oompah

I know a good deal about software coding, my company is small but we serve globally. I don't know anything about game design or working on larger teams. I am sure it's a massive undertaking. I still can't believe the level of low-sophistication level bugs that are into this game 3+ years later. Take all other arguments aside. I can see there are plenty of cool, complicated meta game components that are working, but after three years I still break a leg walking, can't climb stairs, load up to see a 1985-like graphic display. I guess I am just talking out loud but how do those things get missed in the QA phase? From what I understand there are lots of other low-level bugs still floating around, it boggles my small mind...

well I think the ladder issue isn't so much that I object to the game rule being "a player can not carry a gun in his hand while climbing down a ladder". I believe the "game" tries to put the gun into an inventory slot and when one doesn't exist it puts it back in the deer stand, pretty derpy logic, but that's just my opinion. To add on that the animation very elegantly shows the gun in my hand while climbing down the ladder, the animation actually looked good. So the devs went to the effort of showing a smooth, good looking image of the gun in my hand but then magically removed it because i didn't have enough inventory slots to hold it after i climbed down. This mismatch should have been found years ago, at least I think it's fair to think that. I know Dayz is a big undertaking and that lots of complicated things do work, it just makes me scratch my head when i still see so many basic things not working.

I didn't have a broken leg when I couldn't climb the fire station steps. I was full health just spawned in. to your point about climbing a ladder with a gun in hand or as someone else mentioned using a knife to gather sticks... well come on now, if you want to get literal and treat this game as a real life sim you don't think in real life I could carry a pistol down an 8 foot ladder? Or if magic sticks fixed a broken leg I couldn't just rip a branch off of a tree with my bare hands. the point of post has also been a simple one: how can such fundamental things still be broken 3 + years into development

my PC is a standard rig with some higher end stuff: i-7 cpu nvidia 770 card - 32 GB ram, win 7 pro, SSD HD I have loads of games and apps, the only one I have ever seen wig out the graphics settings and so regularly is DayZ SA. It's not a deal breaker for me because I enjoy the game. My point has just been how can such glaring core issues still be so common 3 + years along the dev cycle.

vaulting didn't work I tried it, nothing happened, I attempting vaulting away from the stairs and it worked, so vaulting was working in general just not at the steps. Oh I understand there are work arounds; if I handed off a program to a customer and told them "I know it looks bad in your browser here are a list of work-arounds" I wouldn't have a job It's a cardinal sin to have the first interaction with a product be a mess. It's hard to understand why Bohemia wouldn't want to ensure the opening 5 minutes of gameplay are smooth and user friendly. The issue with the video settings being completely screwed up has been a recurring theme for me. I check back on dayz every 4-6 months and it seems more often that not the first thing I am greeted with is this mess.

yea I mean to each his own on game play decisions like how rare should useful items be. That's subjective. I don't have a whole lot of free time to game in my life, so searching 4 hours to find a banana isn't that appealing to me, but I get it, DayZ SA probably isn't for me. The bigger point I was making though is how could such visibly broken things pass the most simple QA process? Things like the deer stand issue, the non climbable ladder is the fire station, the stuck elk animation, the wonky video settings, the broken leg from walking issue etc...

it wasn't that I wasn't able to get my video settings set - it was that when the game launched it was defaulted to 600x480 and was so blurry I felt like Mr. McGoo. Some draw distance setting was set to 75%, my UI ratio was set 1 to 1 i have a modern PC with a fairly high end vid card, why wouldn't my video default to my native windows resolution at a minimum, with my HUD a more natural 4:3 or 16:9 ratio? Things like that after 3 years still don't work? I might expect that after 6 months of dev time or prior to an EA release. These are pretty simple oddly broken items that were visible as soon as I started to try to play. I am a programmers, i write business software for a living. I assume coding a game like Dayz is a massive undertaking, but the core process remains the same....get the basic things working and solidly passed through an extensive QA process (which I assume Bohemia can afford to do) before adding new things, and if those new things break the core things don't certify the build.

my point was that before you add vehicles that need spark plugs, or herds of elk, crafting etc... you should probably have zombies in the game (I can see their point though, if they can't get them right remove them) allow steps to be climbed be able to carry items seamlessly down a ladder not break a leg while walking have video options work and set sensibly when the game loads any good programmers knows (and I write code for a living) that you create a design document and a construction roadmap to follow and get the basic, core, functionality working and through QA before adding in more complex, new features those core things I mentioned above worked in the mod, not sure how the design team at Bohemia got so off track on this project.

EA was released Dec 2013 - two years prior to that game was worked on for a year + 3 years in Dev

easy soldier game is three plus years into dev and I can't carry an item out of a deer stand and break a leg while walking, to me that's not complaining, rather that's pointing out some obvious lack of project road mapping, how were such fundamental things missed in the design document? I supported this game and bought a copy for me and my son. I have a right to post once a year to reflect my thoughts on the product and point out that simplistic core parts of the game are still broken or missing (zombies). I am not calling for a boycott or asking for anyone to be fired, so you can rest easy.

I decided to hop on a see how Dayz is looking as it's been a LONG time since I last tried a run through Chernarus. logged in and my graphics were screwed up; game looked worse than a commodore 64 game. resolution was set to 600 x 480 and other settings were just randomly weird. I hit "set video settings to high" and after it re-configured it was even worse somehow. After playing around for 5 minutes and restarting the game twice I got things working and the game looked pretty good spawned in Elektro, so I ran for the fire station. I got there ok (I was a black woman for some reason) but couldn't climb the steps; not sure what was wrong. I ran down to the grocery store and found it empty; in fact the only thing I found in the first 15 minutes of playing were clothing items and lots of them, all colors and types of shirts, hats, shoes, pants - so much fun. I heard some gun shots, which was kind of exciting, and followed the shooter. I grabbed a hammer and was going to try to take a swing, but I lost him. Just then I realized there are no zombies in the game. really... no zombies? I met another friendly spawn and asked about the fire station bug but never got an answer. I actually went back and tried again but still had no luck climbing the stairs, no clue. Ran into a third guy with an axe, who eventually killed the first friendly I met after we grouped up and ran through town - finding nothing but clothes. The first friendly gave me some food, so the annoying "you feel hungry" notice finally stopped flashing for me. In theory making all buildings enterable sounds cool, but in practice adding tons of new ways to find red shirts actually makes the game play more tedious. In the mod you would just run for the handful of buildings and get valuable loot, now you crawl through miles of houses finding nothing and more nothing after the axe guy killed my friend (I think being a woman saved me) I ran north and came across a deer stand and found a .308 hybrid break action pistol thingy, cool. I also found a snap loader for a shotgun (umm ok) and several gun parts - butt stock, hand rail, etc... Two things struck me at this point. I miss the creepy music the mod used to play in the background, to me when I first started playing it created a cool backdrop and tension, and two I don't find it fun/rewarding that there are thousands of combinations of gun parts and ammo. You can seemingly search forever and fill your inventory up with nothing but disparate, non-compatible, gun items, ammo and attachments. This time (and the last time I played) I ended up with 4 or 5 weapons 4 or 5 types of ammo and none matched. In the mod when you found a gun you almost always found some matching ammo with it - which was awesome, now the whole thing it just feels laborious. I didn't yet have a backpack, so I had to hold the .308 in my hand as I climbed down from the deer stand. I climbed down and starting running north but realized the gun was no longer in my hand. I went back and it was in the deer stand. I tried again to get the gun and get out of the deer stand. No luck, tried again, no luck. Tried standing near the edge of the deer stand and dropping it, but it would always remain in the deer stand. I really didn't want to give up my weapon, after a while I was able through trial and error to hold the gun in the action position and climb down, this allowed the gun to stay in my hand after I was finished climbing... good work dev team, can't wait to see what works after three years. I ran north, stopped a few places over the next hour, found a little bit of food and water and a backpack and lots of clothing (clothing sim FTW). I actually picked up three guns: an AK, a shotgun, and the pistol - no ammo at all though. Most buildings were empty, or had ... a hat maybe. So to this point I have been walking through a lot of useless buildings praying to see some AK rounds or something. I continued north not seeing any more players. I did have a cool encounter with a herd of elk, one big bull with a giant rack with four females, so that was actually cool. My pistol had a scope so I was able to watch them graze from a distance. When I finally ran up on them they did get spooked and the females took off while the bull stood in place stuck in a running animation, derp. I was getting close now to the NW air field, woo hoo, when I saw a vehicle. I guess there are finally a few in the game now. It was in the middle of an open field, hmmm. I was able to get to it, there were no repair options, from what I could tell it looked fine (no damage visible), I couldn't see any reason why it wouldn't work, but it wouldn't. I was able to enter it and had an option to "start engine" but nothing happened. There was no feedback as to why- no mention of gas, damage, nothing, just no deal, so I ran on. about 3 minutes later while running through a small glade I heard a groan and my character went prone. After about a second the screen says "you have a fractured leg", at first I thought someone shot me maybe with a silenced weapon, but no, nothing I guess I just stepped on a rock or something? I remember that you can fix a broken leg by making a splint with some sticks and some cloth. I had cloth but no sticks. If you have an axe you can chop down a small bush to get some sticks, however for the past 1-2 hours I have seen nary an axe, odd because from what I remember from before dayz seemed more like an axe simulator. But now I had a sinking feeling that I was never going to find an axe. Luckily though I was right near a bunch of barns, barns used to have a high probability of having an axe in the mod so woo hoo. I crawl to the barns, three of them in a little outcrop on the edge of the town south of the airfield, no axes. seriously game? I crawl to at least 20 buildings, no axe, nothing. The hell with it, I'll side roll to the airfield just for lols. On my way there though another player decided to shoot me before I could complete my crawl for glory. So my journey ended, a quick recap 1. no zombies 2. lots of bugs 3. vehicles, sort of 4. clothing simulator 5. axes removed 6. random broken leg 7. weapons and ammo is a frustrating game of hope and pray two years later dayz SA is s till a giant step backwards from the mod

come on guys this is all pretty clear Bohemia isn't thrilled with Dean's management style and how he runs the show - probably not Dean's fault entirely, this thing blew up real big, real quick and Dean never headed up a project of this size and scope before. But hey Dean made this company a shit-ton of money, so it's hard to kick him out. They probably put up with his quirks, loose control, odd management style etc... for as long as they could until it reached a breaking point. I'm sure they had a serious talk about things and from Deans presser it sounds like he pretty much agrees with them. It's tough making a high profile game when you are a high profile personality in the business, which Dean definitely is. I've - like a lot of others in here - felt like the development process to date of the stand-alone has been a pretty un-even experience. Some features were implemented well, some oddly patched together. The game doesn't wreak of tight control or clear vision. Those things are hard to achieve when people are anonymous and in-sync. But when one person dominates the show and has great influence (internally and publically) it has to be a nightmare. Probably best if Deans goes off and does his own thing with full creative freedom and less pressure. Good to luck to everyone, I actually think this will be a positive step for the future of Dayz

it is so nice when a company has the luxury of being honest - the dayz mod revenue from Arma 2 sales alone allows for that. It's great to see a company like BI be rewarded.

solid work as usual

I think the issue people are struggling with is - why is the game play not improved from the mod after 18 months. And while that point is debatable - it is true that a lot of features are missing, things likes vehicles and weapons etc... What took up some much dev time was the transformation of the game from largely client side (hacking impossible to stop) to server side. This was a pretty big ordeal that involved ripping the engine down to it's core and re-enginneering a lot of how arma works. I actually think it's fairly amazing they were able to do that in such a short (relatively speaking) period of time. If they did it well (made the code modular in nature) then they should be able to rapidly (relatively speaking) tack on new features and troubleshoot bugs. Yea sure it would have been cool to have seen this early version of the game be substantially better than the mod, and you can argue that point all you want when the truth is you wont start seeing those types of gains for a while. Keep in mind a lot of people here and on reddit were BEGGING for this version of the game to be released, so I guess becareful what you wish for.