BeefBacon

Yeah, that makes sense - I hadn't thought of it that way. Thanks for the reply. I'm keen to see what you come up with to address the issues inherent in 3pp even if, as you said before, it's just to make 1pp more popular.

I know this must have been asked before, and even then it's probably best left to one of the dev Q&As, but have you looked into... ray trace occlusion? I think that's what it's called; when stuff that you can't see in 1pp doesn't render in 3pp, as a means of eliminating 3pp wall-peeking. Assuming it was something that you could implement flawlessly without any bugs, is that something you'd do? I guess I mean that both in the personal sense (is that something that you in particular would like to see added?) and in the wider sense (would that be on the cards and actually have a chance of being implemented?) I mostly play 3pp because other people mostly play 3pp - including the friends I play with (I don't think they've even tried 1pp). The wall-peeking annoys me, though, and I don't like having to do it just so I'm on an even keel with everybody else. If wall-peeking was somehow eliminated I would have no problem with 3pp, and I think that's a view shared by most people who prefer 1pp.

A shove would be nice, like in Left 4 Dead - though not as powerful of course. A simple solution to the one-punch thing is just to nerf fists. They're stupidly powerful. Hell, I've seen healthy players killed with a single punch to the head - fists are more powerful than a crowbar, it seems. That doesn't seem right at all.

I never played the mod. I watched plenty of videos, though, and it looked neat. Saw mods that added a lot of STALKER content, and I'm super keen on a STALKER-themed mod for the standalone. I expect that vanilla will have a pretty short lifespan, though that isn't necessarily a problem. I'm looking forward to how DayZ evolves when the community gets their hands on it. If you'd said this a few years ago you might have been right, but this isn't 1995 any more. Hell, Half-Life 2 started development in 1999 and was released in 2004 - that's a good 4-5 years right there for a game that's practically ancient. As others have pointed out, Skyrim and Fallout 4 took many years to develop, as have many other games. Some games take 6 months. Some games take 6 years. Most big games tend to take longer - indies are usually smaller in scope and so often require less development time (unless they're unfunded, of course). BI isn't a huge studio, and the scope of DayZ is fairly large. Just throwing money at the devs doesn't magically make them work faster, in fact - as I've pointed out in the past - it actually made them work slower. The huge early access sales lead them to make DayZ a bigger, more ambitious game rather than just a version of the mod that didn't require Arma 2, which was pretty much the original plan.

I see the dropping player counts as more of a return to a sort of baseline. An alpha game should never have thousands upon thousands of people playing it - that fact that a game that hasn't even been released yet had that many players is pretty impressive. The people playing DayZ are effectively alpha testers. When DayZ hits beta or when it's released - certainly when modding becomes available - the number of players will shoot up. I've not played DayZ in months. I play a few hours of each patch and then I move on. How people have managed to put thousands of hours in is beyond me.

I can see this being a mod, but I don't think it's in the devs' vision of the game. To expand on this, and it really would never exist in the vanilla game, it'd be neat if the profession you chose affected your starting gear as well, and if spawns were all over the map. All classes should spawn with a weapon (with some getting better weapons and gear than others at the cost of more specialist skills) but it was very, very survival focused. Think the 'Misery' mod from STALKER. Again, it would never be in vanilla but I'd give that a shot if it was a mod.

Good idea. I have no idea how activated charcoal is actually produced - whether it just occurs naturally when you burn stuff or you have to do something special to it - but being able to produce it would be great. Could maybe be found randomly in fireplaces in houses too, assuming it occurs naturally without any sort of special intervention.

So use a torch. Use night vision goggles. If it's so dark that you can literally see nothing without a light, I'm sure the devs will brighten the nights up a bit so you can at least see basic shapes. I see no good reason why the gamma exploit shouldn't be removed if it is possible to remove it.

The (current) general wear and tear of Chernarus suggests that is hasn't been very long since the outbreak. That's subject to change, of course. It's probably been less than a year since society collapsed, so I could definitely see at least some telecommunications infrastructure remaining intact. Having said that, the phone assets are probably just left over from Arma 2, when Chernarus would have had power. Probably just an oversight. You never know, though.

Huh. That's actually a really interesting idea. I like it.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty much certain that this is already a thing. Magazines can be empty. They can be half full. Certainly in .59 they were always full, but in .60 they are randomised - as are weapon attachments. As for bullet crafting, I doubt we'll see that. I can't imagine that making a bullet it something you could do without specialist equipment. I could see a mod introducing ammo crafting, however.

Well. I guess just adding way, way more face options would make this a non-issue, right? Maybe even a couple of different animation sets so players each have a slight variation in the way that they move. I don't want floating names, and I sure as shit don't want any kind of reputation system, or tagging, or any nonsense like that.

Well when there's stamina I expect travelling on foot will become more difficult - or at least slower. Certainly you won't be sprinting everywhere. But yeah, a debuff to stamina or perhaps movement speed (or both) would be good. As a side note, I think players should spawn in a worse condition. We should still have bandages, a flare, whatever, but our clothes should be ruined and we should be soaking. First port of call should be finding dry clothes and warming up if necessary. So many items of clothing go unused because the clothes we spawn with are simply better. Spawn with ruined clothes, and people are more likely to want to find replacements as soon as they can.

7 Days to Die has a system where if you die your maximum health is decreased. With soft skills, perhaps death could mean players suffer a skill reduction. Obviously when you die all your skills will probably be reset to 0, but maybe if you die again your skills should be decreased even further - meaning players are unlikely to want to keep dying since it'll just make the game harder and harder. This means that even players who have only spawned 10 minutes ago will want to stay alive, rather than just saying "fuck it" and letting themselves get shot because all they have is a child's backpack and a farming hoe. There should be a cap, of course, it'd be stupid if you died 10 times in a row and then couldn't do anything because your skills are so low - and it would make geared players on the coast killing freshspawns more of a problem - but it would make death more impactful than "you died, now wait an hour or join a different server."

Well, it was. The DayZ dev team used to be pretty small, and was originally going to pretty much just remake the mod as a standalone game - clean things up a bit, add a few improvements, things like that. When the standalone proved extremely popular, the dev team and the scope of the game was expanded, and they embarked on a more ambitious project. Yeah I'm hoping the alpha won't poison the well, as it were. I know a lot of people are whining saying they're giving up or whatever. I expect that when 1.0 eventually arrives they'll change their tune. I play a few hours of each patch, then wait for the next one. I don't get how people can plough thousands of hours into a game that isn't even finished yet.

I... what? CoD and Battlefield are extremely iterative and are produced by very large studios. They do not have the scope of games like DayZ and Fallout, and they have teams dedicated to making sure there is a new CoD game every year - I'm sure you've heard stories of how those developers are being ground to the bone so they can meet deadlines. Why the fuck would you want BI to be a videogame sweatshop? As for Fallout - please do regale me with stories of major content updates that Fallout regularly got over its lengthy development cycle. Fallout is not the pinnacle of gaming - it can be compared to many games quite easily. Skyrim, for example. Basically any Bethesda RPG. If DayZ had just been released in 2017, or whenever, without early access then nobody would complain that it took so long to develop. They wouldn't complain because they wouldn't be privy to the game's development. Let's say Fallout 4 had announced it's release to early access back in, I don't know, 2009. Do you think that every week there'd be a game-changing new feature? Do you think there'd be a major new feature every year? Developing a game is one thing, but making sure the game is always in a playable state so random people can test it is another. That's why you hear about the devs doing internal testing and seeing that there are 'blockers' preventing them from releasing it to the public. Most of the time you don't have to worry about that. If anything this is an indictment of the early access model - sometimes it's too early.

Games take a long time to develop. Bear in mind that we've seen the development of DayZ pretty much from day one. Most of the time we're only privy to a game's development several years in. Games aren't announced, produced in 6 months and then released in perfect working order. They're worked on, then announced, then they're released. The early access model just sort of switches that order around a little bit. Throwing money at the devs doesn't magically make them work faster either. If anything it makes them work slower, because the early success of the standalone led the devs to make DayZ even more ambitious - rather than just a standalone version of the mod. If you want to play the mod then play the mod - you shouldn't expect the standalone to be the exact same thing just with a new coat of paint. If it really bothers you, wait for 1.0. Nobody knows when it's coming - it could be next year some time. If 1.0 doesn't meet your expectations then fair enough, but it seems stupid to declare the game worthless when it isn't even finished yet.

No, no, there are plenty of videos. Depending on where you go you can find a good number of zombies, but not in the numbers you (and everybody, I suspect) are hoping for. I don't know when there'll be lots of zombies. The next patch is having a fair bit of AI work done on it so a higher zombie count might sneak in. .60 was the performance update - it's worth playing just to see how much better it runs. Beyond a quick gander, however, you might be better off waiting for .61 - that's what I'm doing.

Honey should spawn fairly rarely in houses, but should be relatively common out in the woods. It should obviously have a risk associated with gathering it. It feels like a bee suit would be a bit OP - basically making you immune to bee stings. As such there should be other ways to harvest honey from bee hives safely that poses a different risk or requires the consumption of some resource or other. Being able to keep our own bees would be neat.

Sort of. Yes. Obviously. We still have an alpha. The performance is much better, but not all that much has changed in terms of gameplay. The next patch will be introducing some cool new stuff, though, so it could be worth checking in on that. Watch a video of .60. There are plenty of them out there.

I don't even know if the devs have confirmed vehicle modding. If not, yeah I expect the modding community will leap on that. I'm looking forward to mods - even new maps I'm keen on. Chernarus is lovely, but something a bit different would be nice. I've only played the SA, so I didn't get to experience Namalsk or... Taviana? Those popular maps. Anyway, I'm going off topic.

This would be better as a suggestion. It's not a bad idea. We can see time of day, why not weather too? I suppose a downside would be that players would hop on and off servers more frequently. Servers empty when it turns to night because players can easily find a daytime server - so something similar might happen with weather. That only really affects public servers, though.

RPGs and some M...something AT Launcher is going to be included. They showed pictures off a while ago. As far as armour goes, the most I want to see is a Humvee - but I could probably cope with one of those early APC designs, like an M113 that were basically just armoured chassis with a machine gun on top. I'm keen to see what vehicle modification options we'll have.

If you want to squeeze your littlebird that you just spent 4 hours fixing up into a tiny gap between trees in the middle of a forest, be my guest.

I can't imagine some freshspawn is going to happen upon a fully functioning chopper on the coast and is going to fly around spotting camps. It will, or it should, take a ton of work to get a helicopter working. Also, I seem to recall, there will be more trees and denser foliage in future updates. I think the devs said they were planning on doubling the number of trees, or something like that. I don't know how big bases will typically be. I don't know if landing a chopper in the middle of one will be feasible. I don't know if there'll be secure storage options. Besides, if your base is in the middle of a forest, do you really think people would be keen on landing a chopper in that? You don't spend however long fixing up a helicopter only to risk crashing into a tree. I expect they'll be somewhat more common to begin with - in experimental, say - so they can be more widely tested?