UE1 - UT DayZ gametype

I'm kicking the idea around of making a DayZ-type mod for UT. In case you are going "what's DayZ?" here's a quick synopsis..

There is one rather large map for this game. That's important because the crux of this game is continuity. You spawn with almost nothing and your life depends on finding food, weapons, etc. The world is inhabited with slow zombies and the name of the game is survival.

Sounds all generic but the real twists to this game are the choices you make. Players can team up with other players to make survival easier...however at any point you can frag your teammate and take all his stuff. If that's not enough there's also this little fact: if you die you start over from the very beginning. First level, no stuff. Who do you trust indeed...

I thought of including a persistent login system with password to protect your player name, a leveling system, persistent server-controlled inventory (in case of server disconnect or crash), and some other goodies that already exist in UT. Would anyone be interested in something like this? Do you guys play DayZ and do you think it would translate well into the UEngine? I'm interested in feedback before I started this.

I should have replied back with my testing, here was what I got as a result:

Map size is doable. I got permission to modify MH-LostInTime, a map that uses a single plane of the editor from end to end (pretty much). It consists of a lot of valleys to keep draw distance under anything that causes issues (HOM errors). I then cloned the map into 3 more 'sheets' and connected them all with tunnels and hidden warp zones. This gave the effect of passing through a darkened tunnel in the edges of each map and then coming into another version of the same level (4 in total).

Poly count was kept under the max but it was getting uncomfortably high. I know what you mean about the standard weapons and range but this game would have required custom inventory all the way around and I'd have dealt with the max range on the sniper rifle classes then.

I even rough coded a placeable zombie class that would spawn depending on proximity of players and redid the zombies so they looked more realistic (fixing the texture problems on them too).

Overall though there are just too many limits in UT. Creating a large enough 'world' then asking the engine to do all this other stuff is just too much so I scrapped the idea. It's possible but not to the way I'd like to do it.