Dean Hall and friends have been keeping busy with the upcoming DayZ standalone alpha, which they plan on releasing on Steam Early Access sometime… in the future, but before that happens, Hall wants to make sure we keep our expectations relatively low.

“I really can’t emphasize enough — this is going to be an early access project on steam,” Hall wrote in a post on the game’s forums. “Massive areas of the engine were entirely reworked, involving a large team of people over the last 12 months. Much of what these achievements will enable won’t be seen for many months — so I really plead for anyone who is on the fence to take a skeptical approach — watch streams, read reviews, watch some let’s play and form your opinion. You could always come back to the game in three, six months time and buy it then.”

Perhaps the similarly themed zombie survival sandbox game Infestation: Survival Stories (formerly The War Z), which didn’t go over well last year, has inspired some trepidation in the developer, who certainly doesn’t want to see the same reaction to DayZ. I’m sure it won’t, but I understand the need to clarify fans on the state of the game.

The point of an alpha is to open the an early, unfinished and unpolished version of a game to a wider audience, to locate and remedy issues a QA team might not find before the game is “finished.” It’s not an uncommon thing to do in the games industry, and it’s become even more common lately, especially with indie games on Steam that aren’t crafted by large studios armed with legions of QA testers.

So should you decide to grab the DayZ standalone when it is finally made available on Steam Early Access, just know that it definitely is not feature complete.