LoksVassago

Hi all, registered an account here just now to leave this stuff: Brief history of me - I played DayZ the mod for many uncounted hours, though I stopped playing about 3 months ago. I was pretty darn successful, both learning to survive, and then after that playing around like it was a PvP sandbox. I guess that's to say that I'm "qualified" in existing DayZ content, as I'll be basing my suggestions here primarily off of what already exists. Things I'd like to see changed about DayZ the mod in an official DayZ standalone game - All the bugs (my first death after about 15 hours of play was glitching through a rock and breaking my everything instantly because it wasn't properly clipped against players walking through it), hacks, exploits, griefing, etc. etc. you've heard this before. Some way to prevent the game from turning into a PvP sandbox that happens to have some zombies in it (NOT to prevent PvP entirely, just to reduce it from how it was around the time I stopped playing; I felt it was just too much). My feelings here is that it was some combination of the zombies being too "easy" (predictable, kite-able, whatever; also it meant you didn't need to rely on other people to protect you from the zombies as much), players acting as a sort of gear filter/aggregator (players will only carry the best gear they come across, which means you save a lot of time if you harvest gear from players instead of spawn points since players won't be carrying tin cans around), and a lack of cooperation-based end-game activities (once you had a vehicle, a DMR, ghillie suit, and nightvision that was basically it - you had won DayZ, so now all there was left to do was to hunt people for sport). That's basically it for basic changes to the mod that I'd like to see in a standalone version. They're obviously two very broad categories, so here's some more specifics: Bugs, hacks, exploits, etc. I can't comment on. I'm no coder so I have no clue which end's even up for that. However, ways to address the reasons I think the game turned too easily into PvP Sandbox Which Happens to Have Zombies... The zombies are too easy, which means you don't NEED to work together with everyone you find. Ways I'd improve zombies to make them more of a threat to help fix that problem would be to have more of them (this was experimented with during the mod itself, primarily through respawn time tweaks), make them less predictable (lots of random triggers would help here: zombies randomly not paying attention to you, for instance) especially by placing them in locations they don't presently inhabit (the middle of nowhere) and by giving them a bit more initiative (essentially keeping zombies spawned for longer and having them roam the map of their own volition). Of course also the issue of "zombies can't run and attack at the same time" being fixed by making every zombie usain bolt should probably be addressed, too, since that's what makes them sort of a pain to hit while simultaneously making them easy to kite regardless. Another way to improve the difficulty of zombies is not just by improving the zombies themselves, but also by lowering the resources players have access to. If you have an M4 then three or four zombies doesn't seem so bad, but if you have a double-barrel shotgun you're going to need to reload in the middle - or worse yet, if you only have a fireaxe then only ONE zombie might be a threat! Basically: the existing zombies don't necessarily START easy in DayZ the mod, but they GET easy, which encourages you to ignore the zombies as a valid threat. Players acting as a loot filter/aggregator I'm not entirely sure what to do about. This just sort of seems like a normal thing that will happen, as players will obviously bring along their best gear whenever they go somewhere that will put their (virtual) lives in danger. Even having reliable bases wouldn't really do too much, since you're not going to stash your AK-47 in favor of a makarov assuming you have the ammo for both and it's up in the air as to which you bring along. However, one solution I can think of for making killing people for their loot less reliable would be that you might damage some of their gear in the process. This is a trick I commonly see employed in tabletop RPGs of all things, because commonly you will want to loot your enemies (after all, they tried to kill you, it's only fair!) Essentially maybe your bullets hit some of the magazines on their assault vest, so now the magazines are all bent out of shape and are useless, or you hit their water bottle so now you'd need to fix it or it would leak, stuff like that. This might be kind of pie-in-the-sky to model accurately, though, because I imagine it'd take a lot of processing power to damage gear in a player's inventory using hit location modelling, so more realistically it might potentially involve simple random gear damage/destruction. Damaged gear leads, obviously, to the proposition that there be wear and tear on your gear. This is something that the STALKER games did in a very simplistic way (I mention this because the level of detailed that's ultimately used for this feature could be relatively simple and still have a good effect), such that as you used a gun more it'd jam more often, or as your armor became more used it'd be less protective from the damage it took before, stuff like that. Repairing this wear and tear might be an important feature as well, or gear could simply become worn and ultimately useless and need to be discarded, which could lead to an interesting resultant economy of its own (but would probably require that things spawned infinitely, rather than there being a fixed amount of DMRs in the world, or else the DMR as a gun would go extinct - just as an example). A lack of cooperation based end-game activities is basically what it says on the tin. Getting a vehicle functioning again, especially a helicopter, is really accelerated with teamwork much beyond how much teamwork helps you scavenge for beans. This is a great example of AN end-game activity, but DayZ the mod really only had this one. Once had a vehicle that was it for cooperative endgame activities. The proposition of "base building" is a great solution to this, however, as building a base is much more complex than building a vehicle, and having a fleet of bases is much more useful than having a fleet of vehicles (because you can position your bases both near important locations to guard them, and far from important locations to be kept secret, so having many bases in many different locations is very important). In addition, base building is incredibly important as it affects the world itself. However, and this brings us back to zombies, bases in dayz mod as it stands currently wouldn't make a lot of sense. The only way they'd be overrun is by other players, since zombies don't roam. An archetypical situation in zombie lore is the survivor base attracting a giant shambling hoard of zombies, so that definitely needs to be in there! Some other cooperative end-game activities that I can think of are events, like those mentioned by other people. People mentioned things like "convoys", though I don't think that would work well with NPCs like in most traditional MMO games, since that doesn't seem to be the kind of thing DayZ is all about, mod or standalone or otherwise. Rather to enact events like that, I think you'd probably need to have a core of people who either volunteer or are on payroll to act out situations like that for other people to stumble across. It's kind of staged, so that's not necessarily very "DayZ" in principle, but unannounced "improvised" events in the game like that by some sort of staff members would be really cool to liven things up, because if they get killed they didn't just spend 20 hours scavenging the gear necessary to enact that sort of cooperative cinematic event moment in the game world. Finally, I have some general suggestions that don't really fit into any of the above categories. DayZ seems like a more simulationist game than most (probably because it uses ARMA as its base), and while the gunplay is pretty realistic by nature, I'd love to see all of the other stuff be that way, too. Imagine if repairing a car in DayZ was like a simple version of repairing a car in real life? The game would make it easier but the real info would still be there to learn about. DayZ taught me a lot about actually navigating real places using a map and compass (and also about the importance of roads and power lines as landmarks!), and some years ago there was an article about somebody responding to a real emergency using what they learned from the America's Army game's medic tutorial. This game seems like a prime opportunity to "do the research", as it were, and to keep things as realistic as possible (although at the same time, this runs the extreme risk of being too daunting and shutting people out, so it would take a lot of work). The obvious benefit is that this would aid immersion, assuming you could keep intrusive menus out of the way. The secondary benefit is that it might actually teach people a thing or two. I see a lot of existing suggestions for extremely realistic inventory management, but I did spot some mistakes in the suggestions for very realistic injury models, so obviously a big problem here, besides being hard to avoid lots of menus and clunky UI and overcomplicating things, is making sure that the research is right. Not the top of my list, I'd rather have a good game that makes some abstractions than a bad game that's really realistic, but I think the game is in a unique position to take advantage of that. Some sort of group affiliation system seems like an important idea. If you're going to have a base, you're going to want to know who's allowed in that base and who's not. This takes a cue from EVE, where probably the most excellent part of that game is the system of alliances and no-holds-barred power politics. Some existing suggestions make mention of groups fighting over a gas station in order to control the diesel that powers their generators, but without what amounts to a "clan system" that seems hard to pull off. Also, since EVE is notorious for backstabbing, that seems like it'd fit strongly in to the "late game" of DayZ. At the same time, it's also important that these features not get carried so far away that people have essentially rebuilt modern civilization, just now there's a few zombies running around - it is meant to be an anarchic apocalypse after all, and organization should be hard. Entirely enterable buildings seem like a must, so that it's not quite as fake feeling as seeing "oh there's that one building model that I know is enterable, time to head over there and ignore the other 95% of these buildings". My final suggestion is basically a word of warning about suggestions (ironic, I guess). The design space in DayZ needs to be kept properly organized. I learned a lot about game design across disciplines, first from music, then from tabletop RPGs, then from video games, and all three have very similar rules about space. Film does, too, actually, but I'm not really as much of an expert on that. In music you have three dimensions within which to place elements: volume (loudness), frequency (pitch/tone), and panning (audio field). If you have any two elements occupying all three of the same locations in these spaces (say, "loud", "high pitched", and "panned left") at the same time, they're going to blur together and form a sort of amorphous blob, which is bad. Sort of like in film, if you place one actor behind another relative to the camera, the first actor will block the second from view, so he may as well not even be there. Games work the same work, so if you have too many fiddly bits for the same purpose, it starts to get really weird. The ultimate analogy, though, is that a game's set of features is a lot like a song's volume: once you hit +- 0dB you're done, and anything else you add is going to make it horrible. You need to strip things out in some places to make room for things in others. Basically, DayZ is a pretty niche concept: post-apocalyptic zombie survival, with an emphasis on relative anarchy and anomie. This means that there's a short list of things you should be focusing on, that fits within this archetype. Weapons, obviously, is one of them. What you can carry on your back is another. The things that can hurt you is a third, and comradery, or a lack thereof, is a big fourth. There may be more, I haven't thought too long about it, but some suggestions (perhaps even my own, and my personal bias prevents me from seeing it) can start to creep outside of the original archetype of the game. This is commonly known as "feature bloat", something I'm sure Rocket is aware of being in the business of game design, and I'd personally quite like to avoid it in any future DayZ Standalone game. Stuff like bases, or clan systems, or whatever are probably important to reducing the amount of PvP gunbattles in the "end game" of DayZ, that may be true. What's also true, though, is that giving players that power to organize and fortify reduces the sort of "transient wanderer in a wasteland" archetype that DayZ the mod is famous for. I'm not sure if that's "ok" with the vision of DayZ, but I still think it'd be cool, so I suggested that sort of stuff, but as my closing words I would ask Rocket to pay close attention to what is, and is not, DayZ - and no matter how cool a feature sounds, to absolutely under no condition implement it if it is not about what DayZ is meant to be about. I had a lot to say, so I'll leave it at that. Cheers to Rocket for the fun game I played those few months ago and I look greatly forward to what DayZ standalone might bring!