Pioneering open-world survival game DayZ has had a long history of behind-the-scenes issues, spending nearly five years in early access before finally launching in late-2018, and it seems the development gremlins have reared their ugly heads again. Earlier this year DayZ publisher Bohemia Interactive revealed the game’s support team had been significantly reduced in order to focus on developing their new next-gen Enfusion technology, and now we have word one of the studios working on DayZ, located in Bratislava, Slovakia, has been closed.

　　The closure of the Bratislava studio was originally reported on Reddit, with the leaker claiming all future DayZ support was ceasing. Today, Bohemia Interactive posted both a confirmation and denial – the Bratislava studio has indeed been shuttered, but development of DayZ will continue…

　　We recently closed our Bratislava studio. It was a mutual decision between management and studio leads, and we want to thank all team members for their contribution.

　　This decision won't affect the future dev. of DayZ, which will continue as outlined here: https://t.co/iXt1gntkTa pic.twitter.com/Ca6nKH4KcW

　　— Bohemia Interactive (@bohemiainteract) April 27, 2020

　　Here’s what Bohemia Interactive is promising to bring to DayZ in 2020:

　　Stability

　　Last year, we had ups and downs regarding the stability of both clients and servers on all platforms. We will continue to monitor this and take any action necessary to ensure the best possible gameplay experience for our players.

　　Bug fixing

　　DayZ is a complex beast of a game and bug fixing is a constant necessity – therefore, we'll continue our best efforts to squash as many bugs as we can.

　　Gameplay improvements

　　There are several features in DayZ that are in dire need of improvement and/or balancing. There is huge potential here as these changes often impact the gameplay in a big way, and so we intend to continue our efforts in going through various systems, focusing strongly on the survival aspect of the game. To give you a few examples of areas we intend to look into:

　　Base Building is a big part of the game for many of you and we intend to focus on fixing most common issues, proceed with the overall balance pass, and perhaps even add some new toys to play with.The impact of the environment on characters is not yet in the state we want it to be, and so we intend to proceed with numerous improvements and balancing changes to make the so called "environment exposure" a much more interesting part of the game.We intend to make several quality-of-life improvements for cooking by, for example, implementing direct cooking slots (grill), adjusting lifetimes of different fireplace stages, and even offering more types of indoor ovens.We also intend to look into the systems surrounding diseases and their symptoms to make sure they are better balanced, utilised, and perhaps even expand them a bit.Modding support

　　Modding is a huge part of the game and we intend to continue supporting the needs of our very creative community. Every Game Update contains several additions or changes to support various community creations. To give you some examples of what are we looking at in terms of modding:

　　We will unlock the server mission folder for full modifications on console community servers. This should give console server owners total control over the Central Economy and the ability to add custom locations to the existing maps.We will release our animation rig in fbx format and p3d samples of male and female character body parts.We intend to finalise the full implementation of the server browser with full mod support in the official DayZ Launcher. If all goes through, this launcher update will significantly improve the accessibility to modded servers.New content

　　While we will prioritise stability, bug fixing, and improving/balancing existing features this year, it does not necessarily mean there won't be anything new coming to the game. To keep the Game Updates interesting enough (for both you and us), we need to mix things up from time to time by adding something new between our bug-squashing and system-adjusting efforts. We can provide a few examples, which you can expect in 2020:

　　We intend to continue adding more of the original and/or new firearms into the game.We know how important broken body parts (legs in particular) are to the overall DayZ experience, and we intend to bring this mechanic back to the game.We know how much you like the new vehicle wrecks on Livonia, so we will add them to Chernarus.Whether Bohemia manages to deliver all the DayZ updates they’re promising remains to be seen, but given the behind-the-scenes happenings, and state of the world in general, it seems kind of unlikely. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see what happens.

　　DayZ is available now on PC, Xbox One, and PS4.