Valadain

In your picture, the guy who can't see the other is playing wrong. It isn't about each individual situation, it is about overall strategy. Knowing this mechanic exists should adjust your entire strategy. That is how it is equal.

That isn't quite true. I'm wary of that fix due to how it might be implemented and the amount of time it would take to put it in right and deal with all of the bugs that would be sure to come. So, I would agree with you if we also assume it was implemented 100 percent perfectly and in a short time period.

I don't think I could care less about third person if I tried. There is already an option for those who don't want it. For those who do want it, you know the dangers and need to adjust your play accordingly. It wasn't added for casuals, it is just something that has been in Arma and was carried over by mod players who liked it. Honestly, what I want is the ability to turn head bob to nil, that is the main thing screwing with my preferred perspective of first person.

I'll never understand why people think that melee weapon slot is legitimate. It was a kindness the developers gave to you to let you carry a large melee weapon. It is a bonus slot. Running around with two guns on your back would severely limit your movement. Honestly, I would suggest that they take away the melee slot and make the hand-melee weapons more useful. Add some belt sheaths where you can store them and make large melee, like the axe, take the primary slot or stow in backpack.

That's fine for now, but once base building is in, it would make no sense if you couldn't stash weapons.

FPS is not a condemnation, it is a description of the control scheme. Yes, this game has an FPS control scheme. It was built from an FPS game. If it were built around the Assassin's Creed engine, I might agree that guns aren't critical. It wasn't. It was built around an FPS engine and therefore, melee is going to suck, which is why it needs to remain primarily projectile centered, just with a lot of options on top.

It isn't so much that they are hard to make, but rather that they are hard to make well. Punching through an apple and punching through a person, wearing all manner of potential gear, and having bones, are two different things. As I said though, I don't have a problem with it being in game. I love realism, but concessions will sometimes need to be made here and there.

It should really be Орлок Don't butcher the Cyrillic!

I don't have a problem with the payday masks from an immersion perspective, but I think adding them, burlap sacks, handcuffs, and the feeding of poison as pretty much the first mechanics of this game really set a particular tone.

Exactly right, I should have read further before making my post above. I can see how the money might make them be a bit more comfortable communicating the road-map, but it certainly won't speed things up much. They can augment staff, but the nature of training and such puts a hard cap on just how much you can expand a team. Not to mention, the time it takes to train up resources in the first place. If this game was set to be developed for several more years, you could certainly start ramping up. With a goal of end-of-year for beta, you'll spend a lot of that just going through the hiring and training process.

I don't think that was the point (or I hope it wasn't). The way I took it was that games using an early access model or kick starter, meaning they don't know exactly what kind of funding they'll have, tend to be pretty light on the actual commitments and road map. Generally, because they can't be sure they'll have the money to complete what they are "promising". I'd say DayZ has hit the point where they should be able to pretty well finish off what they've decided to do with the game, so they should feel more confident in releasing these sorts of details.

I agree with this. People want crafted bows and arrows which is terribly unrealistic. They want to craft usable flint weapons, which is absolutely unrealistic (seriously, try it, I've done it and you get mostly a broken piece of flint, that yeah, might be sharp, but isn't going to be a balanced arrow head). People even want throwing weapons which won't do jack to a zombie as anything light enough to carry in quantity isn't going to penetrate a skull and the actual skill is hard as hell to learn with any reliability. But you know what? I don't care and I hope people get what they want. I hope it doesn't become the focus of the game, but if people want to throw knives and craft bows and arrows in addition to guns, fine with me, even with it being terribly unrealistic. A sandbox game should provide a lot of mechanics, useful items and places, challenging enemies, some dangers and things to do, then get out of the way of the players and let them build the rest of the game. By balancing, this, and changing that behavior, and trying to force the game to be played a particular way, you generally end up ruining everything. My biggest fear about the end-result of this game, isn't that zombies will walk through walls still or that flashlights will suck, it is that so many resources will be spent on bringing the little things to absolute perfection, rather than making some compromises, that there won't be a world robust enough to support the single most important thing that made the DayZ Mod. A world created by players.

Curious, I haven't seen anything that said "all guns will become rare" only that "military gun spawns will reduce" with craftable weapons. I really don't like the general push for less guns in an FPS. I realize people have glamorized the idea of throwing weapons, but the idea of people actually using them effectively is terribly unrealistic. Almost, for myself, game-breakingly, immersion-destroyingly unrealistic.

Well, to be fair, an FPS will be much harder without guns. Just like Mario would be much harder without jump.

I know what people mean by it, but it is wrong. Absolutely wrong. There are plenty of modern civilian weapons. The only real distinction that can be made between the two is Selective Fire vs. Semi-Automatic.

That actually isn't quite true. You can own an M16 in the US, it is just going to cost a ton of money and a whole lot of red-tape.

It would not be the M16 as that is expensive as heck here and generally a pain to buy. The AR 15, however, is the semi-automatic counterpart and will look to anyone pretty indistinguishable from "military" weapons and is extremely popular, yes. You realize that the whole premise of this game entirely justifies the mentality you are mocking.

You can't have it both ways, either most of the players want vanilla SA or most of the players want private modded servers. If the market is there for public-hive vanilla servers, this makes a clear place for BI or a third party to start up a subscription model, providing these servers to the people. If, on the other hand, most of the players want more access to guns and vehicles... well... things aren't going to work out the way you want them to.

Automatic weapons aren't designed specifically to kill better, they are designed with a tactical advantage in mind. Namely, suppressing fire. Keep the enemy from shooting back and in a controlled position. Keep them from flanking while you flank. The US military has mostly gone from fully automatic to three round burst fire. Why? Because fully automatic fire doesn't provide much advantage and you can only carry so many bullets. People are worrying over rarity, when there's no weight or exhaustion mechanics yet. If they implement that right as well as proper damage from bullets, it really won't matter much what gun you have as long as you are good with it. You aren't going to run around with a thousand rounds of saw ammo on you. You are going to walk, and huff, and puff, and probably get shot trying to get wherever you are going. Anti-Material? Yeah, not carrying ten magazines of .50 on you either. Sure you'll get, say, a dozen nice and painful shots. Then you have an expensive club for a weapon. So basically, until you get up to mounted weaponry, where you can basically just evaporate both a target and all cover near the target, skill wins.

This might help:

Takes a lot more than that to rile me!

Really depends on the back story. If the population were killed very quickly, there'd be plenty of stuff all around for people to find and use, new shiny stuff. If it happened very gradually over the course of a decade or two, yes, finding stuff would become much more difficult. Regardless, people have their own viewpoints of what the zombie apocalypse should look like. The point I was trying to get across is that "zombie apocalypse" itself has no bearing. The question is all the other stuff around it, which people tend to take for granted that their vision is what absolutely would happen.

I personally wouldn't play an FPS in which I couldn't find a gun in a fairly reasonable time-frame. I'm not saying we should spawn with them or that they should even be in the first place we loot, but they need to be accessible. I wouldn't mind, however, if they had less desirable guns be more common around the spawning areas.

When you begin a development project, particularly one where you have multiple branches of the code-base, you run development of features over iterations or sprints. The results of these sprints are often only small features that can be seen end-to-end (a player can see on stable) and cumulative work that is held out of the stable branch as it isn't ready for player consumption. As you run these parallel threads of development, they all get closer and closer to done, so once these start being stable enough for merging in to the stable branch, you get dependent features merging in more quickly, and eventually get a nice pace of features being pushed out. A development shop pushing out huge amounts of features right at the beginning and tapering down, as you suggested, is one that is going completely market driven and pushing to be the first out, not focusing on a stable and finished product. It happens, sometimes makes business sense, but isn't how you develop an off-the-shelf purchase-once product. That sort of development usually requires a recurring revenue model to sustain the continuous stabilizing patches that need to be produced after release.

I've been doing this for two decades. Yes, it is how development works if you are working Agile and only releasing at stable points.