Bohemia Interactive, the developers behind DayZ, an open world zombie survival game that came into being following the success of the ARMA 2 mod of the same name, recently announced that it would not be able to deliver a DayZ beta to players before the end of the year. Citing a number of technical issues, Eugen Harton, the Lead Producer of the game, stated that "we have put pretty much all our resources on that task, but as of now, we already know that the scope we will be able to achieve by the end of 2017 does not represent a full DayZ experience, and therefore blocks the 0.63 Experimental [Beta] release."
Some of the more problematic gameplay mechanics that are allegedly holding DayZ back are, among other things, the implementation of vaulting, swimming, and vehicles. There are also a large number of other bugs, glitches, and polishing issues affecting player movement (leaning, ladder climbing, etc.), camera collisions, melee combat, player character status effects (i.e. diseases, stamina, injury), actions revolving around items and the environment, player audio, weapon particle effects, scopes, weapon jamming, AI, and various UI elements. Naturally, Harton wants to make it clear that even though it appears as though DayZ is barely functioning as is, the internal version of DayZ has so many new and interesting features that it makes it hard to go back to the current public version of the game despite the bugginess of the build.
In addition, Harton promises that there will be things like base building and helicopters when the DayZ Beta eventually releases, which will supposedly lay the groundwork for the introduction of airplanes and barricades in the full release of the game. Interestingly enough, no one has actually seen any of these features (or for that matter, most, if not all of the features mentioned above) outside of the development team, so the public will just have to accept his statements at face value. Speaking of which, Harton wanted to reiterate that Bohemia Interactive remains committed to bringing DayZ to Xbox One in the future.