darkmooninc

This was my first real gameplay with DayZ. I spent an hour in darkness after spawn, finding nothing but a can of spaghetti, realized I was in an endless night server and I hopped servers to a day server. Sure, my crime against humanity I suppose, but I didn't deserve this. I had a backpack, baseball bat, and some minor supplies. Then I opened a house to see you standing there. You had nothing. Just your fists. I panicked, I’d never seen another person in game. So I backed up to leave. You raised your fists, swung and whiffed. I ran. Running away from the house, I looked to see you running after me. Were you hacking, or was it my encumbrance? You caught up with me easily, took a swing and missed, fell behind, and ran again. You rubber band caught up, punched, missed, and fell behind many times as I pleaded for my life and ran. I don’t wanna fight. I’m a hero, a carebear. A good guy. Live and let live. Please! PLEASE! I swerved and dodged through buildings, around corners, over fences, but your tiny Asian fists came for me every turn of the way. I couldn’t get zombies to pry you off. You kept on me like glue. I found a ladder and I went up. Up. Up. Top of a building. I pulled my baseball bat and I backed to the edge. Hiding. Sure enough, here your matted black hair rose into the sunshine. And I pleaded for you to change you mind. You stared quietly, raised your fists, and came at me. IT DOESN'T HAVE TO GO THIS WAY! So I swung. And you were dazed. Swinging little fists and missing, I backed up. Tears streamed my cheeks as you came at me and I kept sidestepping you, swinging that bat into your face. You went down, and I didn’t stop swinging. You tried to get up twice, but eventually you stopped moving. All you had on you was two cans of spaghetti. WHY? It DIDN’T have to be this way! You could have walked off and lived. You could have found a life out there in the Chernarus wastes! Instead you wouldn’t shake off my ASS! I HAD to! I had no choice! I DIDN’T WANT TO! WHY DID YOU DO THIS TO ME? Dear lord what have I done? My sweetest friend. Everyone one I know goes away, in the end. --- God I love this game.

I see a potential and I’m afraid that it will go unfulfilled. Modding. Arma 1 2 & 3 had nice mod communities. DayZ itself was a mod, hell, there's a mod called Epoch that's a mod of DayZ mod (modception?). As of right now, Rocket says modding DayZ Standalone won’t be a priority at release. But the architecture it uses is a parallel to Arma 3. So all the resources to mod this game exist, and good modders can figure out how to make stuff work without support. But I think support will come, it’s a question of when. And I’m not talking about modding the small stuff. New outfits, altered weapons, different zombies. Small stuff. There’s an impatience among gamers to rush mods in that the developers are already working on. Like with Skyrim’s DLC that addressed player concerns and made obsolete some mods. For example, we know huntable animals, shotguns, and bases are coming soon so there’s no need to mod in those. When the game hits beta or final build, sure, we’ll have piles of people trying to mod in alternate objects. But what I’m addressing is great complete mods that aren’t being addressed. First, we need to agree what DayZ is. It is, at it’s heart, a very large scale, super-realistic simulation of a low-resource sandbox survival experience between multiple players. What really sets it apart from Arma is the limited supplies combined with no clear missio objective and no-team servers of 40 players. The zombies are (theoretically) inconsequential. Take them away, it’s a The Road simulator and most players wouldn’t notice much a difference on populated servers. Modding is an ample opportunity. But modding takes a long time. If modders start now, they can have resources available and ready for when the game build finalizes. So I’ve listed down some ideas I thought people should discuss. Complete mod overhauls that don’t touch much of the base game-play, but change out zombies and Chernarus. Purists will auto poo poo on this. That’s ok. Pure vanilla DayZ is still an amazing game, and even if there were upcoming mods, it wouldn’t lessen the greatness of this game. Here’s what I’ve written. Imagine, if you will, spawning outside Raccoon City. There’s more than enough resources on the internet to model a full hundred miles of Racoon and it’s surrounding cities. You get to keep the zombies. And occasionally we can spawn bigger things. Hunters, dogs. Maybe a very rare tyrant. Just… how cool would it be if Chernarus was Racoon City? Or perhaps Silent Hill. During day it’s a foggy city with a few harmless monsters from the series. When night comes, everything slowly turns dark metal and *random other player’s game models are replaced with monsters*, so you never know who is human and who is a monster. When you’ve lived for more than so many hours on the server, Pyramid head starts stalking you slowly through the streets and countryside. You know that would be amazing with this game’s gameplay. Side note: Horror slashers. Dinosaurs. Why not. Keep Chernarus. Replace the zombies with Compsognathus, Dilophosaurus, Velociraptors. Occasionally you break the tree line into a field and hear thundering, turning to see an ‬Allosaurus coming to wreck your shitt. I know there’s a group of people out there that tingle at the idea. My personal idea is to make a 6kmx6km map that is 6km tall, comprised of endless floors of a HUGE prison colony. Pulling from the game Condemned, Saw, and the Hellraiser sequences in the labyrinth. Or, if you want to go vertical maps, something like out of the Fifth Element. I was pondering an Alaskan tundra with small villages, adding in hypothermia, and changing the zombies out to whatever the alien was in The Thing. Making blood tests take on a new meaning. And trust between players even more razor edge. Which, I suppose, means we can shuffle in things from Dead Space. And lastly, I kind of wanted a mod that adds in underground monsters. Like Tremors, or Screamers. And lastly I know it’d be real cool to import all of the STALKER material and just use DayZ SA’s engine to recreate a STALKER sandbox mode. Lastly jotted down on paper: Slither, Splinter, The Mist, Alan Wake. Wish in one hand, shit in the other, I could post ideas all day. To wrap up. I look at each of the mod conversion ideas above and think: Could I enjoy the game-play even with this changed material? And it’s yes. Always yes. The base core game-play is so fun that you could throw any monsters or map in and it’s still going to be a fun game of scrounging for supplies, braving the elements, and being murdered by psychopaths. No matter what, this should be a call for Modders! I'm sure a lot of you have your own great ideas. It's time to start fathering what you need for it, using Arma 2 or 3 as a testing ground to import into DayZ. Get modding modders! And get asking for mods, non modders! And everyone, keep playing this amazing game! Thoughts?