DayZ's lead developer Dean Hall has apparently made his plans for this year: he wants to leave Bohemia Interactive studious at the end of 2014 and start planning his own studio in his native New Zealand.
In an interview with Eurogamer, Dean Hall said that he called himself a "grenade": "I'm really good at risk-taking and making other people take risks," I've always been good at that in my life. Like you say, maybe I've got the gift of the gab, so I can talk, I can explain something, I can talk people up to the ledge and get them to jump off it."
"But eventually, that's the bad person to have. Eventually, you don't want the guy telling you to go over the top and get through. So at some point I'll be a disaster for the project, at least in a leadership role."
"And also, I never intended to be here."
Dean Hall originally intended to spend a few months working at Bohemia as a break from the New Zealand army and has been at the developer for over two years. "It's kind of like cooking in someone else's kitchen: I don't want to be constantly telling Bohemia that this is how I do it and this is the way we do it," he said.
Hall said that his original plan was to leave Bohemia before 2014, but said that doing so would have been unfair to the community and the game has now been played by more than 1.5 million people.
He said that "I have to be on the project as long as it's important to, whether that role is as the leader, whether that role is in a more creative sense... But at a certain point there will be diminishing returns."
"The thing is, if I'm involved in the project, I'll be fighting anybody on the project to make sure it's good, so for the rest of the year, I'm there. And I don't just sit around; it doesn't matter if I'm the cleaner or the leader or whatever, I will be making sure, I will be in Marek's [Spanel, CEO] office yelling at him. I'm notorious for it."
When Hall leaves, development of DayZ will pass to the rest of the team at Bohemia. For his new studio in New Zealand, Hall says that he's already cooking up three ideas that are ready, and is working on two more.
Hall says the new ideas have "similar DNA" to DayZ, because he's fascinated with that type of game. "I feel like DayZ is a fundamentally flawed concept," he said, "and I've always recognized that. It's not the perfect game; it's not the multiplayer experience, and it never can be, [with] the absolute spark that I want in it."
