Bohemia Recap – February 2020

With so many projects and (live) games, it's not always easy to keep track of everything that's happening at Bohemia Interactive. That's why we've started doing Bohemia Recaps – concise blog posts that simply list our key announcements and (public) activities from the past month. Here's the February overview. Let's go!

Vigor

At the start of February, we released Vigor's major 2.0 update, which also kicked off Season 2: Hunters. Highlights included the addition of brand-new tools and a crossbow, and the introduction of a tweaked Battle Pass that allows for faster progression. Watch the latest trailer to see all of these additions in action, and/or read this blog post by Vigor's Project Lead for more information.

To keep the pace, we already released Update 2.1 last week, which brings along even more additional content and improvements. One of the top-requested new features is the ability to track your progress in your Personal Stats. Other highlights are the new reward screen, wardrobe shop, ready button, fake buried caches, and shoulder mirroring. You can find the full changelog on our website here. If you want a quick overview of all our development progress so far, do check out our renewed Updates web page.

Lastly, we decided to share some of the more remarkable statistics of Season 1 ("Preppers") on our social channels. Click here to see one of the more hilarious ones (if we say so ourselves). We also kept our regular "Get to know the #VigorTeam" interviews going. In the latest edition, we chatted with our Sound Designer, Andrej Novosad. You can read the interview on the forums.

Vigor's Top Tweet in February:

Ylands

While in January we released a major update called Eastern Endeavours, in February we hopped onto preparing the next big update, which we’ve so far been calling the "RPG Update“. And there sure are some cool new features coming in this update. While for Exploration players the new Random Encounters featuring the fearsome Wendigo, Goatmen, Golems (but also the fair Elves and the Crystal Golem appearing randomly in caves) will definitely come as great news, for Creators we have plenty of Editor quality-of-life improvements and new features, such as the much improved particle effects.

We have also put up new rules for the Workshop, turning it from the Weird Wild West into a creative paradise which will be safe for any that venture there.

There are other exciting features and projects we’ve been working on, but we’ll have to keep those secret for a little while longer.

Ylands' Top Tweet in February:

DayZ

In February we released DayZ's Game Update 1.07, first on PC and later on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. After the initial update, we received user reports on several issues, and deployed a first hotfix in response. We believe this addressed some of the critical issues, but more fixes are on the way. We thank everyone for their feedback and patience!

In terms of highlights, Update 1.07 contained important fixes related to the inventory, but also introduced the Repeater Carbine (using .357 rounds), and 12-gauge rubber slugs that can be used as non-lethal ammunition for all of your favorite shotguns in the game. Furthermore, you'll find some new points of interest across Chernarus in the form of amusement parks. Plus, there were some noticeable changes to the global lighting, which also lets server admins enable an optional setting that makes in-game nights brighter. Watch the teaser trailer and examine the update changelog here.

Since DayZ players are known to be true romantics, we decided to host a Steam Free Weekend and sale on Valentine's Day and the days after. This proved to be massively popular, with a peak of 40,500+ concurrent players (last seen in February 2014) and an average of 17,100+ concurrent players overall (last seen in March 2014). Thanks to everyone for participating, and a big welcome to all new survivors!

DayZ's Top Tweet in February:

Arma 3

Last week we deployed the latest update for the Arma 3 Apex: Old Man open-world singleplayer scenario on the Steam Workshop. Check out its changelog for an overview of all of the changes. If you played Old Man before the update, please do make sure to fully restart the scenario, even if your older save game still loads. Unfortunately, save games from the previous version are not compatible with this newly updated version, and you would likely run into compatibility-related issues.

Some of you have been asking if they could purchase the Arma 3 Soundtrack separately. Thanks to some recent changes on Steam, you now indeed can! Head over to its Steam store page and seize ownership of all 100 original songs (total duration of the soundtrack is approximately 3.5 hours!).

We've continued to interview prominent Arma community members in February as well. Check out our Community Profiles on Greenfist and Sa-Matra, and get to know them a little better.

Arma 3's Top Tweet in February:

Mini DayZ 2

Our Mini DayZ 2 team shared a new blog post to discuss where we are in development and what challenges still lie ahead. In addition, Designer Cannedbits (Mike) and Producer Thales hosted an official AMA (Ask Me Anything) on the Mini DayZ subreddit. You'll find lots of information there regarding almost every (planned) aspect of Mini DayZ 2, but also about the devs themselves. All in all, it's great to see so much love and excitement for this project!

Mini DayZ's Top Tweet in February:

What else?

Bohemia's Top Tweet in February:

And that's it for our February Recap. Be sure to follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn for all the latest Bohemia news. And of course we'll be back next month with a recap of March.

Take care!