bfisher

The problem with a lot of these "open world" early access sandbox games is that they start with an interesting idea, but you have no idea what the finished game will be, if anything at all. The Mod started off as this brilliant, if crude, concept of a brutal open world zombie survival game. Similar in tone and style to The Walking Dead, The Road or 28 Days Later. Survival times for new players was like 15 minutes on average until you could figure out how not to be immediately killed by zombies or player bandit gangs before you found your first backpack. Only THEN would you actually have to think about where to get food, weap;ons, etc. We thought the Stand Alone would just be a polished up version of that. Four years and many interface and engine overhauls later, we have a big nerfed down walking simulator on a very pretty but largely empty giant wilderness map. Zombies don't work. The loot economy is broken. But we have this new engine that dramatically simulates leaves gently landing on a pond. I'll check out .63 when and if it's ever released. But I'm skeptical that it won't just be more of the same.

Yeah, I don't know. The problem IMHO is that since the day / night cycle is more or less "real time", no one is going to fumble around in pitch black darkness for 12 hours. They'll just switch to a daytime server. And if you make night time into a bright "TV night time" where you it's just daytime with a blue filter, sort of defeats the purpose of it being "night". A short day/night cycle forces the player to find a light source or hunger down for a time period so they aren't stumbling into zombies or players. You can create a sort of Minecraft / I Am Legend / Dying Light dynamic where you hide / fortify at night and go out during the day. Or maybe a reverse of that where the night offers greater reward and safety at the expense of not being able to see so good. I haven't quite worked out what the ideal day/night dynamic should look like on a largely open map where you only occasionally encounter people. Chazz Michael Michaels: "The night is a very dark time for me." Jimmie MacElroy: "It's dark for everyone, moron."

I don't know much about game development. But I do know a lot about general software development project management. "It's done when it's done" is generally not an acceptible answer. I presume that BI doesn't have infinite budget and DayZ's fan base doesn't have infinite patience. Is that normal for games to just be developed for years on some open-ended timeline?

I suppose a use case for inland boats would be hauling stuff up and down river. But I guess it's more like, if they are already creating the boats to get back and forth to islands, might as well also go up river with them.

If they are going to add streams, I wish they made them wider so I can take a small boat upriver Apocalypse Now style.

I'm a bit concerned that the new stamina system will make the game a lot more boring by preventing us from "fast forwarding" through the vast empty wastelands between towns. Still have high hopes for .63...sort of. It's nice knowing the dev's reasons behind the new spawn locations. But to be honest, I still miss the old school Mod spawns on the southern coast from Balota to Electro. In my mind, the game always had a natural South-North progression. You started on the coast and made your way to the PvP shit-storm that is Balota Airfield, Cherno or Electro so that you could gear up with enough low-grade basic weapons and supplies to head north (if you survive). I mean you could try heading north directly, but it might be tough to get through all the wilderness between the coast and the next ring of lootable cities. Once you cleared the coastal cities, you were more or less safe until you entered one of the high-loot bottlenecks at Stary Sober, or NWAF. Along the way, you stopped by Green Mountain, one of the castles or a few other spots. Maybe if you were lucky, you came across a heli crash or camp. I liked Berezino and NEAF because they were interesting locales that took a while to get to. Assuming you managed to survive to this point, you then had the option to find some obscure part of the map to build a camp and otherwise eek out a living or go south and kill people. To be honest, I haven't played much as of late, but the current system basically seems to consist of: 1) Spawn wherever 2) Spam apples til your belly is full 3) Run to NWAF and Tisy Missile Base to get some good gear. 4) Don't know...I lose interest by this point and start over at the next post-patch character wipe.

That's what they said 6 months ago! And the 6 months before that!

I feel like a lot of negative reviews might be due to a failure to have a proper vision for what DayZ should be and how to define and market to its target audience. I "grew up" on the Mod and Rocket's original vision. So I kind of expect to spend long hours scavenging for supplies, gearing up, hiding from swarms of zombies, PvPing CoD style in a few known hot spots and occasionally running into packs of overpowered gangs of psychotic players at random. But for various reasons, I feel like the game isn't quite "there" yet. There are hints of where it could be. Like getting corned in a house by a pack of wolves or teaming up with a gang of new spawn strangers in Cherno to hunt some ghillie-suited sniper whose been harassing us. But then there are long stretches of wandering around, not seeing zombies, not really needing to do much to survive.

I often imagine the world of DayZ is more similar to The Crazies than Night of the Living Dead. That is to say, (most of) the other players are the ones who are actually "infected" with a virus that turns them into murderous lunatics. The NPC "infected" are just later stage where they lose their cognitive abilities and just wander aimlessly like drunken hobos.

So basically..."Battlefield Z"?

I generally like your idea except for one problem. "Running" is unfortunately the quickest way to get through the interminable no-mans land between major cities and towns. Also the map isn't that big really. It's about 10x10 miles of mostly open farmland, small forests and towns interconnected by roads. Too small to realistically be worried about "getting lost in the woods" but too big and sparse to actually want to spend hours "not running" from location to location. But I do like the idea of your speed being determined by your load and having to drop your pack to get away from that zombie hoard...if the zombies actually came in a hoard...and were actually dangerous.

Interestingly, right after the 62 upgrade I respawed into a new life (which lasted 15 minutes) that kind of felt like the Standalone might be getting there. I started in a big city (Cherno, Electro or Benzo...can't tell anymore) at dusk. I found a fire ax relatively quickly and shortly thereafter, encounter another player screaming for help being chased by 3 zombies. I dispatched the zombie and he seemed grateful. But this being DayZ, it got a bit tense when he approached a bit too close for comfort (turns out, only to give me some food). Fortunately a third neutral player showed up, which diffused the potentially dangerous situation from escalating. We all seemed to hit it off so we decided to head off together and try and take out a Ghilli suited sniper one of the players encountered previously (presumably the source of the high powered rifle fire we heard). Soon we encountered another player just standing in the middle of the street (all these players wearing the t-shirts and hats of a new spawn who hasn't found much besides hats). I told the party I would "ax him a question" at which point he freaked out and started slashing at everyone. The fight didn't last long as we started taking incoming sniper fire. We all got separated in the shuffle, but I did manage to fix the snipers position, but was killed before I could ax him. The last thing I saw was seemingly every newspawn in town rushing him as the sun went down. I respawned, and since that, it's mostly just been wandering the empty countryside spamming apple orchards and acquiring military gear at the army bases.

I too would think that would be neat to get the trains up and running. Although regarding the detail, one thing kind of bothers me: If you check out the wrecked ship or the harbors, they are all filled with standard 20' intermodal shipping containers (maybe some 40' as well, I don't recall). https://vignette2.wikia.nocookie.net/dayz-standalone/images/0/04/Rify_Shipwreck_aerial.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20140312122643 And yet I don't think I've seen any rolling stock equipped to handle intermodal containers. Mostly I've seen these old box cars that look like they are left over from the Battle of Stalingrad. I'd expect to see lots of flatbeds or well cars, some loaded with containers.

What would be the point? So my character can wake up from his coma years from now and no longer recognize the world he once knew?

44 Magnum here (world's most powerful hand gun. I've been playing since the middle-ish days of the Mod. Don't have much time these days, as I didn't have a wife and two kids when I started. Putting it that way, it kind of makes it seem like development is taking a long time. I guess there isn't really a way to put it to make development not sound like it's taking a long time. I hope some day when my son (or daughter) is older, they might get a chance to play the Beta.

So it sounds like the obvious answer to "why is it harder to have interactions" is that there are less people actually playing to interact with! My personal take is that there are two main reasons player interaction is becoming more rare. Bigger map and lack of zombies. By bigger map, I mean that even though the total area is about the same as the mod, all the new locations and buildings create more places to go and more space to not see another player. You can hide 50 people in Electro without them ever running across each other. Back in the day you had like 5 buildings in the largest cities that you could enter. There was always a bottleneck at Balota airport, the fire stations and the hospital where players would run into each other. And of course having lots of zombies gives players something to shoot other than each other. And they provide a bit of a warning when players are around so they don't just surprise each other and shoot each other in the face.

To be honest, unless you had a large clan of dudes (and dudeettes) where at least someone was around to guard the base, I never really saw the point of having one. To me, bases make sense in an Minecraft Project Zomboid Dying Light I Am Legend scenario where it's relatively dangerous to venture out for half the day, so you go out scavenging during the other half. During the dangerous period, you hide in your fortified base, sleep, count your beans and bullets and wait for the sun to rise (or set) to do it all over again. DayZ doesn't have those cycles. I just don't see the point of spending an hour walking across the map to get a couple cans of beans, walk all the way back to some fixed base and hope my shit is still there. To me, much better to be mobile and live out of a car so I can take my stuff with me where I go. But I'm not against base building and DayZ should allow all sorts of play styles. I just don't want to see Cherno become a shanty town of bunkers and watchtowers made from plywood and HESCO barriers.

Seriously, can someone explain the "sickness" mechanic? How does one get "sick"? Drinking pond water? Getting hit by a zombie? Eating undercooked chicken? Did I just catch something in the air? I felt like I was kind of sick (yellow) for hours. I had a full stomach (highest "energized" and "hydrated" levels). Predictably, I needed to constantly drink, but fortunately I was right by a pond. After what seemed like hours, I thought maybe the pond water was making me sick, so I decided to travel cross country and find a well. Big mistake. After about 10 minutes I because dehydrated and VERY sick (red). I did manage to find another small pond but couldn't drink fast enough and died. So can someone please enlighten me on "sickness"?

Had an interesting encounter today. I'm minding my own bussiness, running in the Solnichniy to Tisy 20k and I hear a couple of gunshots in the distance a few clicks northwest of Alter Radio Station. Their in my path, so I investigate. I start hearing more shots, which I eventually determine to be coming from a small cluster of houses about a click away. All of a sudden, I see movement coming towards me off in the distance. On closer inspection, it appears to be a bunch of wolves, spread out in two groups of 2-3 about a thousand meters apart. I manage to book it out of there without them tracking me. Never did find the source of the gunshots or what happened to them. I like those little touches when you encounter evidence that there are actually other players on the server. I mean besides when you encounter some other asshole in an airbase going for the same weapons cache.

No, it was more an impromptu test of the "dinner bell" effect of firing a rifle in town. I got killed by another player a short time later anyway. And in a typical shitty glitchy DayZ manner. I could hear the guy approaching so I pulled out my AK. As I'm waiting, I just silently fall over and a few seconds later hear some out of sync gunshots. So looks like some work is still needed.

I've been playing a bit and here are a couple of thoughts: The zombies are better, but the game won't be anything but a PvP fest until they can create zombies that are numerous enough and dangerous enough that they pose a threat to a single player. I did run a bit of an experiment in one of the towns that worked out pretty well: From the doorway of a 2 story house, I dispatched several zombies with a silenced pistol. Pretty decent distance shots IISSM. The zombies went down without drawing attention. Then I went upstairs, shut the door to the room and killed a couple more with single shots from an AK-101. That drew every zombie around. I could hear them all running around and inside the house on the other side of the door, which they noticeably did not teleport through.

I had eaten some cooked (not burnt) chicken too.

Came across this mess near Tisy. bunch of wolves taking down a zombie. Chased me into a nearby house.

Personally, I've always felt that DayZ is best represented by long dull stretches of tense lonely boredom, punctuated by short periods of terror, followed by either frustration or victorious elation.

@maxhewitt- Actually, I think the fact that there is no "instruction manual" and the constant threat of PvP is the best part of the game and is completely in the spirit of what Rocket had in mind when he created the original Mod. The intended effect is that you are dropped into this hostile and unforgiving environment with no gear or survival knowledge and hope you don't get killed by the steep learning curve. A bunch of new players should very much be the "blind leading the blind", similar to Season 1 of The Walking Dead or the first 20 minutes of any zombie movie where people are just running around trying to stay alive. Having the Community shape the play style is sort of the whole point of an open world survival game. I think the problem is that gameplay mechanics are underdeveloped so you almost don't need to do anything to survive. I seem to remember the early days of the Mod where average survival time was something like 15 minutes. Now, once you've found a pond and an apple orchard, it's pretty much until you accidently kill yourself or run afoul of another player.