DayZ on PS4 is a “win win” for PC, says Dean Hall

That familiar logo.

One of the more impressive reveals of the Sony Gamescom conference was DayZ on PS4, which didn’t go down brilliantly with all of the PC players. The general discontent stemmed from concerns that spreading development even more thinly would mean even more time spent in Alpha purgatory for the DayZ PC version.

Dean “Rocket” Hall hopped off the Gamescom stage and, apparently, headed straight to Reddit to make the case for why a PS4 release is a “win win” for both versions of the game.

According to Mr Hall, the way he sees it is: “Console versions gave us the opportunity to do more things than we originally planned, such as DX11 and 64bit support to name only a few. PC gamers will get all the benefits the console gamers get, for free.”

He admits he “had misgivings about console versions too initially,” but now sees this as a “win win.” In fact he says “win win” an awful lot. It’s clearly the phrase he wants people to pay most attention to.

“Console versions come AFTER PC in priority but PC gets the benefits of things needed,” he reiterates. Those things are the much-needed optimisation, DirectX 11 options via a new renderer and 64bit servers which, he says, “as a direct result of console development activity.” That repeats the message he gave on stage during the presentation.

Quite why DirectX 11 and 64bit servers (two things associated heavily with the PC) are only an option for the game now that Sony is involved is a bit of a mystery, but there you go. Presumably money is involved.

If it all works out like that, it doesn’t sound at all bad. With DayZ development, however, that’s sometimes a pretty big “if.”