Ex-DayZ boss says survival games should give players as much power as developers and "expose damn near every single variable" they can mod: "Expose as much as possible"

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Brian Hicks wants you to have ultimate control

(Image credit: Bohemia Interactive)

It's not enough to simply build something like a big hot dog out of diamond bricks in Minecraft anymore – former DayZ creative director Brian Hicks thinks survival games should give players ultimate control.

So, you actually want to have hot dogs, hamburgers, french fries, chicken wings… or, more realistically, decide you want to bump enemy aggression up a couple thousand notches. Hicks tells PC Gamer in a new interview he doesn't understand why more survival game devs don't just commit to "exposing as many of the levers and switches that developers and designers use, to tweak the difficulty settings and the vibe of the game" and allow players to start "soft modding" it.

Softmods, in computer tradition, usually involve beating hardware into submission with the power of software exploits – making it so you can do things like crack your Wii and play Wolfenstein 3D. In this case, Hicks is advocating for game devs to start "exposing all of" their behind-the-scenes tricks "to the player in a custom difficulty setting. Because why not?"

Hicks continues to commend survival horror game 7 Days to Die developers for "the way they expose damn near every single variable in that game on the XML side to the players – why the fuck not?

Ashley Bardhan
Ashley Bardhan
Senior Writer

Ashley is a Senior Writer at GamesRadar+. She's been a staff writer at Kotaku and Inverse, too, and she's written freelance pieces about horror and women in games for sites like Rolling Stone, Vulture, IGN, and Polygon. When she's not covering gaming news, she's usually working on expanding her doll collection while watching Saw movies one through 11.

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