Hello Xbox Survivors!
Since launching in Game Preview, we haven't really released any major content update for DayZ, and especially now after the PC BETA update, we've been getting lots of questions about when you can expect it to drop. Well, good news - it's right around the corner! Read on to find out when, what's in it and what else do we have planned for DayZ on Xbox this month.
Basebuilding & Vehicles Update
Alright, let's start with it right off the bat - if nothing goes wrongduring internal testing, we'll be releasing a big Game Preview update on Thursday, November 22 - next week. We're announcing this with a little bit of a warning since there are quite a few things that can still break the build, but hopefully, we should be all good and ready to release what's without any doubt the biggest game update we've done on Xbox so far.Along with bringing new things to try, the update should also be addressing some of the very annoying issues that you've been reporting. Let's take a look:
Content & Features Highlight
- new vehicle: ADA 4x4 + parts and other necessary items
- base building + necessary items to make it work (tools, planks, nails...)
- new shotgun + ammo
- tents and barrels for making improvised camps and loot stashes
- improved nighttime (don't throw away those road flares everyone! You'll need them
- lots of other new items configured for spawning in the Central Economy
- slightly increased numbers of infected >
- fixes for the annoying hit registration bug
- some missing controls should be added, as well as some new options (we'd like to add leaning, switching fire mode, weapon zeroing and switching between multiple user actions)
- we've gone through the first round of optimizations improving the performance and stability of the inventory (evaluating the performance will be one of the things we will be monitoring)
- changes to Central Economy and item spawning quantity in general
- lots of smaller animation and sound improvements
- general improvements to game stability
Bug Fixes & Quality of Life Improvements
Upcoming Inventory & Usability Improvements
One of the things that we'd like to resolve during the Game Preview is the general usability of the game, and the inventory/UI functionality. The DayZ game design team joined forces with our friends and colleagues in the Vigor teamand for the past 2 weeks, they have been brainstorming possible new concepts for the DayZ UI and inventory usability. We've done a pretty extensive research in this area and identified a lot of specific things that would be worth taking a look at. This effort should result in a set of specific improvements that we will want to try implementing in order to make DayZ a bit more user friendly.
While it's too early to show any results and the implementation phase is always the hardest one, we're taking this very seriously and will update you whenever we have any concrete results. Your feedback on this will be very important, so get ready to bring it on! 
DayZ will support mouse & keyboard!
Lastly, at XO, Microsoft announced that mouse & keyboard supportis officially coming to Xbox One - and DayZ is one of the games that will take advantage of this new feature! It's good to mention that our intention is to always match players with the same input method, and not mix controller and mouse & keyboard players together. While we don't have a specific day to roll out support for mouse & keyboard input, it's safe to say that we will most likely not be able to do that before we leave Game Preview. Figuring out agood controller experience is the priority for us at the moment, and while it may seem like it's easy to just bring over the PC controls to Xbox, there's actually quite a lot of programming and scripting work that would need to be done in order to support this - and we need our programmers and scripters on other things right now!
