Dean "Rocket" Hall made waves as a big dog in the gaming industry with the Arma 2 mod, DayZ. The mod later evolved into a standalone game, and then Hall left to work on new projects. Well, he's keeping his newest game close to the chest due to what happened with DayZ and all the copycats that followed.
According to Eurogamer, Hall and the rest of the two dozen or so team members at RocketWerkz are currently embroiled in various experimental projects and one very lofty AAA game that's being bankrolled by Chinese mega-corporation, Tencent.
So what is the game about? We don't know. According to Hall...
I believe it's a gap in the market. For that reason I'm going to be pretty coy about exact specifics of it - also because of expectations and how experimental we are at the moment. I need to be deliberately coy; I need to avoid a kind of War Z situation.
For those of you unfamiliar with The War Z, it was a hastily made first-person, survival shooter that piggybacked off the fame of DayZ. The developers hurriedly tossed the game out onto the market to cash in on the absolutely huge craze in the industry that DayZ had created. Of course, the rushed production, poor gameplay mechanics and cash shop-laden structure of The War Z quickly left a bad taste in the mouths of many gamers. Accusations of the game being a "scam" were thrown around, and it basically sullied the waters for people looking to get hyped about the zombie survival genre.
After the debacle involving The War Z (which underwent several name changes in order to avoid the stigma it had created for the survival sub-genre) there were various other copycats that also surfaced in the wake of the DayZ mod. Each of the copycats utilized similar no-holds-barred approach to multiplayer and PvP, and tried hard to implement crafting and building into the foundations of the game.
None of the clones really captured the stark desperation of DayZ and even fewer seemed to retain the appeal, save for Garry Newman's Rust. The zombie survival sub-genre has been milked for much of its worth since 2013, and the standalone of DayZ is sadly still in Early Access on Steam.
For Hall, it's now about bringing something new to the table in the same way that he brought something new to the table with DayZ. While we don't even know the name of this new project, one thing we do know for sure is that it's not the space game, Ion.
Hall did reveal in the editorial with Eurogamer that the game will be a multiplayer-focused title, so we at least know that much. But we probably can't expect much in the way of gameplay details until they have something much closer to release. I'm sure after all the controversy that erupted over The War Z, Dean "Rocket" Hall and the rest of Rocketwerkz would love to avoid another situation like that with their upcoming title. Now all that we have to do is sit and wait to learn key details like what the name of the game is.
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