So I've had enough. I think you should know the reasons. Maybe you can feed them into improvements to the game. Close quarter combat is bugged, flawed and weak. - Shouldn't have to "reload" a melee weapon. It makes absolutely no sense. - There should at least be some support for unarmed combat. - There needs to be more melee weapons. - There needs to be more silent weapons. Crossbow bolts should be recoverable. - Zombies attack by having a fit in front of you. Usually this has no effect. Sometimes you'll fall unconcious. Sometimes you'll die instantly. It's all too random. How can I defend against random? Underlying all this there's a crucial problem. The ARMA 2 engine is a warfare simulator. The vast majority of this warfare takes place using ranged weapons. But zombies attack with melee (ie fists/claws). The ARMA 2 engine doesn't seem to be up to the job of "simulating" close quarter combat, which makes sense really, that's not what it was designed to do. The blood system is flawed. I'm sure that a lot of the other bugs influence this. Maybe once they're ironed out the blood system will become more acceptable. Backpacks are bugged and clunky. Why do I have to "open" a backpack to see what's in it? Just show me all the slots I have available. Make it dynamic based on the container type. Because you can't store a weapon in the backpack whgen you first spawn, and because you can't (easily) keep an axe and a gun at the same time, I find that my first objective is to find a backpack that's large enough to hold a gun. This seems like something I shouldn't be doing. The survival element is flawed/pointless. I've never once needed to build a fire and cook meat. And I've never once found all the parts needed to do this. If this (building fires and cooking) is a priority then it should be easier to find the resources to do it, and there should be more pressure to do it (ie less tinned food). Night isn't worth bothering with. It really isn't. Unless you have night vision goggles. In which case, why bother? If you like playing at night but your favourite server insists on playing daylight hours then simply turn off your monitor for the same realistic effect. Hackers. They really spoil a server. This isn't solely limited to DayZ, ARMA 2 has the same problem, but when you've spent a few days trying to build a character, only to have some l33t haxor explose the whole map, it kind of sucks. There should be more vehicles. I know this is dependent on the server and I know clans often horde vehicles for themselves. Still I've never played on a server and been overwhelmed by the availability of vehicles. There's no purpose to the game. Yeah yeah I know. Before you hit the flame key I know it's an open sandbox game. Unfortunately, because there's nothing really to do, it becomes a crude capitalism simulator. People become bandits because there's nothing to do and they take your stuff because only objects have value. There isn't the sense of cooperation you get in Left For Dead where you really feel as though you need to band together to survive the zombie horde. In this game you just need to band together so you can steal other peoples stuff. I suppose an interesting question to ask would be: Why would I want to kill zombies (other than "Aaargh get it off me")? Perhaps they could have a value that's tradable. Perhaps they could destroy player built defenses. Maybe zombies need to survive somehow too, eg capture a town, so there's actualy conflict between players needing to hold a town and zombies needing to hold a town. Who knows. Oh and I don't know if i'm winning, or if another player is a good player. Some engrossing game statistics would be good. A lot of the replies will probably be in the form of "dude it's a military simulator, it's ultra realistic, If you don't like it go back to Call Of Duty". Hmm. Well the game already takes many short cuts, such as allowing people to magically draw on my map even though they're thousands of miles away. Or telling me what town I'm in at the start. Or letting me open a tin of food without a tin opener. Or letting me fire weapons and drive vehicles that I've probably never been trained on. The point is you shouldn't let realism get in the way of fun. This should apply doubly so in a zombie game. Which, lets be honest, is just a bit of fun. Oh I like the fact that you can transfer characters between servers. This is pretty awesome. Anyway. I sound like a Debbie Downer and I don't want to. DayZ is a really original idea and I'd love to see it evolve into something more playable.
