Riem

-Twiddles thumbs-

So, was perusing the forums, had a minor idea strike me when visiting some threads about cars and how rare they are. It makes sense, as most people would have attempted to turn tail and flee in their vehicles once the outbreak started, and, most working cars since the initial wave of panic would have been dismantled or taken as well. But, obviously, that wouldn't work so very well, now would it? Not with everyone trying to crowd the highway all at once. We've seen it in countless zombie movies and games, where there are highways just utterly packed with stuck cars, all with nice little morsels stuck in their cars until the zombie can openers get there. Ahem. So my suggestion is this: Have a large stretch of highway packed with stuck cars. I'm not suggesting any of these cars be drivable, right off the spot. They should have to be repaired, as they would most likely have all been picked apart by scavengers. If we had that many immediately drivable cars spawn at once, well, Twisted Metal: DayZ, anyone? There should be little to none in the way of military or weaponized vehicles. They would have been the very first to go, either to scavengers or the military that would have tried to establish a presence, and as such would not be still at the highway. This is for both realism and practical gameplay reasons. What I am suggesting is it would be just one different area to explore, filled with your typical, shambling zeds, rife with spots to be picked off by bandits, and ample spawns of loot from inside the cars and around them. There could be many many dead bodies inside and beside vehicles, as I'm sure there would have been many dying inside their cars. Also, as a fun and completely different scenario, perhaps someone infected could be trapped in a car, and if you're not paying attention, they could jump out and attack you. The area itself should have rows of cars all stuck as if lunch hour had just struck in a major city. Lunch hour for zombies anyway. Plenty of wrecks would break up the monotony of rows of vehicles. There should be little to none buildings around, as this was a highway, not an apartment row. Perhaps some semi trailers, both capsized and still upright, could be still entered, and have loot spawns. It would also be the spot where you find the most vehicle parts in the game. Now, yes, most parts would already have been scavenged, and it should reflect that, with some cars stripped to the frames, others on cinder blocks, etc. But there is a likelihood that some of the cars weren't deemed good enough to loot, or they were just missed. I'm suggesting over fifty cars here at the minimum. Even a large group would be hard pressed to need that many car parts. You would also be able to loot some fuel from the cars, but this would be in very small quantities. Those cars would have idled there forever, and likely would have been drained for the most part by people way back when. Additional Ideas: Addetter has suggested as an alternative, should there not be space in the new map for it, or even a companion, to have a large overpass type stretch of highway that spans a small gap of the ocean, perhaps leading to an island out in the ocean, if it is still included. You can read posts numbers 34 and 35 for more details and a small representation of the idea. Ruins: With the ability to create bases for persistent use, I think it would be great for them to slowly fall into disrepair, making it necessary to continually gather supplies to fix up barricades, expand and reinforce the base, and add features to it. The tedium and effort it would require would certainly balance out the game-changing benefits that bases would provide. It should happen more quickly when a player is around, as a constant, quick decay would be somewhat heavy handed towards non-active players. But it should still happen, albeit on a slower rate. The logic for this is that your bases aren't going to be built with heavy equipment and the necessary supplies to make them last, and while in your base it would make sense that the zeds are still trying to get in. They'd tear down boards, probably claw at anything they could, and generally make a mess of things, while trying to get at a player within the base. When the player isn't there, or able to be sensed by the zeds, then they'd leave, more than likely. If buildings reach a critical point where it can't remain standing, it should fall over, or a wall should cave in, the roof collapses, you get the idea. I'd love to be able to find weapons lockers in the remains of a base, stock up on food from this place's personal stash, water, and other supplies. Some supplies and weaponry could be damaged from the collapse as well, ensuring that some of the item tables are taken off of the server, if only until someone finds the exact item in a new spawn. Collapsed buildings also should be somewhat repairable, and could provide a decent alternative to finding, supplying, and building your own base. --- Anywho. Positive and negative thoughts are always welcome, and suggestions to build onto this would be appreciated. As suggestions are in no short supply, to avoid a massive wall of update text, I have hidden it via spoiler tags for your eye's pleasure. I do suggest reading them, as they do contribute much to what could be a very fun site. Edited with a few new area suggestions. And bumped for new input from fresh eyes. Also necro'd from three months deep. Dear lawd.

I think this would fit, I would even keep the rain in the background.

I have heard many great things on Deadlight. I take it that the game's good?

Health and blood are going to be separate things in standalone, if I've remembered the list of changes correctly. If you changed this to 'health lost' from 'blood lost' from hunger/thirst, then this would be a solid suggestion, if already in the works, as I believe it to be.

Because there are new, but similar, suggestions to be had, and it is always better to post in an existing thread over creating a new one.

Grave'd. Also a new suggestion with a few more incoming when I return from a nap.

Yes. Let's take a game designed for pc specs, and layout, then move it to a limiting platform. Genius.

Only if I can use them as thermal blankets, ala Tauntaun! Cough. I mean, sure! Let's have horses to ride in the game. The only thing I can bring up to object to this is that I'm not sure many horses would have stayed around after the world went to pot. So if they are included they should be found in the wild and might not be completely approachable at first.

How is this a suggestion? Also, patience patience. This sort of rushed 'i want it now' mentality spawned WarZ.

Now now, children. Keep it civil.

This is exactly why we don't want it. We don't want to be able to know if people are near villages or buildings. We don't want the tactical advantage offered to anyone in knowing how much blood they have, exactly. You shouldn't have a big green stats board that shows you all these things.

Wait. We have ambient music?

There should be different levels of 'interest' provoked by different guns. A suppressed pistol firing subsonic rounds would garner a lot less attention than a high powered rifle.

Honestly I'm surprised I haven't heard of a hunting mod for Arma II as well, but I'm betting there's one out there. It would however be nice to be able to find plants you could harvest, and some of them could be poisonous unless prepared correctly, or just poisonous in general. Maybe a book could be added in game that would have pictures of what was safe, what was not, etc? When I go out mushrooming I never leave my book at home. And I'm sure I don't have to detail what many mushrooms can do to you if you eat them.

I will be throwing crippled players in so that they could beg for morphine and beans, and when they die they can stink you out. Bonus, any player i throw becomes instantly crippled upon impact.

I require catapults so that I might siege these fortifications. And wenches.

Cue 'I can see clearly now,' anyone? In rebuttal, my main complaint on giving bandit type players a sort of penalty mechanic flies in the face of DayZ being about it being what you want it to be, and playing it how you want to. I don't want to see players choosing to cooperate because shooting them makes them hear noises or get the shakes, or any of the various other suggestions that have been offered up. I want to see them team up because the landscape and the zeds are harsh and unforgiving. I want to see visual cues in how that character moves, how he looks, what he looks like he's doing. I want to have to interpret for myself whether he's a bandit or not. Subtle visual cues need to be how the bandits are recognized from survivors or heroes. It should be left up to each player to decide the course of each encounter, and the outcome. Not the game engine. No benefits to any playstyle, and no disadvantages. You get killed by a bandit? Kill them back. Get a group together, hunt them down. Dance and piss on their corpse! I don't care! As for what I said earlier about it being harder to survive, those aren't changes to the core concepts of the game, they're going beyond the limitations of DayZ as a mod, and making it into the vision Rocket had. It IS going to be harder to find the high powered sniper rifles bandits are using to kill people with, and it is going to be harder to find ammunition, weapons, food. Zeds are going to make it more difficult, and the whole system's going to feel new and fresh and exciting. Let the standalone come, then we'll see what needs to be addressed, first. I have a feeling once the hacking/duping is fixed, the game itself is harder, and the abundance of things to do will be increased, that we'll not see so much killing for the sake of killing.

There's no easy way to fix the way players interact with each other, and truthfully there shouldn't be attempts to do so. DayZ is how you interpret it. You want to sit on a hill and take out a player who wasn't even aware you were there? That's your prerogative. But I don't want to see those players just start to have psychological trauma. Or any other mechanic in game that facilitates one style of play over the other. With the SA version going to have its multiple fixes, I'm fairly sure people who start to shoot others just for the hell of it are going to find themselves wanting for a lot of things. Ammunition being one of them. And let's not forget it's not the game making you kill others for fun. Changing the game won't change deathmatching, but making you actually need to conserve your ammo, making the zeds harder, making the survival aspect harder in itself, will end a lot of the shooting for thrills.

I like this. It would add a possible depth to a server that makes being a bandit that much more impacting. Possibly, there could also be some added effects to the timer getting closer to zero. More zeds could start to spawn, in more concentrated numbers. The spawns for loot could start to become smaller, making items harder to find. Etc, etc. I do agree that this should be a server setting though, and it would be massive hackbait.

Military simulator implies you're simulating military activities. DayZ is currently a mod of a military simulator, and we should, with the standalone version, move towards thinking about making it more of a survival sim. Also, I'd like to see crudely drawn and bloodstained maps.

I would not object to seeing a couple civilian airplanes being added. Chernarus might have a strong agricultural community, and it would be amazing to find a crop duster in a barn. I'd much rather see those than military helicopters or jet aircraft. Examples would be the 'Hedgehog' Istra Erzhik. The Sukhoi SU-38L is another agricultural aircraft common to Russia. Another kind of plane I'd like to see is a freight plane, useful for loading all types of different things into, be they small vehicles, massive amounts of loot, bodies. Ahem. You get the idea. The Sukhoi SU-80 wouldn't be too uncommon for Russia

And I'm going to find most of these in Post-Soviet Russia why, exactly?

No, if I were going for total realism I'd actually go outside and make my skin a few shades darker from sunlight exposure. The health system is being reworked in the SA version, and the current one we have is a limitation of what a mod can do. Stamina and spawns are ALSO being fixed. So your arguments are rather silly. And even if you say that you want to see the this just for the mod, I'm fairly sure the majority of the community who will be working on it while we wait for the standalone will disagree with you. Not because of realism, mind you. I suppose you could say you could imagine this bright green menu in your mind showing your current health and other levels. But because of atmosphere. I like DayZ because playing it immerses you into this bleak little landscape where just about everything is out to kill you. And any moment some ill-intended sniper rifle bullet or a bad game of tag with a zed could end your playing. So no, I don't want this big, clunky pile of stats showing up in the corner of my screen.

There's a point where you want to play the game the way you want to, and there's a point where you suggest something that clashes with the core concept of the game. DayZ is not so much a game as it is a simulation of survival. You don't have this little green menu popping up in your head showing the exact quantity of blood you have, or how 'nice' of a person you are. So no, I'm glad it's gone.