DayZ studio Bohemia Interactive has begun a significant expansion of the team and the game, "both in scale and scope," according to a developer blog posted today.
"We've been getting more and more people involved, both locally and externally," said Bohemia, adding that many of the new team members are coming from the DayZ community. In particular, Bohemia is expanding the art team so it can create hundreds of new items such as clothing, weapons and buildings. The developers are also redoing all the weapons in the game "at extremely high detail," which will reduce the number of weapons that the game launches with, but will allow the team to release regular post-launch updates with new ones.
Another area of focus for the art team is character customization — it is "the absolute core of our current design efforts," said the developers. New images released today by Bohemia (see above) include in-game models of black and Asian women. The studio added, "We want to allow characters to be fully customized and reflect the players story [sic] as they are going along."
Bohemia also welcomed back Ivan Buchta, who had been imprisoned in Greece for 129 days with fellow developer Martin Pezlar, to the team. The studio called Buchta "a huge asset to the team," and said he has been working with world designer SenChi to redo parts of Chernarus. Their work is showcased in the screenshots above, which Bohemia noted were taken at low detail.
The studio told fans that it aims to produce a new development blog every Friday from here on out and continue answering questions from the community.