#dayz mod

Zombie survival games have been very prevalent in my life since the release of the first Left 4 Dead. The adrenaline rush from hearing the distant screams of a massive hoard of brain dead goons heading your way with only you and three other of your friends to fend off against the unlikely odds was by far the best thing to happen in gaming at that time. The very aspect of looking for things to increase your odds of surviving that level was by far one of the highlights of the game. And the more you’d played the game, the more you were aware of a the new metas the game introduced, be it hiding in a specific corner while the hoard plowed in through one entrance as you lit them up or avoiding certain portions of a map by taking advantage of glitches. The game changed the more you played it.

And with time came more games, I took a brief hiatus from the zombie genocide to get into a more calm, collected, more punishing series of games; The military simulator. America’s Army online and Arma 2 were my top 3 most played games at a point in time. I’d spend hours playing Arma sniping terrorists or looking for caches that were tucked away and being defended by terrorist cells. It was all very time consuming. And then one day, the mod named DayZ popped up into vision, it boasted a health system, something I was very eager to see in a game and I wouldn’t have to stray very far to get into it, it was a free mod on a game I was very acquainted with already. I knew the map but much like Left 4 Dead, there was a whole new meta and world for me to discover.

Getting into DayZ was a social experience that really pushed interaction with strangers online to the max. Your life mattered in that game, it was the early stages, people were figuring the game out and figuring each other out. The big thing about DayZ that made it differ from a now ‘arcade’ shooter like Left 4 Dead was now not only did you have to worry about zombies, you have to worry about other players and your own body. If you were out in the rain too long you’d get hypothermia, you took a bit of a fall or slid down a hill you’d break your legs, you ran into a corner you’d break your legs, or you bled too much, so now you’re low on blood and you need some painkillers to ease the shaking and some more blood to get your vision back. Surviving zombies was a matter of running away from them and hoping you didn’t get cornered. Now, those weren’t the biggest things to worry about. You had to worry about other people, and this is probably what makes me a skeptic when talking to anyone new. You didn’t know who you could trust, in the early stages of the mod everyone was given a pistol and how you were going to use it was up to you. There was an eerie fear whenever you met up with someone, they’d talk to you but how they wanted it to end up could’ve been a few seconds away. They might come off as friendly but even after 4 hours in the game you know this father of four, church going minister could very well be a serial killer who was after some beans he’s been craving for. Now here was the hard part, would killing be worth it, you don’t know this guy!? You’ve got a nice rifle, he’s got a pistol, you can take this guy out in a shot, but you know if you do that that can come with other problems. That rifle you’ve got in your hands is the loudest piece of shit you’ve ever heard, your place will be swarmed by the walking dead in a matter of seconds. You didn’t even search the place! He could have a friend somewhere near you ready to end you. The possibilities were endless.

Later into the game, you had more responsibilities tacked onto you, and chances are you’ve got some newbie friends that need to learn the ropes because they haven’t heard a word from you since you started the game. You’re stacked up with a ghillie suit and have a sniper and a M4, that’s right you are the one who knocks. And now at this point you’ve probably got a camp set up with a few guns and food, somewhere west of Lopatino hidden under a tree. There’s threats of high rollers with a truck somewhere on the server trash talking you for running away from a fight the other day, you were out manned and outnumbered, what could you have done? So managing to find someone who won’t shoot you on site and making your way into a skype call with them and their besties is the best way to survive. And that’s exactly how I met the best friends I have today. Their plans were to kill us, but we made way into their heart and our forces grew. Me and my newbie pal joined a clan called IDEC(I dont even care). We learned all these different callouts and shared information with each other on a frontier that was still hardly known to us. We were a force to be reckoned with. Soon the baby weight we had on the game (50 hours) grew into 500 hours and then into 2000 and we were grizzled veterans getting into clan wars searching the tree lines for tents and camps, fighting and searching for the helicopters on the server. The war and feud was endless. And then after ages of it all, the server came to a halt. The owner had received a huge donation, took the money and ran. We tried rebooting the server by hosting it ourselves the sense of community we had and played with had died down.

Years later DayZ standalone had been announced. It was being produced by the studio that made the mod, and the company that made the game. The hype was alive, our group had been looking forward to this forever, the game we loved was going to be polished and updated by two of the best groups. We were announced promises of what this new game would hold and all well.

Fast forward even farther, we have DayZ standalone ‘alpha’. Is it really an alpha if it’s been like that for 3 years and has hardly made any progress whatsoever. And the problem is, it hardly makes any improvements over the mod. One of the main complaints is optimization, arma 2 was a shotily optimized game, and having loot spawns, zombies and clients, should have been priority number one.

COMMUNITY. Shit talking was the best part about DayZ, saying you found someones base, blowing up their car and being able to talk and get to know their names was what kept you coming back. You got attached to your enemies and you always had a sense of 'I’d buy that fucker a drink if I met him in a bar, we’ve got some story’s to tell’. Communicating easily made you aware of the people there, on Standalone it all feels so empty not having a side channel.

GAMEPLAY Its less arcade like than Arma 2’s mechanics and thats not a bad thing. Its the extent to which they push it that makes it a travesty. Arma 2’s movement was a real mess, but now in DayZ you can move around much better and the world’s easier to navigate through. Jogging is too damn slow. You can be run one side of the map to another in DayZ mod, here you can jog. Jog through all of Russia I dare you, you might see a cow, some trees, and a rock. Arma 2 wasn’t known for its landscape because what happened between cities wasn’t always important. Where everything went down was the hot zones and the cities. I don’t want to sit for 5 mins before entering a city because my guys fucking fatigued i need to be in and out and still be deadly while I’m on the move. I dont need spaghetti arms that sway in the wind after a jog. How can i defend myself?

Defence is the only offence. There’s hardly a reason , aside from me breaking their shit for why I’d ever not want to kill someone. Everyone’s always a threat. And that’s a problem. Killing the players that aren’t visibly armed or geared doesn’t mean they’re not threats. They can throw and punch. So while you’re being genuinely nice they’ve got a loaded pistol in their cargo shorts. They can pull out or while you access your inventory you get knocked out. This has happened to everyone, and i cant blame them for not taking any chances and just killing everyone and anyone. And thats what deters the experience, there’s little to no player interaction amongst the lines of communication and that’s what made the game interesting in the first place, not every conflict had to be a fight.

The game is plagued with so many other issues spanning from netcode to the UI. But what killed the game was execution. DayZ stunned the industry by coming off as the first and strongest contender to the new market, all they had to do was finish the game. And they didn’t do that. We are 3 years into the games early access with no feeling of the old DayZ and a good DayZ is far off. The industry zealots wanted to get a taste of the money that Bohemia was making by developing this game and that spurred games like Miscreated, WarZ, H1Z1, Dying Light, 7 Days to Die, and so many other games that have nothing on this DayZ as a title. Its a shame the devs of the game didn’t listen to the core fans who knew how the game could be balanced, mechanics should be treated and art could be done especially after recycling a map and its assets and copying and pasting it and calling them 'new cities’.

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Guefrmr29GU)

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HGawldfCWGY)

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_EBUxsWSQs)