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So you have wandered into this DayZ mod and you want to know more about it? Well, I will tell you what I can. Keep in mind this is from my own perspective and is only an opinion. The Good Big open world environment, lots of items and weapons, post apocalyptic zombies (who doesn’t like zombies?), vehicles, an interesting hunger/thirst system. The Bad Incredibly clunky controls, All in-game signs are written in Russian, almost no character customization (everybody looks almost exactly the same), a massive population of hackers/cheaters, no persistent character advancement, very anti-social community. The Review Over the last few weeks a number of friends started playing this game mod en-masse. They seemed to be enjoying it. So I asked them some questions about the game and decided to pick it up so I could play with them. I have played my fair share of games over the years, although I knew a few of the problems with this title before buying, I felt I could manage. The first major hurdle was learning the control scheme. I must say that these are some of the worst and most clunky shooter controls I have ever learned. The resident evil series remains on top of the list for clunky controls, but only barely. DayZ tries to be a first person shooter with standard controls. But they are very complex and half the time do not function properly. These controls are so clunky that I could write an entire page describing how bad they are. As “The Angry Video Game Nerd” would say, they are bad – like Dark Castle Bad. If you haven’t played it, you have no idea how shitty these controls are. Aiming is nearly impossible, and picking up items is like attempting to pick up a melting ice cube with only your elbows. And for the love of god – don’t try to climb ladders, you have a good chance of just falling off and breaking your legs. Speaking of broken legs. Everything can break your leg. You can trip over a fence and break your leg. Yes I just said that. Walk up to a fence, press the proper key to step ever-so-slowly over it, and viola~! Your leg is now broken and you are bleeding out on the ground. Opening a door is even worse, if you are standing in the wrong spot when you open it, the door will hit you, possibly glitching you inside a building, which will break your leg, wound you, and possibly knock you out. Zombies hitting you can also break bones far too easily. The zombie runs up, hits you once on the chest, you fall down with a broken leg, bleeding, and knocked unconscious, the zombie then chews on your unconscious broken body till you die. Zombies also zig zag all over the place, randomly teleport short distances, or glitch through walls doors and buildings. This makes zombies quite difficult to kill without getting hit and very possibly giving you a broken leg and knocking you out in a single blow. Fun times. Then there are travel times. Think incredibly long. If you remember Oblivion you may be familiar with extremely large game maps, DayZ is roughly equivalent in size and a lot more boring. So you start the game, it randomly drops you in a starting area, and you decide to go meet up with your friends. Expect to spend the next hour (or possibly two!) running across the landscape just to reach their location. There is no fast travel system of any sort. And if you happen to be killed, expect to start all over again. This leads to my next point. Nothing is persistent in regards to your character. If you die, everything you own is dropped on the ground, anyone can take everything you had, and there are no sort of learned character skills which can be built up as you progress. This encourages players to simply kill each other to quickly obtain items and equipment. Expect to start at square one with a fresh character for most of your DayZ experience. Then there are the hackers. Oh yes. This game has a massive amount of Hackers and Cheaters. Almost always their entire goal is to ruin your day. I had heard a horror story of one from one of my friends before I started. He had a run-in with a cheater who teleported him out into an endless flat plain and left him there. He could not die, he sat there in game for literally 4 hours real time till his character eventually starved to death – finally allowing him to start playing again. I figured it could not be too bad, the game designers must be aware of the hacking and be actively trying to stop it right? Not so. As it turns out, DayZ is incredibly easy to hack and has been since its inception – just google 'Arma II ***/hacks' if you want and find out. The game has an anti-cheat system installed, but it obviously does not work. This leads to players with ultimate equipment, teleporting around, killing everyone, modifying the game world, spawning vehicles, items, and generally abusing other players in an effort to get their twisted jollies. Finally I should address the community. This games 'end-game' seems to be purely designed around fighting other players. It has a veneer coating in the form of a large, post apocalyptic world. Initially the goal seems to be survive and gather items to perpetuate your survival. But beyond that there is absolutely no goal. No quests, no storyline, no faction groups to align or fight against, no area to run from or get to -- Just you and some other players in a large zombie infested game map. Someone I know summed it up for me in a rather disturbing way, he said; “other survivors are like item filled meat bags”. The idea being – to simply kill them and take their stuff. Most people playing this game seem to regard this as their goal. Since you can’t trust anyone else, it is easier to simply shoot everything on sight – making this game Call Of Duty with zombies. It also creates an incredibly anti-social environment for new players. Since the world is full of cheaters, hackers, and people who get their jollies from generally abusing and hurting others. There are also a surprising number of people who do not care about items, they just get a sniper rifle, sit up in some well-traveled area, and shoot as many people as they can. Now don ‘t take this the wrong way, I completely understand what makes games centered around PvP fun. I just do not think it fits in a game where most players are just trying to survive against hordes of zombies. This is not some sort of ‘Left 4 Dead’ where some players are zombies and others are real players, This is purely real live players vs ai controlled zombies initially. It is player choice which causes people to attack each other – and often it is over petty items. I read a post a while ago where a player gleefully described shooting someone simply to get their matches. He could just have easily found his own matches, or shared the fire with the strangers, or teamed up with them until he found his own. But instead he chose to kill these random strangers for a pack of matches… I still feel sickened and disturbed by his actions. And this is common behavior! It seems it is not enough that most people in this game world are dead already, the survivors feel this need to kill each other rather than working together. Synopsis This is DayZ. The game rewards those who hurt others. There is no punishment for harmful behavior. Turning the game into an incredibly antisocial environment. When combined with the prevalence of hacking, amazingly clunky controls, a written in-game language which most of the world can not speak, a very glitchy game world, bugged zombies, glitchy buildings, and killer doors, a complete lack of character advancement, no storyline/factions/quests. There is very little reason to play this game. So why did I try to play it for the last week? Three reasons. I enjoy games in a post apocalyptic setting. I had a number of friends playing it. I could not return it and get my money back. However I can no longer justify playing it for these reasons. So I felt it was time to post a bit about my experiences and shelve this title. If you are a player looking for good post apocalyptic games, check out the following titles: Fallout 3, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Call of Pripyat, Id Software's RAGE, Wasteland, Metro 2033, or maybe even Borderlands 1 or Borderlands 2. For games due out in the future, keep an eye on Survarium (a free-to-play game made by the same people who made the excellent STALKER series), and Metro Last Light - both due out in 2013. But stay far away from DayZ.

***First Issue*** So I have been listening to my friends playing this mod for the last few days. It sounded like they were having fun. I asked them about the game and decided to purchase arma ii specifically so I could play with them and help them out. So we foraged around, found some tents, finally got our base established way out in the mountains. And when I say out, I mean Waaaay out! It takes nearly 20 minutes of running through complete wilderness (absolutely nothing there, on the edge of the map), from the nearest town. So we travel out there, pitch our tents (we found two tents luckily over 4 days and many many untold hours of play). And we are gathered around getting things together, sorting inventory etc. Then suddenly a bandit player appears literally right next to us. There is literally no way he could have snuck up on us, and he kills us all from 2 feet away with his high powered semi automatic scoped sniper rifle with a huge box clip of ammo. It kills us all in one shot. I die, I respawn, I complain that there is a guy teleporting around killing people in general chat, I see a huge list of people die in quick succession while I am typing. And just when I get my complaint out, the SAME GUY! with the same equipment, teleports next to me again and kills me again! I'm sorry but this is complete crap. I can understand that there may be crazies in the world. People who just go around playing this like unreal tournament and killing others randomly for literally no reason other than just plain killing. But cheating to do it is what makes it unacceptable. This needs to be stopped or you will bleed players at a massive rate. No one will want to play a game where people break the rules and teleport around killing people with their hacked weapons and equipment. ***Second issue*** This game plays fairly well. But at the moment there is no mechanic in the game to stop people from playing this like they are playing any other first person shooter. This is a game about a zombie apocalypse, most people would not just run around willy-nilly shooting each other when there are massive numbers of zombies and an incredibly few number of people still alive to work with. Sure there would be the occasional psycho, but most people are not just going to start shooting everyone they meet, not if they wanted to survive very long. I don't care who someone is, in order to survive over the long-term you need friends. This would be reflected in that with 'real life' - you only get one. If the game could be set up so if a person died once, they would lose the ability to play the game ever again, that would appropriately reflect the harsh realities of a zombie apocalypse. However because a player has infinite respawns, killing others is turned into a quick and easy way to advance your own standing. This destroys any possibility of larger conflicts between groups because most people will be avoiding others because there is a good chance that person will simply kill you and take your equipment. This leads to people who mostly only want to play for a quick-fix, and destroys the environment for those long term players who take the game seriously. When there are many people just running around and kiling people without any penalty creates an environment where new players are also going to be easily discouraged, they have no reason to try building up their equipment if they lose it all every hour or two. New players are not likely to try working in any sort of groups which destroys the possibilities of any sort of large scale conflicts from ever taking place. I suggest some sort of mechanic which allows a player at some point to choose a faction or a side. Give each side various bonuses to encourage people to join. Perhaps a base of operations where they can store items and build up their available equipment. Have there be some sort of penalty for attacking players in the same faction. Or perhaps give players an option to 'opt-out' of pvp entirely. The world can be dangerous enough with AI enemies to fight. Put some lasting character bonuses into effect, so even after dying - a player can earn things which can never be taken away from his/her character. This could be in the form of skills, such as running slightly faster, carrying slightly more, gaining more endurance to resist the effects of thirst, hunger, or bleeding. Perhaps give them something which increases their stealth skill such as the ability to move without creating so much noise. The meta-game, where players earn bonuses to their characters which do not vanish on every death - is going to be what draws people back to this game. Otherwise it is simply a larger version of most every other FPS out there, and we may as well be playing those instead.

Oh i am used to alpha type products. Its the rampant and blatant cheating which really turned me off to the game here. If that can be resolved at some point, I will probably try it out again. Of course the alpha's I have been involved in previously were closed alphas. A small group of trusted testers striving to make a better product. Not open with many thousands of people like this is. I am able to cope with bugs, glitches, clunky controls, and broken items. But massive numbers of players cheating is beyond what I am willing to endure in a game.

Well I am a new player - and this experience has caused the game to bleed 'me'. There is a good chance I will not be playing the game very much - if at all in the future because of this issue. It just is not worth my time. There are plenty of other games out there which do not have these problems. I will simply go play them instead. I simply felt that it might be helpful if the people in charge of this game knew what was going on. And while i'm at it, there is a good chance if anyone asks me about my experience with this game, I will suggest they avoid it because of these issues. And turn them to other games instead.