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DayZ Standalone zombies shown on video for first time

Plus, a poor diet will affect a character's long-term health.

Dean "Rocket" Hall has shown, on video, DayZ Standalone zombies for the first time.

They're placeholder zombies until the new skeletons are ready, but there they are, shambling like they just don't care.

I think someone's been looting unhealthy foods again, haven't they?

The difference with zombies in DayZ Standalone is they're all spawned and controlled by the server. As it stands, 3000 can be spawned. But that number will increase "quite dramatically" as the project goes through development, Hall said. It also means the server handles the processing load, not your computer.

Zombie pathfinding will be much improved in DayZ Standalone as well. This is demonstrated in the video. It means kiting zombies will be much harder to do.

The video later switched to gameplay footage of Dean Hall and some alpha testers - most from Reddit - running around an urban environment, breathing heavily and looting cans of beans (and pooping out empty cans), helmets and items of clothing from cars. Or, in one tester's case, running around in one's underpants.

Dean Hall's dry sense of humour makes the video a surprisingly funny watch as he quips about bugs and wisecracks about this and that along the way.

In addition to the video, there's a brief DayZ Standalone dev blog recapping some of the work being done. Brilliantly, one update mentioned how having a poor diet will affect the long-term health of characters in the game. This will apparently make medical specialists valued players in DayZ Standalone.

Watch on YouTube