hefeweizen

and when all those needs are met then what? I mean, how unrealistically fragile would you have to make your character for survival itself to be the only enemy on a map that is obviously a temperate climate and is crammed with former cities for shelter? That has plenty of wells, ponds, streams and eventually wildlife to supply all your food/hunger needs. Hell, by the look of the grass and foliage Cherno looks absolutely lovely to camp in. What your missing here is why on Earth would a place like Cherno suddenly go all Blade Runner if everyone just died. There would be no scarcity at all, no lack of resources causing conflict. Unless you drastically altered the map to be a completely different environment, removed most if not all of the cities, removed hunting, gathering berries and drinking from streams, survival alone isn't going to cut it as compelling game play. Seriously think about Cherno without zombies for a moment and tell how in gods name that'd be a difficult ordeal? Step one: Find one of hundreds of houses for shelter. Step two: Find a water source, there are streams and ponds everywhere so not too hard.. Step three: Find a food source. Could be hard, if you made it unrealistic. But a place like Cherno would have more animals to kill and eat than anyone would need and tons and tons of houses, stores and misc buildings to freely loot.

You shouldn't be. Many many people on these forums are PvP nuts, their only goal playing DayZ is to "win". Zombies, glitchy or not get in the way of straight PvP. So, of course there are people who want their only obstacle in the way of "winning" to be successfully getting the jump on whoever they're trying to kill. That is what you're seeing here, people who treat DayZ as a big slow death match and would rather not have zombies interfering in that.

Noobclear Warfare server is the most prominent regular DayZ server I can think of that has absolutely no zombies, however many many Epoch servers have zombies that only walk and never run, effectively removing them from the game for the most part. It is pretty bad. Honestly, I don't see any way to prevent it from becoming a camp fest without adding unfriendly NPCs. Unless you wanted to make players unrealistically fragile when it came to the elements. Snipers sit in trees for days waiting to take the right shot, no reason players couldn't do that anywhere they liked were it not for unfriendly NPCs. As it is zombies serve the purpose of limiting the locations snipers can set up shop in, which in turn helps to balance out the effectiveness of long range vs. medium/short range combat, I.E. you can check those six or seven good snipers spots in Elektro before moving around to loot the city. Hell, with the mechanics you suggested it would probably go like this "Find cold weather gear, find food, go prone in the middle of a city between a fence and a shed. Scan in 3rd person and wait for someone to walk by." Sure this is what a lot of people do now, but they're mostly limited to the various high traffic corridors in between cities and hopefully in the future open areas free of buildings won't also be free of zombies. I just don't see how this game could even make any sense without unfriendly NPCs, especially on a European style map like Chernarus. Sure, if DayZ took place in New Mexico with a dumb ass U.S. style highway and bedroom community system, plus super light population density before the apocalypse it could be interesting. But without an enemy that normal people couldn't easily rid themselves of, why wouldn't whatever population remained in Chernarus just reform society in the hospitably temperate cities they still have access to? I mean, you said what if an illness killed about 9/10ths of the population. Well that has happened a lot to mankind, like way more times than you'd think and it doesn't lead to lawlessness, if anything is usually leads to the exact opposite, a police state. Now, maybe you could do an interesting perma-death sandbox without NPCs on a map that was completely inhospitable to man. But that map isn't Chernarus, you'd need it to take place somewhere where mankind can't easily survive without the aid of modern technology (A desert, a turndra, open water) and you'd need it to take place somewhere that didn't have much at all in the way of population density before hand. Because even if there is just a few dozen people left in a city, they're just going to reform into a civilization anyway. It is part of what made man the top dog on Earth, our drive to live interconnectedly with other people in massive groups for safety is an evolutionary trait and it wouldn't just go away because there are suddenly less people. Hell, most likely that urge would get much stronger. I suppose you could ignore the fact that Chernarus devoid of most of her people would have no reason to break down into post apocalyptic lawlessness. You could ignore the abundance of flora and fauna, the easy access to shelter in her many buildings, the gentle climate, the soft grass in which to lay around in for hours, the many streams and ponds from which to get water from and the large supplies packaged of food that would no doubt be left over. But that would probably be even more silly than asking if a game called DayZ really needs to have any "Z". TL;DR Chernarus is a good map for a zombie apocalypse, would make absolutely no sense for a Mad Max/Fallout style apocalypse.

So have you actually ever played DayZ without zombies? 'Cause those servers exist in the mod, and they're terribly boring camp-fests. Its amazing how many places you can go prone and snipe from for hours when you don't have to worry about zombies.

*sigh* Hipsters are hating zombies now? When did that start being a thing? Yes, some things are popular and a lot of people try to replicate those things in order to cash in on their popularity. That's not a valid reason to sh*t all over them. Zombies are classic. Mutants, or animals, or I dunno cannibals would be fine too, but DayZ is one of the first of a new type of open world perma-death sandbox and I think it is kind of ridiculous to pick apart certain aspects of it as "done to death". What other zombie survival games are there? WarZ? Please. Then what the hell is wrong with DayZ filling the role it was advertised to fill? It sounds like you want Fallout: Online, or something close to that. That is fine, but there is no need to belittle all the people who enjoyed DayZ: Mod and the standalone specifically because they have zombies, and like it or not that is exactly how your OP sounded.

That would actually be an awesome idea, having to bathe or mask your scent otherwise your aggro range for zed would be larger. In addition to 28 days later zombies, Romero and Walking Dead zombies also smell their prey. But 28 Days Later zombies are the closest to DayZ zombies so I'd go by that standard.

1. In what zombie literature/movie/television series is this the case? Any? 2. You'd probably have to get right up on your target because in real life sniping is a helluva lot harder than it is in any video game. But since it is a video game and therefore sniping = easy mode, the devs should do whatever they can to balance combat toward close and medium range encounters.

Heh. That has been a problem with every game since sniper rifles were part of gaming. ...And don't link Ace mod, I've seen it already, and I agree with you. :thumbsup:

To all that I say "It makes the game soooooo boring." and if you're playing DayZ to "Win" at "PvP", then you're doing it wrong. Also, its still a chickensh*t tactic. Its what people who lack the reflexes and situational awareness to handle close quarters combat do to "get kills". Furthermore if there was one style of game play that could be associated with pointless KoSing, it'd be snipers. I mean, at least the CoDers who spray bambis with their M4s loot their kills.

Two things: 1. We're going to assume zombies tell the difference between the living and other zombies via scent, so no go on the ghilie making you invis to zed. 2. If you're so sick of seeing people run across the NWAF, why wouldn't you pretend you're a man for a little and engage those guys at close range instead of relying on chickensh*t sniper tactics?

Come the f*ck on. Really? With all the massive failures in gaming within' the last five years, you expect me to buy that major studio execs have a grasp on what the average gamer wants? Always on DRM, abusive F2P schemes, uninspired yearly sequels and micro-transactions for games you already paid for must've been right at the top of every gamer's list of cool features they wanted. Game developers are media companies just like music and television producers. They are always behind the times on what customers actually want/look like and they take years to catch up to the rest of society. Gamer's are an increasingly diverse group of people, that much you can't argue with. But if you are just looking at the games being produced it sure as hell doesn't look that way, how many recent AAA games with non-customizable human protagonists can you name where the lead wasn't a straight white male? Lee from The Walking Dead, Lara Croft and I guess Salvador from Borderlands 2 counts as Latino, uhhhh..... That's about it. Maybe you're right, maybe game developers do know their target audience. So when the hell are they going to start producing games like do?

'Cause I don't like kids and I'm realistic as to what having children does to ones free time (As in, removes it entirely)? Or was it 'cause I called them "crotch droppings"? 'Cause that sh*t is funny.

Bull. You're changing the historically accepted definition of "a gamer" for no other reason than to be exclusionary. The difference between a game link Candy Crush and a game like Dr. Mario or Tetris is almost nothing. To be fair, this is common in nerd culture; once fandom of something nerdy grows to the point of being mainstream the old guard fans like to make a a bunch of bullsh*t rules on what constitutes a "real fan". You know, you can't be a "real" Batman fan without reading certain select comics, you can't be a "real" fan of Doctor Who without watching the classic series, you can't be a "real" gamer without playing "Call of Shooting People: Shooting People Edition". It is stupid in each case. Saying only certain type of games are "real games" is like saying only action movies are "real movies".

What does that have to do with your wife being a gamer? I spend time gaming with friends without my wife all the time, that is what communication is for, son. If you need some time to yourself or with friends every once in a while, then ask for it. If they don't want to give it to you, then they might not be a good person to be involved with. I can speak from experience and observation that the men I know who married gamers are way happier than the alternative, most of which just don't game anymore (not by choice, mind you). And I don't get why you linked what you linked. If you're dumb enough to spawn a couple if snot nosed crotch droppings that'll grow up to hate you anyway then you probably should just give up on gaming as a hobby all together.

Yes, it can be any number you fancy if you arbitrarily exclude games at your own discretion, you are correct.

Gamma exploit. Like everyone else is saying. Game looks terrible if you jack up the gamma, but you have to do it if don't want to be severely disadvantaged. Playing daytime until using a torch doesn't make you totally gimped.

No man is more miserable than the one who gets the stink eye from his wife every time he wants to partake in his favorite hobby. Its 2014 and 50% of all gamer's are women, so you'd be an idiot to go long term with someone who you don't share common interests with. Or maybe you're one of those guys who can't talk to women, doesn't have a lot of options and is just holding on whatever girl showed a vague amount of interest in him. That's okay, too.

Radar cap - Black.

So in ten months, come back and give the game a fair assessment instead of jumping the gun with needless doom saying. If SA hasn't fully fleshed out its feature set and moved on to Beta in ten months I'll eat my hat.

Whats your point? BI just bought an entire studio to work on DayZ and I can guarantee that getting them up to speed will take longer than Notch's Java scripters. It still took more than two years to get from first release to final, on top of that it was coded in Java making it infinitely more simplistic, it uses easy to model/texture block graphics and is entirely procedurally generated. Notch had every advantage in his favor, still took 2.5 years. Not that that is a bad thing, but for f*cks sake learn some perspective son.

Because your criticism is baseless and when criticism of something you appreciate is perceived as unwarranted people feel compelled to point that fact out. Of course, you already know that I assume, you're just trying to stir up shi*t. Progress hasn't been painfully slow, if you actually take into consideration how long the vast majority of games take to get from early alpha to full release. Minecraft for example had its first release in May 2009 and didn't have its full release until November 2011. However early release alphas are generally a new thing and people like yourself are just too dense to understand that going from Alpha to Full release takes time and given that you don't have much to compare it to you're assuming that progress has been slow because you're impatient.

There is a difference between complaining and being an a**hole. Most of the people in this thread are either A. Deliberately phrasing their complaints in a way that'll piss off as many people as possible. (These are trolls.) B. Too stupid to write eloquently enough that they convey that they are attempting constructive criticism.

That's all your fault. Get a girlfriend who games, problem solved. Seriously though, hate when people makes post like this. "I have four kids, a wife who hates me, and I work two full time jobs. And you expect me to wait 500 seconds to switch servers? I'M ANGRY AT YOU BECAUSE I MADE THE TERRIBLE DECISION TO NOT HAVE ANY FREE TIME!!!!!!!!"

Well wait... These new 1:1 mouse controls are from Arma 3 are they not? If so, then don't try to frame this as "BiS selling out to appease the filthy casuals!"

Also, maybe the guns are they are specifically for gameplay reasons, I dunno. What I do know is I've had waaaaaaaaay more chances to return fire and come out on top in the Standalone. Where as most of my deaths in the mod are a bullet from an unknown location that takes me down in a single shot, most of my deaths in the standalone have been from prolonged fire fights that I actually enjoyed. From the perspective of someone who camps on hospitals the gunplay in SA might suck, but from someone who likes to travel around while he plays it is way better.