That is if you purchase it via Steam early access in the near future, as Dean Hall states on his official website's forum. This follows on from the previously reported news about a few issues being ironed out, well with this latest update from Mr Hall, we're about to find out what is and what isn't working.

"As most will know, we achieved quite a milestone with over 50 players on the server recently. While this is pretty normal for the mod, it's a big deal for the standalone as the architecture is entirely different and so much has been moved onto the server. So what does this mean? "

Does it mean we'll get a stable release when it hits Steam early access? Unfortunately, the answer to that is no, it will be a long ways off before we see anything stabilised and bug free.

"DayZ handles a minimum of 15000 dynamic objects. This is a huge amount of things to synchronize, in a MP environment. We implemented an entire rewrite of how objects are managed, linked with the "network bubble". The main problem appeared to be scaling, in that the more players the worse it got.

"We are no longer player number bound. It appears the server loses about 3 FPS per 40 players. We have only tested to 52 players currently. At that time, it was our first efforts with this number and we immediately found some missed areas of optimization, so with our next mass test we expect better results. The more players we threw at the server, its FPS numbers didn't change."

Sounds fantastic! Although this is only half the story, now for the rather disappointing news for eagerly awaiting fans:

"I was initially quite surprised because we still had a very high starting frame usage. 15000 loot items were using 1 FPS, that's right - just 1! But for some reason, 1000 zombies (despite all but 10 being at rest) were using a whopping 35 FPS. It didn't make sense and we've been going through this, optimizing and looking for the reason.

"I really can't emphasize enough - this is going to be an early access project on steam. It's a true-blue alpha. Massive areas of the engine were entirely reworked, involving a large team of people over the last 12 months. Much of what these achievements will enable won't be seen for many months - so I really plead for anyone who is on the fence to take a sceptical approach - watch streams, read reviews, watch some let's play and form your opinion. You could always come back to the game in three, six months time and buy it then."

Unfortunately, no specific time frame is given for the first public release of the Alpha, but throwing out a statement of coming back after a max of 6 months, is rather...pre-mature, dontcha think? Either way, who knows, we could be waiting for 6 more months before we see the release of Day Z. If I jinx it? Too bad, we'll just have to wait for X or Z number of Days.