bfisher

I played a bit yesterday after taking a long break from DayZ and now that you mention it, I did hear something like what you described. It sounded not quite like thunder and not quite like something trying to smash the door of the building I was in.

By the same token, I get freaked out whenever I'm jogging along the Hudson River past the Lincoln Tunnel ventilation building because the structure and the cliffs behind it reminds me of the coast of Chernerus (near Solnichniy I think). https://www.google.com/maps/search/weehawken+lincoln+tunnel+ventilation+building/@40.7645139,-74.0196602,34a,35y,359.62h,78.98t/data=!3m1!1e3?hl=en

Maybe. I haven't explored the modded servers all that much. I want to like it. I think it's a great idea for a game. And every now and then I have a gaming experience with DayZ where I "get it". Even wandering the wilderness alone for long stretches is part of the experience. But then sometimes when I'm spending 30 minutes running along the coast in the no-mans land between major cities, not encountering anyone or anything, I think my time might be better spent going outside for an actual walk.

You may be right. I simply don't have hundreds of hours to devote to a game like Dayz and I don't think you can really enjoy DayZ unless you can devote hundreds of hours to it. I don't want it to be Call of Duty or some Battle Royale, but the game still feels very empty and unfinished to me. Like they are adding broken bones, but other than walking off a rooftop, there doesn't seem to be a whole lot in there to break them.

The Mod was a good (but flawed) Proof of Concept that came out almost a decade ago (2012). I'm curious what is the current state of DayZ (PC)? Is there still a sizable community? Is it fragmented across all sorts of custom moded servers? Is the game stable? How's the player interaction? PvE? PvP? Every few months I log in to check out how things are going. But to be honest, it kind of feels like not much has changed over eight years. Walking from town to town, picking up random loot. Avoid some stupid zombies. Once in a blue moon encounter another player and exchange unpleasantries. Basically I play for a couple hours, get bored and go do something else. Walking through the woods, hearing distant gunfire and picking apples, the game feels less like a "hardcore zombie apocalypse survival game" and more like a "visiting my in-laws in Pennsylvania simulator".

I'm just impressed you actually encounter other players.

https://www.pcgamer.com/dayz-review/?ns_campaign=article-feed&ns_mchannel=ref&ns_source=steam&ns_linkname=0&ns_fee=0 "February, 2013. Barack Obama is in the White House. ‘Thrift Shop’ by Macklemore and Ryan Lewis is topping the charts. The Harlem Shake is taking the internet by storm." So I played a bit after 1.0 went live. It was an ok experience. Spawned in. Got into a fist fight with some jerk. Kicked his ass. Met some guys and wandered around the map for an hour or so. Honestly though, after 5 years and around 350 hours of play, I'm just kind of bored of DayZ. There just isn't that overwhelming sense of dread about being sniped or accidently agroing a whole city full of zombies. I don't know. For me, the SA has never really captured that same sense of impending death as the Mod did all those years ago. I'm just kind of disappointed at this point.

I don't know if waterfall is completely obsolete. But as you say, it is a sequential, relatively rigid approach to software building - Usually some variation of Plan, Design, Build, Test, Validate, Release. The main problem is that you often don't know what you don't know in the Plan and Design phase and it's prohibitively expensive to find out. That uncertainty often doesn't manifest itself until Testing and Validation, often requiring major expensive rework. Stress tends to build midway through the project as deadlines slip and project managers push their teams to compress the work so they can deliver to the original milestones. Projects often go off the rails at the end where you end up with this long tail of bugfixing and scope changes. Then it's just developers working feverishly to try to make everything just work. (sound like anyone we know?) Agile tries to mitigate this by delivering complete modules of software at regular intervals or "sprints". It's not just a "philosophy". It requires functionality to be built and created in a very modular and self contained way so that there is minimal rework. If DayZ were delivered using an Agile methodology, I would expect that the first release would be a relatively stable, if empty world. Each week (or whatever the sprint lengths are), I would expect to see something new added. Some weeks it might just be bug fixes. Other weeks, it might be "ground vehicles" or a new gun.

Ehhhh...fine-ish

I tried SCUM today. DayZ definitely has some competition in the "running around a large empty map doing fuck-all" genre. After an hour of gameplay I can proudly say I achieved the following: Found a crowbar I hope to use as a weapon someday. Ate a cucumber Destroyed someone's lean-to I also experienced a moment of intensity when some sort of flying drone camera stopped to look at me. Developers don't seem to realize the clock starts ticking as soon they release their "early access alpha". I've put 300+ hours into the Standalone. Certainly not as much as some people, but certainly more than a lot of people put into any game. I'm starting to feel like "early access" is really just a scam to sell people on the possibilities of what a game MIGHT become, without actually creating it.

And then he went on to make over eight hours of Hobbit movies.

Maybe. I just don't think DayZ is going to "blow up" again like it did when the Mod first came out 4 years or so ago. AFAIK, there was never anything like that. Since then, there have been all sorts of similar zombie survival games with various degrees "sandboxedness" and success (or even completeness) (H1Z1, State of Decay, Dying Light, Dead Rising 4, Dead Matter, Dead Island, etc), survival games like The Forest and The Long Dark, Rust is in there somewhere and "battle royale" games like PUBG and Fortnight.

At some point, I would consider their failure to deliver on the promised gold to be what is commonly known as a "scam". Forgetting metaphors here and without discussing the quality of the standalone, the reality is that pretty much anyone who has or had interest in playing DayZ at some point has probably played the standalone. They may have even played it for a long time or are still playing it. But people don't play a game forever. Under the best of circumstances, these sort of games go through a cycle where they get a big hit of players in the beginning, player count slowly increases until it peaks and then slowly wanes as players lose interest and move on to other games. Once the player count drops below a critical mass, a multiplayer game becomes for all intents and purposes unplayable. The point being, by the time DayZ is released (assuming it ever is), most people who were interested will probably have moved on and simply won't care.

Almost...

I think what the game play loop is "supposed" to look like is this. You start on the beach with minimal gear a bit hungry and thirsty. You then spend a lot of time picking your way around a mostly empty, but picturesque wilderness and scattered towns looking for stuff to help you survive. Much of it will be junk. Some of it will be junk that helps you survive a bit longer. Like something you can fashion into a rope or bandages or a weapon marginally better than bare fists. Every so often you find something super-useful like a hunting rifle or large backpack. If you're really lucky, you find some military grade shit. The entire time, you have to be mindful of zombies, making every excursion a bit of a risk/benefit analysis. Ideally you get into a routine of explore, finding food/water, preparing it and repeat. And every so often, you encounter another player or players, which raises the possibilities of either cooperation or a brief firefight that sends you back to the beach. I suspect that actual game play loop is wandering around stuffing your face with apples and wearing track suits until some idiot punches you in the head.

No point getting into the "DayZ is dead!" vs "it's Alpha!" debate again. I'll check back once I hear it's finished.

DayZ is a bit more brutal than real life I think. There are no consequences in DayZ and few incentives to team up long term. I think in an actual post-apocalyptic scenario, few people who go it alone KoSing everyone they came across would last long. There is safety, companionship and other support in numbers. You need people to watch your back while you sleep. Or complement skills you don't have. Plus I've found that there are enough players who want more than KoS Battlegrounds play that I've had some decent interactions once we've managed to get beyond the "do I murder this fool before he kills me" stage.

I've said this before, but I feel like DayZ is closer to that movie The Crazies than a traditional zombie film. What I mean is that all the other human players are really the ones infected by the virus and it's turned them all into homicidal lunatics.

As a long-time player of DayZ, I feel like the ability to spawn with your friends or anywhere besides "random" is against the spirit of what DayZ is about. You should start each game in the role of someone who just washed up on a beach with no idea where they are or where their friends might be. You need to SURVIVE long enough to meet up with your friends before you earn the right to go skipping tra-la-la with them through Cherno. It also adds to the "real consequences" aspect of the game if dying means a 40 minute walk to reunite with your pals. But maybe that's just me. IMHO what makes DayZ different is that it is long periods of almost boredom dealing with the grind of survival, punctuated by moments of shear terror, followed with either celebration or throwing your keyboard in frustration. There are plenty of other games out there for just spawning in with your team and going at it.

Sounds encouraging. Did you get a sense for the survival mechanics (food, thirst, body temp, etc)?

You cared enough to use one of your 16 posts on this message board.

I did log on last night, but given the low traffic on any server, it seems like Bohemia has made a great "last man on earth" simulator.

For the record, my wife and I have actually gotten married and produced two actual children since the SA was originally released. My dream is that someday their children will get to play a finished version of DayZ.

In the mod a person's name used to appear above their character. Now the problem with this mechanic was that it was visible for hundreds of meters, even if the person was hidden. But I wouldn't mind having it in the Standalone at a range of like 10 meters. Wearing a facemask, bandana, balaclava, helmet or other concealment would disable this.