It’s week since the new DLC was released and went public together with a big 1.26 update. As expected, launch was not smooth and brought some problems, especially for the modding community…
Please do not treat this article as a review – it provides a general look on the update and its purpose is not to encourage you or discourage from buying the DLC.
General reception
It looks that majority of players enjoy the release of Frostline DLC that brought us a new Sakhal map, set in far east Kamchatka region with enhanced survival aspect due to the coldness, snowing storms, lack of food and harsh environment. This is the first official map set in the winter theme for DayZ. Previously maps with similar concept were not that common – the most popular one was Namalsk, created by Adam Francu (aka Sumrak) who is a Creative Lead for DayZ at Bohemia Interactive now. Other full-scale winter maps were just “remakes” or “reskins” of existing ones, like Winter Chernarus, Winter Livonia or Winter Deer Isle. Some other maps had just small winter areas, like original Deer Isle, Chiemsee or Pripyat. Sakhal is especially new for the console players which don’t have access to mods.
We don’t have the exact sales numbers, but it’s worth noting that according to the SteamDB DayZ was the fourth biggest top seller on Steam for Week 43 (excluding free to play games and Steam Deck device). Also, there were more than 450 000 daily active users on all platforms around the release (PC, Playstation and Xbox combined). Game as a whole peaked on Steam with all time high of more than 78 thousands players online at the same time on October 20th 2024. Reviews of Frostline on Steam are in 69% positive and 31% negative, which resulted in Mixed overall opitions (Steam’s nomenclature). It’s hard to judge if this score satisfies the team, but as it was already announced few times, we can expect future updates for Sakhal, just like in the past for Livonia. This may increase the number of positive reviews in the long run.
Problems with servers
During the launch day of Frostline DLC unexpected problems occured. Official servers hosting Sakhal map were unavailable to play for many people. The biggest problem was on consoles, where they were delayed and finally started operating a day after the release. 3 days after release, DayZ Team announced that they will deploy extra servers to accommodate the strong demand for the new map. They were prepared for all three platforms. However, official servers are not only ones that faced problems. Community servers were influenced by the changes made with 1.26 update that changed many game aspects and its assets. The most common issue are floating concrete panels around many maps, problems with navigation mesh for the infecteds and for example issues with temperatures on servers without correctly set configurations for the server. For some time there was also a wrong configuration file uploaded which was responsible for the weather configuration in general (luckily it was already fixed), affecting the wind and rain.
Complicated life of a modder
There is also a list of issues that distrupted the process of map making for the DayZ. Before go into details, it was already announced that for now DayZ Tools are reverted back to the 1.25 version and team is working on addressing other issues that were also reported. New version of the tools are available on the experimental branch.
On October 22th map creators of Alteria, Deer Isle (JohnMcLane) and Banov (Gerbel Jakub) announced that they have to delist their official versions of maps from the Steam Workshop. It looks like at the time of writing this news Banov is back due to community demand, however Alteria and Deer Isle are still not available. Why some authors decided to make such difficult decision? On many maps navigation mesh for infecteds does not work properly. That causes issues when enemies are going into models, jumping over building doors, going through gates etc. Another problem is that concrete panels assets were fixed, but it caused multiple problems on maps that used those assets in their previous, wrong form. Lot of them are right now out of place, making some areas unusable or inaccessible. But one of the biggest issues is that it’s almost impossible to correctly pack maps into PBO files, which are used as mods by the server and game client. There is a way to bypass many problems, but it may create new ones.
If you are a modder yourself or you are interested in modding or just DayZ in general, you can take a look at our page dedicated to the issues that are currently haunting modders: some of the issues and possible fixes if any.
New possibilities
But not only problems arrived with the new update – there are some good news as well! First one is connected to the introduction of a new map itself, developers added two new triggers for Sakhal map that can be used on any other map and this setting is completely server-side so no changes are needed for maps.
First trigger is used for creating hot springs. They can be placed everywhere, not only above the water but also grass, inside buildings or just floating in the air. If player goes into the white mist surrounding the area, it will receive a heat buff. Second trigger is a volcanic activity which is represented as a grey smoke coming out of one specified place on the map and deals damage around (approx. 5HP per turn). This volcano trigger can be a nice addition for demanding areas to make them more challenging (which could be used an alternative for contaminated zones, representing some bio or geo hazards or making an imitation of burning objects).
Another thing that was also added with Sakhal release are the restricted areas. Same as triggers, they are server-side configuration which can restrict players from logging in a specific area. For example, if some terrain is used only for server events and owners don’t want players to stay there after the event, it can be set as a this new restricted area and everyone that will log off in that event region will be teleported out to the specified location after they try to log in again. This can also be used as a basic fast travel system, which could be a nice new feature for community servers that can’t handle mods. Example was presented by the Scalespeeder Gaming:
But that’s not all! Just today developers released files for a tool called Terrain Processor that will help map creators with making complicated powerlines structures on their maps, with the wires. Probably many of you haven’t noticed so far that community maps often don’t have those (mostly small powerlines, high voltage are common) because they were really difficult to work with. So hopefully since 1.26 we will more and more maps being updated with those.
One scandal before Frostline release
At the end of this article, we would like to mention one “scandal” that happened few days before the release of a DLC. One of the biggest modders in DayZ community named MDC (known for KOTH, EvenMoreDoors, BuildEverywhere and other mods) decided to host a server for his community based on a Sakhal map that would be available also for people who do not own the DLC. This is possible to achieve with specific server configuration and specific client to play, so the modder didn’t hack or breach anything, but for sure it was not approved by the Bohemia Interactive, as they decided to ban the user publicly on the BattlEye. Such ban does not only blocks that person from playing DayZ but also other games using BattlEye service (known for protecting games from cheaters and banning people who try to ruin the game experience for other fair players). Probably we can expect some changes in the future that will disable that method, which would be a loss for modding community, not being able to test their mods on future maps that could be released as DLCs, without owning them. However, maybe the modder (who in the past found and reported some exploits) and BI can come to some agreement? Hard to say, time will tell.
(Please note that DayZWorld.com does not approve such actions and this is mentioned purely for informative aspect, that’s why we do not want to link to the source of it – however we try to see arguments of both sides.)
What’s to come for DayZWorld.com?
As you may notice, the website is still under development and many things are missing. It takes lot of time to prepare a meaningful content so I hope that in the future you will be satisfied with things you will find there. In the Gameplay section at the top, you can see that there are already some drafts for each categories, that will include articles about specific topics containing tutorials and tips. If you want to check the Sakhal map, files are already uploaded in the Sakhal map section. Also a Community Maps category is expanding and description for three maps are available now: Antoria, Banov and Namalsk.
Thank you for coming in and see you in the next updates and articles!