So like half the gaming world/zombie enthusiasts, I was very intrigued by the idea of a sandbox post apocalyptic world of survival(with zombies lol). I watched a bunch of youtube videos and thought wow, this looks amazing. This was the ultimate open world, no restraints, walking around with my buddies trying to survive. We could form groups and keep each other alive while picking up stragglers or taking them down if they posed a threat to our group makeup.
This all sounds amazing in theory.
Problems are such:
#1 Arma II
There is the main problem, before we get into anything else. The Arma II engine was not a TOP SELLER for a reason, it is horrible, controls like shit, runs like shit, and handles like shit. For the graphics it provides, you would think it would run on any computer, but it actually is the opposite and suck resources for god knows what... lens flare? Not to mention the amazing metal terminator run animation haha. So you have a very clunky base to start with and then thrown in on top of that is a Zombie Mod… which wouldn’t be so bad, if there wasn’t:
#2 Rocket the Designer’s “beliefs”
Many things have been brough to the attention of Rocket the designer of DayZ, usually it goes something like this:
Q: Rocket I am think it is very unrealistic that I spend majority of my time when I am in a group with my friends on voice chat yelling “Is that you, crouch or something, I am going to shoot you! IS THAT YOU! DAMMIT! IT WAS YOU? WELL YOU DIDN’T CROUCH, SPRINT, FIRE IN THE AIR, SPIND 360 in TIME so I shot you… FUCK”
A: This is a realism mod, there will be no party system. In real life there is no party system, learn to know what they look like better, “Banned”.
Reality: In real life you know your friends by distinctive clothes, smells, looks, etc, in this game you have 1 or 2 looks and the same clothes. So to add a small bit of UI to show a players name over their head in your party or something like that would actually be very realistic considering this is a GAME and not face to face where that isn’t necessary but serves the same purpose.
Q: Rocket, the random spawns after death make it so I cannot play with my friends.
A: You died, you don’t have friends anymore, this is REALISM!
Reality: Last I checked, I didn’t sign up for ANYTHING in real life that I planned to do with my friends that would take us more than an hour or so to get to each other to begin in the first place. What you end up with is the REALITY of the situation being, your character may have died but you are still playing a GAME and want to play with your FRIENDS who are PLAYING THE GAME, but end up having to run for HOURS to get to them if they are inland, or mindlessly running up and down the coast to meet up, IF you have a map on your other screen and IF you see the name of the place you spawned, and IF you don’t get killed along the way. Which then increases your meet up time significantly, whereas now you have been in a game for a couple hours and not PLAYED or been IMMERSED in anything as you were just trying to meet up with your buddies.
Q: Rocket there is a bug that makes my computer crash and spit out viruses to all my emails…
A: Fuck you ALPHA. Look it up. WEBSTER Dictionary fucktard.
Reality: This may be in “alpha”, but when was the last time you saw an ALPHA that was open to the public? When was the last time you saw a Beta that was open to the public that wasn’t polished to hell, for that matter. Beta is not what it used to mean, Beta is advertisement. Alpha is internal testing. What Alpha means to Rocket is simple: LESS COMPLAINTS I HAVE TO DEAL WITH.
While some people back him up on this, and am not buying the idea that magically with the release of BETA status the game will magically be 100x’s better. The reality of the situation is a game is near 60-80% of what you get when it is released to the public regardless of “Alpha, beta, capa” status. People have this strange want to believe that all the things that make the game shitty in their eyes will be magically fixed in the “upcoming patch” and they will play again once that happens… then they get the patch, play for a day, and realize the core of the game still exists and the patch did nothing to spark their enthusiasm.
Q: Rocket, Nighttime is too dark…
A: FUCK MAN, get some nightvision goggles or something shit, night is dark deal with it.
Reality: Night is dark and in real life you cannot turn up the gamma and brightness of your life and glasses to get an unfair advantage against those who don’t know any better and think the game is smart enough to compensate without those methods. So now you have some players able to see a weird pixelated Metroid version of the game and shoot you without you knowing due to increased brightness and gamma(which btw is a real bitch to reverse when you play other games), and others who are walking into zombies and walls trying to get around. When you have to tell your friends when to stop turning so they are running in your direction… it is TOO DARK. Did the apocalypse kill the stars and moon? I think not.
#3 The magic wears off.
The game is really quite cool when you first login. The music is intense (until you realize it isn’t actually queuing off events but randomly triggering so you turn it off), the ambience is nice, the zombies are around you (until you realize if you crawl you can walk by any of them without aggroing them, and realizing if you go into a building they cannot run anymore and are easy to shoot, and realize that you better just wait till they are hitting you because their run animation is so choppy and broken you can’t shoot them as they twitch over your screen to kill you, but who cares since they hit like baby piglets anyway.)
And now you are left with a world where you are fearing the other players more than the Zombies. You are fearing the lack of food and water in your bag more than the Zombies, and you realize there really is nothing to fear since you can just kill someone later and re-arm quicker than if you try to survive.
So in conclusion, if you don’t mind running hours to get to any action and want to play this game like a really old version of Call of Duty, then you are in luck. You can. But why you would want to is beyond me…
If you want a survival game where Zombies are scary, there is lots of teamwork, and you are forced into towns to scavenge for food and provisions, this is NOT the game for you. The most team work you will find is sitting at your friends corpse for a few hours while he/she attempts to run back to you and get their shit back. That or shooting your friend in the face because you don’t recognize them quick enough and apologizing in RL when they come to your door and kick your cat.