Dean Hall, the creator of the massively popular and still unfinished zombie survival sim DayZ, announced last year that he was working on a hush-hush virtual reality project. And now, at last, we know what it is. Yesterday Hall's new studio, RocketWerkz, announced the Steam Early Access release of Out of Ammo, an HTC Vive-exclusive virtual reality strategy shooter that involves blasting away blocky soldiers who look like refugees from Minecraft.Compared to a lot of the current virtual reality offerings, it looks rather fun. Even in this early incarnation, it delivers five playable combat classes and four different environments, and new content is reportedly on the way. The gunplay looks solid enough, but RocketWerkz claims the real draw here is that Out of Ammo uses the Vive's positional tracking to let players "take cover behind sandbags, lean over a tower railing, or duck behind your sandbags and grab a grenade to throw as a last resort."Oh, and it's "a bit clunky to use" and "unintuitive," according to the company's own Early Access announcement on Steam. But no worries! RocketWerkz claims it'll get that all fixed up in couple of months with a new build.Standard enough Early Access stuff. But claims like that set off alarms for many players, as the sting still hasn't worn off from Hall's sudden 2014 announcement that he'd be founding a new studio and leaving DayZ while it was still in Early Access. Hall was the brains of the project, as he'd originally created its zombie survival scenario in his sprawling and critically acclaimed Arma 3 mod, and his departure from Bohemia Interactive's standalone project marked a shot in the foot for the game's future development. It never really recovered, and it's still in Early Access to this day.The community hasn't forgotten. The game's Steam forums are still relatively empty, but the announcement video on YouTube is full of upvoted comments like "How long until you ditch this project?" and "fuck off con man" and "Grab the money and run!""I am a grenade," Hall said in his departure announcement to Eurogamer back in 2014. "I have a specific use. I'm really good at risk-taking and making other people take risks, I've always been good at that in my life. Like you say, maybe I've got the gift of the gab, so I can talk, I can explain something, I can talk people up to the ledge and get them to jump off it."Let's hope that ledge turns out to be worth jumping off of for RocketWerkz.
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