tentacle

Firstly, I'm a long-time OFP player, since the beginning, so that's over 10 years. The controls of the game engine have always sucked, but I was always able to live with it. It didn't ruin the game, because it was all about sneaking around, taking it easy, and if in some hectic moment I got killed, ran my jeep into a tree or had my tank jam in the scenery because of the laggy and unresponsive controls, it wasn't game-breakingly annoying, because of the save games/checkpoints. Now Day Z has permadeath, which is awesome. But when hours and hours of careful stealthiness and exploration and loot gathering end not because of a mistake I made, or being beaten fair and square, or even sniped by a ruthelss bandit, but because I couldn't find the damn ladder hotspot, or opening a gate magically pushed me behind it, trapped and desperately looking for the close gate hotspot, then trying to find the right spot to stand so I can activate the open hotspot without getting pushed again, well that is just plain stupid. It just ruins all the hours of buildup I had in one incredibly frustrating anticlimax caused by technical game engine issues. People will say it's alpha so shut up, but the engine isn't, the controls aren't. It's over 10 years old and has always had these problems. I sincerely hope Arma 3 fixes this, but I'm a little pessimistic. Do a kickstarter for "implementing smooth non-laggy controls into the arma engine" and I'll put in $100.

I could shove 50 bolts in a sock and hang it off my belt. Stacking only 5 is a very artificial game mechanical limit. I could also carve bolts out of branches in minutes. Imho crossbows don't need to be artificially limited like this. There are enough realistic limitations to them: poor range, poor accuracy, do little damage except by headshots. On the plus side, they're quiet, and no muzzle flash. That's how I'd like to see them done.

Imho this kinda breaks the whole appeal and tension created by permadeath. You die, you die - you SHOULD lose your stuff, location, friends. Otherwise it's "no big deal" to die, and all tension is lost.

The thing you have to be careful of when you allow bases, is we probably don't want them to turn into "save points". A group of guys would just keep all their stuff there and whenever they die/spawn they hike it over there and gear up thanks to their buddies in the safety of their base. In other words, bases shouldn't be too easy to protect, and they should be destructible by other players. One believable way was already mentioned - a static base could naturally attract more and more zombies over time. Roaming hordes could provide a believable mechanism.

Maybe we can calm the varulfurs by separating two concepts: atmosphere and story. Bits of newspapers, news, and isolated background stories, these add atmosphere, but still leave the "story" to your imagination. An actual linear sequence of game events, that's a story. The most important thing is, atmosphere can be randomized. Stories can't (well, they can, but they suck). Example: Now: deer stand - two zombies - a little bit of random loot. Uninteresting, doesn't spark the imagination. Story: deer stand - contains a newspaper that explains what happened at the nearby town and some doctor there doing something, you go there, you can find the doctor's body, the story unravels, etc. Can be cool, but this isn't what Day Z is about, most importantly cause it's boring after you've done it once, and doesn't allow room for emergent gameplay. Atmosphere: deer stand - a few zombies, a number of dead zombies, a dead guy with an empty gun, a box of an unknown medicine, a photo of a little girl, a dead woman 500 meters away. What happened? Who was the guy? Was he taking medicine to the girl? Is she alive somewhere? Or was she killed, or did she escape? Is the woman related to this? We don't know, we aren't told, we have no idea - our imagination fills in all the horrible details, we fear the worst, hope for the best. But most importantly, this can all be just randomized, it leaves everything to your imagination, it never repeats (= breaks the immersion). Imagine two days later you find a dead girl across the island (just randomly generated body, not scripted). You remember the photo. Was it her? .... I'm all for this kind of atmospheric details that make the world feel like it has a background, a story, and that "thing have happened here". Without resorting to any scripting, without spelling anything out. Chern is currently pretty "dead" (get it? see what I did there?), but it doesn't have to be.

I don't really even get what is concretely being suggested here or how it is supposed to address the griefer issue.

I agree with majority that night time is unrealistically and immersion-bustingly dark. There is no gameplay, realism, or other justification for the excessive darkness, it's just wrong, period. "use flares" and "dont play at night" are just stupid workarounds that don't work. Night time should offer an alternate gaming environment that has it's own challenges and advantages, like easier sneaking but harder spotting, more/less zombies or more/less active zombies, whatever. Now it's just noobs who haven't yet understood to go other servers and bored people with NV looking for something to do.

This thread is a good example of how when you make a suggestion, you should be clear on what you mean. Otherwise people take their preconceived ideas, fill in blanks, and start arguing with you about something you (maybe) never intended. One extreme: A magical global audio broadcast that endlessly spams you with news and other scripted blabber: not what anybody wants and not what the OP was suggesting. Other extreme: Introducing radios into the game as items (too heavy to carry maybe? like HAM/military radios), that you can scan the frequencies freely on. Two players in the game hit the same frequency, they can talk. Combined with disabling the global chat, this could be neat. Imagine listening in on the chatter between a group of bandits talking about where their stashed car is or something. Emergency broadcast systems as Lukio describes sound like they might be fun too. Picking up signals from the "outer world", well, in principle yes, I think it sounds cool, but it'd have to be done right. 10 scripted little monologues that repeat would not work. Being able to climb to some high point and set up an antenna and pick up bits and pieces of something, maybe.