. And I was playing with him, I was having a fucking blast. And he told me, and Lou both, because I don't think either of them streamed at the time, that we've got a stream. And I guess there was some persuasion, eventually gave in and started streaming with them. And we had this thing going. It was insane, the amount of time I put into streaming. I would do a full eight-hour day, and then I would come home and stream 8 to 12 hours every day. I just... 12 hours minimum each day on the weekend. I was literally doing two full-time jobs of time. And we would use... Before the large spread proliferation of things like TeamSpeak, Discord, etc., Discord wasn't around back then. So we would have a group Skype call, and we would always be in this group Skype call. We'd just get our mics, so we left it. It was like a digital hangout. And you could almost bet that, because all we did was play Dayz non-fucking-stop all the time, we lived in DayZ. So you could almost guarantee you go home after work, put your headset on, someone's in there, someone's playing. And you know, we'd put the server information we were on in the chat, and we'd all join. And it just kind of went from there. Non-stop streaming DayZ all the time back in 2012.

I've been thinking about it over the last year. I think I've been spending a lot of time, maybe even a year and a half, dealing with GTA RP. In fact, if you've watched JamJar or Hazard or... God damn it, Tiger Ryder, I was trying to think of who played Lang Goodman, Corona, all those folks. We all play together. We started out on the same community. None of us started out on RP first and then moved to Los Santos RP. I just didn't stream it. Yeah, I've been really heavily into that. And I'd say over the last eight to nine months, I've been very heavy into modding DayZ itself. And that's really that spark of modding that I had back during the DayZ Taviana days, yep, and the Survivor Games. And I've spent a lot of fun. So I've been on the fence about streaming it just because every time I turn my stream on, there's a lot of great people that come in, and then there's some people that are just total fucks. And then if I say something that's related to DayZ, someone misinterprets it, then it becomes a thing. And I don't want to cause any trouble for Peter and the crew. Yeah, yeah.

Well, if there's any mods out there, hit him up on Twitter, let him know you're still available and willing to work for peanuts. It'll have to be peanuts at the start. Now, you mentioned it then. Usually I ask people if they played the mod, but you've obviously made that very, very clear that you played the mod. One thing I don't think a lot of people know, but if they watched any of your past interviews they should know, but you were behind the crew that made Taviana.

To be clear, Martin Bower made Taviana. The terrain, it's from the ARMA series, ARMA 2 modding. You could probably still find it on Armaholic if Armaholic was still around. I did not make the terrain. However, myself and a very good friend of mine who also happens to be Australian got together and we did DayZ Taviana, otherwise known as DayZ Taviana.com. I actually just got into a heated debate about this on the DayZ subreddit because it was a, I'm sure well-meaning, gentleman who remembered things a little differently than things went down there. There was, for I think maybe a couple weeks, an early version from a group called DayZ Lingor. And there was a guy by the name of Alex, if I remember correctly, at the helm of that. And something that kind of blew against the grain and in the face of traditional ARMA modding and DayZ modding later on was that they had this mod, they ran it on one or two servers, and they refused to give anybody access to the package to run more servers. The database structure, the data files for it itself, they just wouldn't. And they did tell me. You know, it was really fucking cool because we had spent so much time at that point playing the original DayZ mod, and then DayZ Lingor when it came out later, DayZ Panthera, I believe, IceBreaker's terrain. But they wouldn't give it up. So I went and contacted Martin Bower, the author of the Taviana terrain, or island as we call them on that side of the fence, and I got his permission to use it in the mod, as long as I followed the principle I told him was that I was going to distribute it openly, that it wasn't a hold on to it and only let ourselves have it. And yeah, so Ian Banks and Ian... Firms, to enable web, by multiple names. Fantastic gentleman. Worked on a lot of keyhole tools for us for the Survivor Games. Put together DayZ Taviana with the blessing, of course, of Dean. We got his permission to use DayZ mod and modify it as well. And one of the things I really loved that I thought was fantastic about DayZ Taviana was Rocket's Maul airplane, which is this white, like single-engine kind of Cessna airplane that we had on Taviana. The propeller, if it impacted any actor, any AI or player, would spray blood all over the cabin and kill whoever the prop hit. It was super, super fucking cool. You know, we did that. We released DayZ Taviana.com. We released the DayZ Taviana package. And quickly, DayZ Taviana became the number one non-DayZ, like non-Chernarus, the number one variant server-wise. Yet, last I checked, the official DayZ mod had like 2,000 some odd servers, and DayZ Taviana had 500. And I think the closest after that was like not even hitting 100. We had a lot of success with it. And you know, we did our best to take it seriously. Got a public bug track software so people could report issues. We made sure that the packages were available for download and install. I worked with Josh for... Oh my god, what was Josh's tool? DayZ Commander. Yeah, to make sure we're on DayZ Commander. It was a lot of drama getting DayZ Taviana out there, but it was incredibly rewarding. And we had a lot of fucking awesome memories playing DayZ Taviana. And later on, Begins it for the Survivor Games.

Well, of course, that is entirely up to the author of the terrain, Martin. Because it's not like we can just take the package from ARMA and move it over there. There's a lot of work that would need to be done on the base terrain to get it to the standards that would be needed for DayZ. And it's really up to Martin. I've pinged him occasionally, seeking on what his thoughts were on it. And it's been back and forth. Some stuff happened with the folks that did DayZ Origins that probably will mean we won't see anything on the Steam Workshop ever now. You know, Martin could change his mind, but that's where it's at. I even tried to convince Martin to talk to Bohemia about external contractor work to do terrain. But I don't know what's going on with Martin. I think the whole DayZ Origins thing back in the day really left a bad taste in his mouth. So I don't know about seeing DayZ Taviana on the workshop. I'm sure someone's gonna come along and try to do some unauthorized stuff, but not from me. Nonetheless, do you workshop? So, what is it about DayZ that makes you love it so much? You've touched on it a little bit, but this game has been such a big part of your life from the moment you first started, what your streamers play it, even until now. What is it that has so encaptured you?

I'm gonna have to say it's the fact that, and in hindsight, it definitely wasn't what it was early on, but it certainly appeared that way. DayZ, much like Ultima Online and early Star Wars Galaxies, is almost entirely driven by emergent gameplay, by player-to-player interaction, by the unique experiences players have in the world. It's a living, breathing world that doesn't say you have to do this, go to these places, and achieve these tasks to play it. You can exist in DayZ. It is entirely what you make of it. The systems designed by designers and put out there are more to create the world and less to tell the player what they have to do. Yep. Sure, there's a drive to stay alive through combating the environment, but how you do that, what happens throughout that adventure, it's entirely up to you. And not a random dice roll. Dynamic events, the spawning of AI, the things you hear over the radio, none of that can be designed by a designer sitting in a room typing something in Confluence. It is the purest form for me of a virtual world right now. Yep. When you're in DayZ, you're in another place. I rarely, when I'm playing DayZ, do I feel... At least when DayZ works and I'm playing DayZ, I don't feel like I'm playing a game. I feel like I'm in a place.

Well, if we're talking about if I could make one last commit to the project, yeah, it would be to change the init.sqf in the mission so that every player starts with a radio and a battery. Yep. That simply would be it. If I was to add a mechanic, like if we're just talking pie in the sky, big sky thinking... Well, there's nothing I would add that hasn't already been documented and the team knows about. Yeah, I can't really elaborate past that because it's not my place to leak information about what's upcoming or what should be upcoming.

Hey, I'll try to answer every question you pass my way. I honestly was half expecting you to know what tonight, sorry, guy for it. Now that I think about it, there is one system that you can see right now, very prototype-y, on 0.63 that I would flesh out to the original intent I wanted, which is soft skills. Yeah, soft skills. But this is a call made by Peter, and it's his call to make. And I still, I'm eager to see what he does with it. But soft skills originally, and it could end up being this way, who the fuck do I know, was intended to have more depth to it. And it was entirely because we, and I say we, but we wanted to solve the problem of value to the character and not the gear. And we thought soft skills was a way to do that because the really big thing about soft skills was it cannot ever replace player skill. So it's got to only deal with stuff that the player doesn't necessarily have control over the success or failure of, so to speak. If you look at the old animation system, like bandaging, it's really a boolean. It's true or false. The act has been completed or it hasn't. And there's a lot of depth in there. Pretty much firing off an action, taking an action that's done entirely in a script and has nothing to do with player skill. You can add depth simply by, instead of looking at it as a true/false statement, a boolean, look at it as a float. Like, what is the success of this? Let's dial it in. Sure, there's still a boolean in there, like has this action been completed, but let's add some depth past that. Watch that function out so that we're checking, essentially, we're looking at the payload for the character in the database and how many times have they completed this. Every successful completion from a fresh character of an action should increase, by whatever range that might be defined in the script, the numerical value of the float. A float being a number with a decimal fraction. Essentially, you can look at it like currency is dealt with in floats: $100.75 versus just a straight number, an integer, which would be $100. Now, adding that depth to allow the character to incrementally increase the value with more precision, maybe a failed action still gives you skill but not as much. That's where a float would come in over a straight number. So, man, I'm really going off on a deep end here. But the idea is, let's take the example of medical actions: bandaging, injecting with a needle, transfusing blood, giving saline. Those kind of things all should build your proficiency in the medical skill. And as this character, the specific character, does it more, the better they get. So maybe the quicker that action is performed, the quicker the animation goes. Or maybe the more blood is transfused. Let's say maybe an initial bandage has a chance for failure. It's like a math.random range, a dice roll. Is this a successful bandage? And you get above a certain number threshold, and it is. The more you bandage, the higher your proficiency and the character's proficiency in the medical skill goes up, so the higher chance you have at a successful bandage. I apologize. At the end of the day, for me, I just had a cigar and a lot of water, so I'm a little hyper. But the point being is that I don't know if that's Peter's intent yet with the soft skill system. But if it isn't, that's where I would go. I would continue to flesh that out. But also to understand that from Peter's perspective, he's also gonna look at this is a 100% mod-friendly title. And does it make sense for DayZ to go down that far deep down the route? Or does it make sense to do the soft touch, essentially presenting the framework there for it to be expanded upon later on? Who knows. But yeah, I would... There's two answers there. If we're talking about one last commit to the project, I would make sure every player spawns with a radio and a battery. If we're talking about fleshing out or adding a system, I would take soft skills and go much farther with it.

It doesn't matter how much I want that. It's never happened. We had that conversation very early on, and a lot of the team, especially designers, were very supportive of it. But the CEO was not. And it's his company. Yes. And to be fair, looking at it, taking my own emotional feelings about my own feelings of the play session and how they in the title place, it is better to offer choice. You know, that's why... Yeah, you good point. You did say the community official servers. Yeah, I wouldn't... I don't think I have any right, and I don't think the development team has any right to remove third-person gameplay. And I don't think we did from day one, because there's a lot of people who love DayZ, and a lot of those people love playing in third person. But making all the official servers first person only doesn't restrict people's ability to play third-person DayZ. Yes, I do absolutely love first person. And that's why the Survivor Games was first person, honestly. Yeah, because it is a much more tense experience. It is the only way to play DayZ in my opinion. I've dabbled in third person, but it's first person all the way. It's just so much more enjoyable. Okay, what video sums up DayZ the best for you? What's a video you've seen on YouTube that you just thought, 'Wow, this really sums up DayZ'?

Well, there's two. I'm gonna say two, because it's like the yin and the yang. There are the heads and the tails. On one hand, it would be Mr. Blackout's series. His... And I say series, but you could just watch the first video of the series and get a taste. Though I reason is not at all. Well, Diaries. Yep. I love Hardcore, but if I was to say sums it up, it would be Diaries. And then on the inverse, it would be the social experiment, Jam's first social experiment. Mm-hmm. Those two are the yin and the yang of DayZ. You've got Blackout being the friendly adventurer. You know, as I once described him, Frankie on PC and 1080p for DayZ standalone. I always felt Blackout was DayZ's Frankie. You know, ubiquitous good guy adventurer. And then you've got Jam, who's just... He's chaotic. He's chaotic good, if we're looking at D&D definitions. I would potentially even go chaotic neutral for him. He kind of does what he wants to when he wants to. Now, back then, I would say Jam was chaotic good. Nowadays, definitely chaotic neutral. Maybe sometimes a little bit chaotic evil, depending on how his day's been going. Yeah. But I feel like that first social experiment video and Blackout's early Diaries really summed up DayZ for me.

Well, I gotta say Beck Beans. It's not necessarily DayZ gameplay, but Beck Beans' videos definitely stood out for me. I don't know if you've caught them.

Honestly, I think I almost regret starting them. Yeah. They caused a lot of stress for me. People might not realize it, but every time a status report came out, I was there reading the reaction instantly. The status report started because I wasn't happy with the almost non-existent communication that the DayZ dev team put out. It was completely random. Whenever anyone felt like it, we could go months without sending any new stuff out. And I wasn't happy with it. And I saw the reports that were being put out by some friends of mine over at Portalarium, Richard Garriott's company. And I thought, you know, we should do something like that. Quickly. The funny thing about the status reports was that I pitched originally to Dean, and Dean was not into it. He wanted to continue just doing whatever we felt like it. And I waited until he was out of town because he had a business trip for something, I think for Ion, and he was in London. And I was like, fuck it. Well, what's he gonna do, fire me? So we put out our first status report. And I just waited. I didn't say anything about it to Dean. I just waited to hear if I get yelled at. And a couple days went by, and he was like, 'Oh, I caught the accession process. Pretty cool.' I was like, 'Well, that sounds like consent to me.' What's that saying? It's easier to beg forgiveness than to ask permission. Exactly, exactly. I like that. It's very smart. That works. But yeah, in general, I don't know. I have to believe there's people out there that enjoy it. And I believe it, Brian. I know there are so many of us. Even now, we still hang out every Tuesday for the status report. The problem is, and people will say just ignore the criticism, just ignore the negative Nancies. It's just not human nature to do that. And it's a lot harder than what people would insinuate it being. Especially when it's such a cornerstone of, I think it's still bi-weekly. It's such a cornerstone for those that have to contribute to it. Yeah. And it was always like pulling teeth to get data for the status report. Maybe because I just didn't want to be a dick about it. But I thought it was much more important that people focus on moving the project forward. And a lot of times, I felt like I had to protect the team. Yes. Because we're just working in the middle of nowhere globally, as far as the dispersion of the user base for DayZ. Central Europe, inland city, a unique culture. There's one country I'm aware of that speaks Czech as a primary language, the Czech Republic. And it's a tiny nation in the scheme of the world. And the culture is very different from where I'm from, where you're from. And I wanted the team to have the passion that I knew they had every day. But fucking reactions to status reports were just demoralizing. Back and forth all over the place. People would say, 'We just want the truth, don't sugarcoat it.' The reality of software development is sometimes it takes fucking weeks for anything to happen. Sometimes it's an explosive week. It's not like a television show where you're gonna get something new every time an episode comes up. Sometimes, no news, it's been a slug. And I tried being honest a couple times about that. Oh my god, people were angry. So you try to squeeze screenshots out because people want to see something new. But if you tell them it's just a mess, you're looking at a textured mesh or it's just an animation laid over the base skeleton, the reality is many things could change, it might not work out. Don't say that to people. They get very angry. And I don't know what to do. You want to share things you're excited about, but I feel like the vast majority of the people that would comment on the status reports would get angry if something's not ready. But they don't necessarily have to be qualified to understand what they're looking at. It's the disconnect. It's like Office Space. Have you seen Office Space?

The film Office Space. It's a Mike Judge film, classic mid-90s. Technology company. There was a guy in there who had to justify his job to these people coming in, efficiency experts. And his job was to be a pass between the engineers and the customers. Engineers don't talk to customers because the customers don't understand engineers. And the efficiency experts are like, 'Why can't the customers just talk to the engineers?' It's like, 'Because they're not people persons. The engineers can't talk to each other. What I do is important.' And the reality is, your average consumer, and to make it very clear, average consumer, game player, gamer, has no responsibility to understand how software is developed. It is not on them to do that. But the average gamer hasn't gone through the full life cycle of a project and the reality of it, the ebbs and flows, the highs and the lows. And I guess this is where PR departments come in. But I always felt, maybe it's because I came from the community, but pure PR guys and PR departments, it's disingenuous. They make these trailers, they cherry-pick things. You're getting a curated view. And I always felt like the DayZ development team was closer to its community than a PR department would allow. And I didn't want to give that up. I didn't want to give the close connection up, despite the cost of the absolute demoralization of those who contributed to the status reports would be subject to on a dice roll. Sometimes a status report would be well-received, sometimes it wouldn't. Sometimes two months would go by and obviously a feature that was shown in the status report is not yet. 'Why isn't it that yet? Was it a lie?' It's like an abusive relationship sometimes. But I didn't want to let a PR department get in there and muddle things and get between the connection between the developers and the community. Yes. And I don't know if that was the right decision. It was a decision I made.

It was server performance. Yep. Most people who played DayZ had no idea how fucking horrible the server performance was for the entirety of the project. We were always just barely skirting by on releases. And I would spend so much time with David, David Durcak, the project lead for DayZ. I would spend so much time being like, 'David, I need you to understand how critical server performance is for DayZ. We cannot leave early access with it in the state it was in.' Any given day, it would be somewhere between 6 and 20, if we were really lucky. And 20 is where the simulation starts falling apart in the first place. And we're such a server-dependent title. Users might... How do I put this? You might see what you think is just DayZ being a piece of fuck because things aren't working right, or projectiles aren't being tracked like they're supposed to be, or you're hitting your hotbar and things aren't responding when they're supposed to. It's entirely because it's server authoritative. And with poor server performance, something that looks fucking fantastic with 1 to 10 players or in local tests breaks down. And it's not because the system is wrong, it's not because the design is wrong, it's because the server is fucking itself. And it's going away though, because I mean, have you seen the server performance numbers from... Yeah, there was the one from Jake saying about the frames he's getting, and another one of the PvP servers that's got a hundred slots saying this server is running like buttah. Yeah. Hearing him saying, 'I never thought this day would come.' This is like... It's like going to bed being an average guy after having an exercise bar or taking a diet pill and waking up and you're Arnold fucking Schwarzenegger. It's insane. They did it. I'm so proud of them. This is fantastic. Yeah. Oh god, I can't tell you how huge this is for DayZ and how much it gives for modding. Oh, it's fantastic.

Helicopters! Hahahaha. I love the way he said that then. It was like really like a little kid kind of. Helicopters. Do I dare mention that word? Helicopters. And to be clear, I don't mean like 100 helicopters per server. I'm like 1 or 2, maybe. You know, like it used to be. You find a helicopter and that is that you have reached the top of the DayZ food chain. This is as good as it gets. Fixing that bird up, you're a god among men. I cannot wait for that.

Honestly, yeah. I had good friends, content creators on Twitch, like Kenny, Cream, telling me, 'I had a great time in DayZ, but I just can't play Chernarus anymore, Brian.' There's nothing I could do about that. It took years for the environment team to get Chernarus where it is now, which is fucking amazing, by the way. But terrain modders will bring new terrain, and I cannot wait to explore a new world in DayZ.

I think so. I'm not... I still don't consider myself a bandit. In fact, much to the dismay of many of the old QN guys, I would subject them to what I called Robin Hood trips down to the coast where I'd defend fresh spawns from bandits and give them deer. I was far more of a PvP player back then. Yep. Way more. And maybe it's just because I feel more of a sense of ownership of how DayZ is played than I did when I played the mod. But I spend way more time trying to be nice to people and help them out just across the map and going on adventures of hunting and trying to set up a camp than I ever did back then. Back then, it was all about action. And now it's more about being a part of the world, I think.

Aside from clothes tests, I did. I, in fact, I know I was the first hundred-person server up for the first day, I think, after the server tools came out. Aside from me fucking around with seeing how the mission is handled and the offline economy is handled, because that was not a thing when I left. Aside from that, you know, like I said, everybody spawns in Elektro and gave them all guns. No, no. I'm glad people are able to do that and have a fucking blast, guys. But that's not... Forgive me for saying this, I'm not trying to gatekeep DayZ. It is whatever you want it to be. But for me, that is not DayZ.

All right, 75. 75. I don't think it can be less than 75, and I think more than 100 and it starts to get a little chaotic.

Mosin.

Mosin.

M4.

MP5.

Not. Much. They don't have a mic? No mic, no life.

First person.

DUG. US.

There's not a name for it. There is a tree to the east, mid-east of the northeast or the northwest airfield. A single tree. If you look at the original Survivor Games event, not the Hunger Games, the first Survivor Games event, that tree is where we started the event. And that tree has got to be my favorite place. Every time I pass near there, I have to stop and see the tree. It has a lot of memories for me.

Private. Nowadays.

Well, because I want public servers to be viable. But it's just because there's no sense of community there. Right, yeah. Because that sense of community lacks, it tends to be far more bandit-y. Yeah, it does.

This is really difficult because I hired a lot of those people. But sure, let's do it.