bfisher

This. 28 Days Later. The Crazies. The Omega Man / I Am Legend. Maggie. Even the zombies in World War Z technically. These are still technically "zombie" films. Yes, they are living humans infected by some sort of "rage virus", not undead corpses like the Romero films or The Walking Dead. But these are still "zombie films" for the following reasons: The "zombies" mindlessly attack "normals". The "zombification" process is permanent and untreatable. In most cases, getting bit by a zombie turns you into one. So I would submit that at the very least, the "zombies" in DayZ should have the following appearance: They should look like sick people (pale or discolored, bloodshot eyes, maybe puss or ooze from various openings) They should look like they have been walking around in the rain and mud for weeks. They might even look like they were attacked or have been attacking something else. Whether they have glowing eyes or varicose veins is purely up to the art team. Whether they are "fast" or "slow" is up for debate IMHO. Personally I like the "slowing rising tide of undead" like the Romero films and Walking Dead. It adds a sort of different tension. Then again, the kinetic frenzy of "fast" zombie films like World War Z, the Dawn of the Dead remake and 28 Days later adds a different, but also cool dynamic. They SHOULD NOT have an assortment of mutants and other zombie creatures like the Resident Evil films.

The premise is that you can play the game however you want within the context that beyond keeping your player's survival needs met, there aren't any artificial rules in place. You can create a Novo safe zone if you like. But you have to get a bunch of your buddies together with a bunch of weapons to enforce it in the game environment. Not create a "no PvP shield" or kicking players. Part of the fun of the Mod was that it's totally unfair and imbalanced and unforgiving to clueless new players.

Safe zones are bullshit. The entire premise of DayZ is that you aren't safe ANYWHERE! You can be killed by ANYONE at ANY TIME! I do think they need to ramp up the PvE element, as well as the PvZ (player vs zombie). But I simply don't understand people coming in here and trying to turn this into a game that it's not. StanleyWasHappy - Just hang out outside the safe zone and pick off anyone coming or going. :D

Personally I miss the South to North flow of the Mod, rather than the East to West flow of the SA. To a certain extent, what the OP described is the fundamental premise of DayZ and I wouldn't want that to change. You wake up on a beach with nothing and no backstory. Assuming you aren't immediately killed by zombies or another player (remember average survival time in the Mod was like 15 minutes), your next step was to take care of your immediate survival needs - drink, food, maybe a basic weapon like an ax. You scrounge the coast for awhile until you have enough gear to venture inland. Maybe you even risk the twin cities of death. As you head north, you have the military bases as NWAF and Stary Sober and helicopter crashes to find some real firepower. Maybe head east to the sprawling but mostly abandoned Berezino to resupply without getting sniped or attacked by bandit clans. It was the promise of top gear that drew people away from the coast. If the idiots want to stay down there donkey punching each other, let them. But the game needs zombies. Ideally ones that can roam all over the map and possibly in giant herds and don't warp through walls. Half the fun of the mod was encountering another player and then needed to team up to kill the 20 zombies that attacked you because you had to. You can kill each other over the last can of beans later.

I think that's what he was getting at. Pristine weapons should never jam. Damaged weapons, you're lucky if it doesn't explode in your face. A pristine magazine should be rare. But weapons should also require regular cleaning and maintenance or they degrade. Especially if you get them wet or leave them on the ground. Not so much cleaning that it becomes tedious, but enough that it's something that needs to be done regularly. The more those sort of mechanics can be added to the game, the less DayZ becomes "grab an AK and shoot someone in the fact". Do you feel cheated if you rush that bandit in desperation with nothing but a garden hoe, only to find out the gun he was brandishing was completely unusable?

I'm not here to criticize the SA. I recognize it's a WIP and they've done some really great things in terms of expanding the world and what you can do with your character. I've personally taken a bit of a break from DayZ for a couple of reasons - playing some other games, don't want to get burned out before it gets good, no time with new small child and new job. That said, like many people, I started with the Mod 3 years ago. I discovered it on another message board I frequent that described it as a "hard core open world zombie sandbox game where people kill each other for a can of beans and average survival time is 15 minutes." I found some YouTube clips of bandit clans cruising the coast road at night, picking up new spawns, driving them 20 minutes north and then forcing them to fight to the death for meat in a circle of road flares and campfires. One weekend, my wife went home to her parents house, I bought ArmA 2, downloaded the Mod and was immediately hooked. The simplicity of the Mod felt more primal than the SA somehow. When you were hungry, you had to eat. When you were thirsty, you drank. You broke your leg, you couldn't walk. A trip to Cherno or Electro meant almost certain death at the hands of bandits or snipers, but you had to go there to get enough supplies to head north. I recall my fear the first time I saw a helicopter hovering over the battlefield a mile away or saw a car driving towards me. Zombies were a real threat, especially if you drew their attention with gunfire. Or coming across the tell-tale buzzing flies that indicated a dead player (or players) was nearby, not knowing what killed them or how long ago. Or finding a half dozen tents full of enough weapons to invade a small country (not knowing how far away the owners were). The Mod was very much like The Walking Dead in MMO videogame form. Sure, once you knew what you were doing, zombies were less of a threat than armed players...until you got complacent and screwed up and then all of a sudden they weren't. Sure guns and ammo were plentiful, but you needed them for something other than griefing other players. You actually felt like you could go insane from playing too long. Anyhow, my hope is that is what the SA will eventually turn into, but more so. We shall see.

That's fantastic. I can't wait until the hills above Cherno and Elecro look like a Brazilian favela covered on corrugated tin shanties.

I think they plan to do that eventually. But I thought all that stuff was done really well in the Mod (or ArmA II I suppose). You had the HUD which IMHO gave you a better sense of your character's actual health than "I feel hungry". You saw the food/drink/health meters dropping, then flashing. As your health got worse, the color faded like it does now. It also blurred (it might still, but I turned off post-processing because I felt like my character is underwater). Pain caused you to shake uncontrollably. A significant problem when trying to aim. A broken leg meant you could no longer walk. Then meant weighing the option of dragging your character a mile to find morphine or two miles to kill yourself and start over. But yeah. the game should do a better job showing you rather than telling you what's wrong with your character

I think the expectation is the game will turn into a better version of the Mod. You don't need to be "constantly starving and cold". The basic premise of DayZ, however, is that your character has needs that must be met. Health, food, drink and temperature (maybe others). These needs have to be met or your character dies. Kind of like The Sims, but with zombies. As long as you are meeting those needs, you can do whatever you want in the world. Kill zombies, build a camp, restore a classic car, PvP, whatever. In fact, it is having to meet those needs that should drive the action in DayZ. You can PvP all the live long day if you feel like it, but at some point, you need to go find some food or drink so you don't starve. The flip side is maybe you don't want to PvP, but you still need to venture into the cities where all the psychos are killing each other to get the supplies you need to survive alone in the wilderness. Or maybe you fell into a pond to escape from some bandits or whatever, but now you're soaked and need to find dry clothing or build a fire. And PvE doesn't have to be constant starvation and freezing. The whole idea of base building is so you can maintain a somewhat defensible location to shelter from the elements and maintain a larger supply of clothes, food, drink and ammo than you can carry.

I didn't serve in the Great Pan-American Canadian Panamanian War (PanAmCanPanam as I like to call it), but I remember Boy Scout camp in upstate New York being dark as fuck if I happened to forget my flashlight on a moonless night. Let's forget "realism" for a minute. IMHO the spirit of DayZ is that you should need to find light source to see beyond a few yards at night. Part of the fun of the mod was watching bambis running along with their flashlights and road flares attracting bandits and zombies. Or strategically illuminating a own with road flares so you can loot it without having people being 100% sure where you were.

Forget the countryside. Ever been in a city during a blackout? It's pitch black with no lights. Maybe you see the buildings silhouetted against the sky. The whole point of making it pitch black is so you need flashlights, chemlights and road flares.

Seriously. I got so bored picking apples in Cherno I ended up driving my family out to the country to pick apples with my inlaws for real.

I watched some old YouTube videos and I forgot how much fun the zombies were in the Mod. Especially when you accidently called down hundreds of them with an Enfield.

It's relevant in that at 3 million sales, even in alpha DayZ is already in the top 30 or so best selling PC games ever. I doubt it's going to get much more popular, but it has a lot of room to get a whole lot less popular. IOW, by the time they finish it, no one will care.

With what? The mod had .50 cal anti-material rifles like the AS50 that could bring down a helicopter a mile away. Are people going to shoot down a gunship with a handful of pistol rounds? As Mark Darkers said, they had helos in the Mod and it wasn't an issue. Even the 1000 vehicles, dozen helicopters servers, it wasn't like the sky was filled with helicopters Apocalypse Now style. I've found / stole helicopters in the Mod on vanilla servers, and unless you have a clan of a dozen guys guarding a permanent base, it's not all that it's cracked up to be. It is actually tough to see people from the air. Everyone for miles will come running when you come in for a landing. They take forever to fuel.

Even on a full server of 50 people, it's not like you're going to find huge crowds. You can evenly space 50 people like 2 miles apart on this map. I tried some "chop chop" with my ax against two guys I met on the coast road. Melee combat is still pretty weak. it takes so long to wind up and swing, none of us could hit each other.

Not really feeling it. At least, not if you need a Level A hazmat suit to enter some designated death zone. Maybe "soft" contamination like drinking from a well or eating food from a contaminated area will make you sick (and eventually die). Honestly, we don't need Fallout crap like radiation zones or giant mutants. Between zombies, starvation, dehydration, hypo- (and hyper-) thermia, food-borne illnesses, lead poisoning and ladder-itis, I think there probably is already enough in the game to kill you once they get it all up and working.

I don't suppose there is any true "right" answer, but as a player of the Mod, I firmly believe in southern coastal spawn only with a general north/south orientation of the map having better loot the further north you go until you reach remote wilderness. The coast road should be extremely dangerous. It should be a hunting ground for new spawns. If you're lucky enough to grab a weapon at Balota or brave enough to swim to the prison island and you survive looting up in Cherno and Electro, you should then have just enough loot in your pack to survive a hike north through various towns and villages. Eventually, you'll make your way to the military complexes at NWAF or Stary Sober. You can get some real gear there, provided you can outwit the gangs of bandits looking to do the same. My big complaint about the east coast spawns is that you spawn too close to Berezino and the huge new cities they built for the SA. I think it would be a lot better if you had to travel some distance to get there.

Yeah, sometimes I just freak myself out and just hide in a corner for 30 minutes because I just know someone is out there. DayZ is the only game I know where you can spend two hours and nothing happens and still be totally stressed out from playing.

Logging into a nearly empty server so I can loot up in peace and getting killed at NWAF by the only other player on the server!

I disagree. I would love it if DayZ had the ability to set up elaborate Rube Goldberg machines to KOS people for no reason.

I'm in the middle of Cherno on a full server of 50 people and I haven't seen anyone. But I know they're out there. It's unsettling. That's part of the charm of the game. You can't be all "stealth" and "tactical" 100% of the time because the map is so big and it would take you forever to get anywhere. At some point, you're going to get bored or impatient and run down the middle of the street like an idiot or forget to keep watching your back and that's when they'll get you.

If Bohemia Interactive got into the homebuilding business, here is what would happen: * They would provide a high-level plan for completing the bedrooms, kitchen, bathrooms, living room, entertainment room, 3 car garage, in-ground pool with Jacuzzi, etc. Basically everything you could ever want or imagine.. * People would buy the house and move in long before the house is finished. * While living in the un-completed home, you will often get frustrated by things like lights and plumbing not working or working inconsistently, rain leaking through the ceiling, doors falling off their hinges, or objects (including you) randomly falling through the floor. * Whenever you attempt to use the stairs or a ladder, 50% of the time you will break both your legs. * About once a month, the workers will add something. Rather than major structural or utilities improvements, you well get six new types of toilets. They will be installed in every single room. * For every major structural improvement added, some other major system will stop working. * Your neighbors will randomly come over and break all your shit for no reason. * 2/3 of the way through, they will decide to rebuild the house using a different building material. * The head contractor will leave halfway through the project to go build a different house. * Occasionally the entire house will explode for no reason. Construction will need to start from scratch. * Whenever you complain, all the other homeowners in identical houses in the subdivision will yell at you that you agreed to purchase an uncompleted house in and you should be happy that you get to live in it at all since Del Alpha Vista is the greatest neighborhood ever.

Not really a bug, but kind of speaks to gameplay. I stumbled across another player in the Balota baracks. I had an ax and he had some sort of rifle. For awhile we are at a standoff as he can't leave the barracks without getting axed coming out the door, but I can't go up the stairs without getting my head blown off. I forget how exactly, but he manages to get past me on to the tarmac. I've developed a slow leak due to either a zombie strike or a grazing shot. Also there is an agroed zombie in the mix. Anyhow, I determine that due to the open ground, the best approach is to try to rush the rifleman rather than give him the advantage of distance and open ground. I run at him while side-stepping which works like it's supposed to. I'm closing the distance but he can't track the sideways movement through his scope at the relatively short range. I get right on him, but the frustrating part is I can't swing the ax fast enough to strike him. So for a good ten minutes, we are locked together with me running after him swinging the ax in slow motion with him unable to stop and fire. Also a zombie running around tormenting us. Because of my injury, I had to disengage and try and break for cover to bandage which is where he ultimately killed me. But it was frustrating not being able to hit a moving target with an ax at point blank range.

About the same. But they've added hockey sticks and pink derringer pistols.