Daricles

It took quite a bit of effort, but I made it. Had to do some serious portaging, pushing the boat around a few narrow spots between the rocks. Speaking of rocks…it would be nice if the devs tweaked the way boats interact with rocks. If you even touch some of them the boat starts jumping all around uncontrollably, sometimes flipping it over. IIRC, this was a feature added awhile back to help prevent high centering vehicles and getting them stuck. It’s probably safe to remove that behavior from boats to make them behave in a more stable manner. Speaking of flipping boats over…it would be nice if there was an easy way to flip an upside down boat back upright. My boat got flipped over by the rocks a few times on my trip to the dam. I had to push it around onto the rocks letting it get randomly tossed around until it finally got flipped back over. The boats are a great addition to the game. It would be really awesome if you made the rivers truly navigable by boat. It wouldn’t take much, at least for the river on the western edge of the Chernarus map. If you fixed the rocks tossing the boat around issue, then there would only be a couple of places too narrow for the boat to get through. If you go fast enough, you can make it over the downed trees and several of the rocky crossings. There are also a couple spots where it’s too shallow, but that’s okay, you just have to get out and push a little. However, if you could make the river about a foot deeper it would make things a lot easier. Having a navigable river leading inland would open up all kinds of amazing new game play possibilities.

I guarantee they did this on purpose to prevent people from driving them out to sea and using them as floating bases. Most of them would up out in the middle of the ocean if they let you do what you suggest.

Well, NWAF by boat just isn’t worth doing. I figured out that I missed my turn because the branch heading toward NWAF doesn’t actually connect to the branch I was on except by a culvert. After doing a little scouting on foot, it looks like the other branch is little more than a rocky ditch and I’d end up spending a lot more time pushing the boat than driving it. I’d say I already spent as much time portaging around obstacles as I did driving just to reach Krona castle. Someone stole the spark plug out of my boat last night while it was parked in the swamp, but I had spares. So, whoever you were, you didn’t slow me down in my quest. However, I jogged up to Krona castle to look around and some bandit shot me dead without saying a word. Whoever you were, thank you for putting that crazy life to an end! Now I can move on to other more sane things to do than trying to boat all the way to NWAF. I’ll settle for having reaching Vavilovo swamp and call it a victory.

Oops. I missed my turn and ended up in the swamp west of Vavilovo. Now I have to turn around go back a ways.

Here’s a link to screenshots: https://1drv.ms/f/s!Ap2aKHFgUU59gsBQGbEQBf50vAScGQ

I have now portaged the boat up over the dam and am trying to boat all the way to NWAF. The canyon under the RR bridge at Rostoki is impassable due to those boat repelling rocks, so I had to portage a good ways down the tracks before I could put the boat back in the river. Unfortunately, when I did so I touched an anti-boat rock and it flipped the boat. It took me about a half hour to get it flipped back over and then I had to catch and cook some fish because I was starving. By the time I finished all that, it was dark and I had to log for some lunch IRL. now all of the NY official servers seem to be down. I plan to continue my journey once they are back up (If the boat is still there and no one kills me — I’m surprised I haven’t been shot by someone yet. I’ve spent a couple hours just pushing that boat around obstacles). Krona castle is just around the next river bend.

I don’t do social media. 🤷‍♂️

I think it might be time to start considering a rollback to the previous version. Also, it would only take a minute to put out some sort of communication at least acknowledging the problem exists.

I have been playing DayZ on official servers since it first became available as a WIP purchase many years ago. I have come and gone from the game numerous times, but keep coming back to it time and time again. It’s probably fair to say that I have as much DayZ experience as most people and there are few that have more experience than I do. That’s not to say that I’m the best survivor you’ll ever come across (far from it — my PvP skills in a gunfight are pretty poor, actually), but I am very familiar with the gameplay. While I agree with much of RunningManZ’s commentary, I am quite surprised at some of the points raised by such an experienced and well known player. While I’m in total agreement about the current spawning system, and sort of agree with the criticisms of the zombies and have a few constructive criticisms about them that weren’t mentioned, I haven’t been hindered hardly at all by many of the other problems that seem to be causing RunningManZ considerable frustration. Regarding the zombies, I also find their ability to strike you while facing the opposite direction annoying and immersion breaking. The other thing I really dislike is how they currently spawn right on top of you. It seems like the game tries to spawn them out of LOS, but fails miserably more often than not, especially when crossing open fields. There are so many times when a zombie steps out from behind a tree or around a corner from an area you can’t see right now, but could see was clear from where you were a half a second ago, that it is also very annoying and immersion breaking. Zombie spawns need some work. I haven’t, however, noticed a huge problem with Zombies ruining my clothing too quickly or forcing me to carry tons of rags and bandages — I’m pretty good at not letting myself get ganged up on and at hitting them hard enough to stun them without getting hit myself, and I normally run with a light load and therefore have the stamina to throw enough heavy melee hits to kill a zombie without getting hit at all. Sure, I mess up and take shots ever now and then, but have never felt like I was constantly having to repair zombie damage to my gear. That said, I wouldn’t complain if item durability was increased across the board. I 100% agree about how frustrating the increased time it takes to wring out clothing is. It’s totally annoying and excessive right now. I don’t mind having to wring stuff out to stay dry, but it takes way too long to do it as it currently stands. I also don’t find myself having any problems with rain on the official servers. I almost never get sick in the game. The trick to staying healthy is real simple. Keep your loads light, your stamina up, and your food and water meters full. To help keep my loads light and gauges full, I eat all the food I find as soon as I find it and don’t carry any food around with me at all. I also limit myself to one long gun, one handgun, and one melee weapon at a time with at most two or three full mags for each weapon. More often than not, I’ll keep a stab vest equipped over the plate carrier just to keep my stamina up. Once you stuff yourself, get your hydration up, and stop sprinting around everywhere you go while carrying heavy loads, you can cover a lot of distance, albeit it more slowly, without having to loot for food and water and you can jog around in the rain all day without fear of getting sick. I also find no difficulty in finding multivitamins and tetracycline. Take the vitamins proactively until they’re gone as soon as you find them. It boosts your immunity to sickness. You’ll even have a chance to not get blood poisoning from stitching wounds or using undisenfected rags, but I still wouldn’t recommend it except in a pinch. I can’t tell you how often I end up looting the bodies of survivors who were running around with heavy packs full of food and ammo who had no meds. I also agree with the comments about shotgun and repeater spawns. Move the shotties further inland and/or make them less common on the coast and make the repeater carbine and sporter more common and easier to find on the coast. The repeater would be a desirable early game gun but, as it stands now, I never find one until I’m already inland and geared up with better weapons. Meaning the only use I ever have for the repeater is to take the ammo for a deagle, leaving the repeater behind. I don’t know if realism is a concern or not, but I have a lever action rifle chambered in .357 magnum and it holds 10 rounds in the tube magazine, is the most accurate rifle I own out to 50 yards (it beats out the AR15 with a red dot, the Garand, and the M1 carbine at those ranges, and it’s not even close), and I can rapid fire it almost as fast as I can shoot a semi auto pistol. You could easily beef up the repeater and make it an uncommon early game gun available on the coast. Right now, with its rarity and geographical availability, it’s a useless weapon assigned to the wrong tier. I too would like to see game changes that make survival more challenging and not just more tedious.

Nice video Espa. Thanks. I completely agree with Vertigo's assessment in the video.

Well, I'm convinced of this: This next release is a pivotal make or break moment in the development of the game. Either the new engine will open the floodgates and the bug fixes and features will start flowing at a steady pace over the next few months or they won't and the devs will wind up treading over the same ground again yielding the same disappointing results in a new engine. I've seen both outcomes from projects that started over with new architecture in the past. However, as I said before, I've seen more failures than success stories after that reset button was pushed. It has been about 2 years since Dayz hit the reset, so now seems about right for the moment of truth to occur. Here's to hoping Dayz beats the odds, overcomes the difficult setbacks of starting over, and goes on to become a spectacular success. I guess that BI does have one thing going in their favor that most projects that I have seen fail after starting over didn't have: Deep pockets. BI did make a crap ton of early access sales back in the day and the project shouldn't be in danger from lack of funding unless they have terribly mismanaged their finances or diverted the money to other projects. That could very well make the difference in the project's success.

How much later? I waited three years before checking back in last time and the state of the game is largely unchanged in that time. I think a little healthy skepticism is reasonable.

Kiwis that show up in slain Dean Zombie inventories often appear as a grey square. You can drag the grey square from the slain Dean zombie to your own inventory and it changes back into a kiwi. It has been that way since at least 2014. With regards to zombies, the biggest change I'm hoping for is for them to aggro on the location where you fire a weapon and not telepathically lock onto your character. I have frequently had zombies clip through walls, tents and concrete barriers to attack me. You actually can't interact with trash piles. However, it had been so long since I last played that I forgot that. As soon as the game crashed when I tried I instantly remembered that the game used to crash back in 2014 when you did that and was frustrated that it was still a problem. Looking back through older status reports I see that many of the same problems were going to be addressed in upcoming patches as far back as 2015. Your optimism is earnest but perhaps misplaced.

Emuthreat, I hope you are right. If beta does address all these things or even some of them that would be great. However, the demo video doesn't showcase those improvements. I still see a lot of the same problems on display in the video with a new inventory management system layered on top.

Biohaze, only BI can decide what is acceptable in terms of progress. They are the ones sinking their time and money into the project. I only commented that I am disappointed that the game still had many of the same problems it did when I first tried it out back in 2014 and was worried that the project is exhibiting some of the same telltale signs of trouble that I've seen in many projects that ultimately failed. I like DayZ. It is a great concept and has some engaging gameplay elements, but it is plagued by some longstanding problems and has been in development for a very long time. Close to five years despite your claims to the contrary. I hope it succeeds, but there are potential signs of trouble that indicate it might not. No, I won't want my money back if the project fails. I'll just be disappointed that a potentially great game never made it to market. It wouldn't be the first or last game to have that happen. I understand what early access means and feel I've got my money's worth out of what I paid for the privelige of playing with their development builds. With my expectations tempered by that understanding, I have enjoyed many hours playing with what they have been able to deliver. That doesn't mean the development is going along just fine without any problems. Only that BI has fulfilled their limited obligation to give me access to their development builds for purposes of evaluation and feedback and I've had some fun in the process. Which is all I expected. That doesn't mean I can't say that I'm disappointed the game isn't further along by now or that I won't be surprised if it never makes it to market. If anything, I'll be pleasantly surprised when (hopefully) it does make it to market and even thrilled if it happens any time soon. I don't care what modding might bring to the table, that's not my cup of tea. I know nothing of furlongs.

BeefBacon, I hope you are right. I played the game for a while back in 2014 and thought "this is pretty cool. It still needs a lot of work, but it's a great concept and has a lot of potential." Having seen what there was to see at the time I left. Three years later I thought "hey, remember that DayZ game? It was pretty cool. It has been a few years, I wonder if it's ready for prime time yet." I logged in and played for a couple weeks. At first glance I thought "it looks better." It was nothing but disappointment after that. Hmm. Kiwis still show up as grey squares? That's surprising. Hmm. Zombies still have rudimentary ai and animations? That's surprising. Hmm. Crawling Zombies still push me around the map? That's surprising. Hmm. Items in my inventory still sometimes leave ghosts behind that occupy slots after I drop them? That's surprising. Hmm, I clipped through a wall and fell to my death? That's troubling. Hmm. That zombie clipped through a wall and killed me. That is troubling. Hmm. I can't pick up any items and have to restart the game? That is worrisome. Hmm, I just tried to interact with that trash pile and the game crashed. That is very troubling. Delivering graphics upgrades when the game is still riddled with clipping errors and crash bugs is just putting lipstick on a pig. If this demo were released as a proof of concept demo four years ago I would be thrilled. After this long in development, I'm just disappointed.

Oh, well, excuse me then. If we ignore all the development going back to 2012 and assume the game's development started in 2013 when it released as early access on Steam and it has only been in development for THREE AND A HALF YEARS then all of my concerns are completely invalid and should completely dismissed. Seriously, three and half years is still a very long time in the development world and all of my points are still valid concerns. If you want to be BI's biggest cheerleader go right ahead. I'm rooting for them too and want to see them succeed. It doesn't mean I have to stick my head in the sand and ignore warning signs that my hopes for their success might not pan out.

Only if the man building the house timber by timber actually finishes the house and doesn't instead change the plans mid stream, screw up the plumbing, run out of money and end up with nothing but a shit filled hole in the ground to show for his years of effort. That's not to say DayZ is necessarily going to wind up like that. I'm just pointing out how pointless and arbitrary your comparison is.

I don't see what all the excitement is about. All the video demonstrates to me is that the development team has managed to replicate all of the problems that have plagued the game since the start in a new engine. Sure, there are cosmetic changes, but the game is hampered by the same crash bugs, clipping issues, zombie ai and animations that are little more than barely functional placeholders that were problematic back before I started playing the game in 2014. I used to work in software development (admittedly not a game development team) and Dayz is exhibiting many of the telltale signs of a project in trouble. It is a red flag when a team says they need to start over with new architecture. You can almost guarantee you are looking at something like a 2 year setback. You can plan on hearing "we are learning the new architecture" for 6 months to a year followed by "we had to start over from scratch and rebuild everything from the ground up" for a similar amount of time. Many projects never recover from that kind of a setback. If, more than a year after pushing that reset button, you still aren't seeing progress toward actually eliminating the longstanding problems that the old architecture was supposedly preventing the team from fixing it is time to start looking at other possible root causes like: does the project have adequate resources and/or do we need to bring in new personnel with a proven track record of solving similar problems? I don't know what the situation is at BI, but after, what has it been now, five plus years of development, it is time to re-evaluate the resources and personnel assigned to the project and start delivering results or shut the project down and move on to something else. I hope this project goes on to be a stellar success. Dayz has a great premise and a lot of potential, but it has been a very long time in the making and most of that potential has yet to be realized and many more projects have failed than have gone on to succeed after such a protracted development process.

I don't know that I find the demo all that encouraging. Knowing how much effort the devs put into this, I'm concerned by how unfinished it seems to be. I noticed that one of the player models froze up during a player vs player melee fight leaving the player model hanging motionless mid swing. The person playing the demo promptly ran away hoping it would go unnoticed. I played Dayz for a while a few years back and recently returned after a few years hiatus to see what the current state of the game is. After a couple weeks being back all I can say is that I'm disappointed that so many problems from the early days of development haven't been fixed yet. I like Dayz a lot. It's an engaging survival game, but it is still deeply flawed in some important areas, which is disappointing given how long it has been in development. Working Beta still appears to be months away and actual release state could still be years away from what I'm seeing on display in the demo. I hope I'm wrong.

Hello all, I've just recently returned to Dayz to check out the game's progress after a long hiatus. I see that there have been many improvements to the game engine and inventory system. I think you guys have the survival part of the survivor-horror genre nailed down pretty darn well. I can't think of any other game that does it better. However, one of the things that initially disappointed me about the game and eventually caused me to lose interest still remains: Being killed by someone spawning behind me into a location that I have recently cleared. Just the other night I searched a barracks house in a campsite and visually cleared all of the rooms. The barracks only has one entrance and I was watching the doorway -- no one came through it. Suddenly I hear a noise behind me and turn around to see a guy standing in the hallway -- he shoots me and I die. This is incredibly frustrating to me as a player in an otherwise immersive and fairly realistic survival game. It cheapens the experience and makes me wonder why I bother with all of the realistic gameplay tactics I employ such as visually observing an area before I approach and clearing buildings before I pick up items and manage inventory. I understand that persistence and drop-out and come back later to resume the game where I left off Is a central mechanic of Dayz. I'm not suggesting that be altered. However, it would greatly alleviate my frustration if there were some sort of warning that a player is about to spawn into the game nearby -- potentially into a place I have determined should be cleared of enemies. Therefore, I propose that, when a player who is not a recently killed player is about to spawn, a lit flare be dropped at the spawn location about 30 seconds before the player spawns and the character immediately vomits as if they were sick when they enter the game. This will give a brief visual and auditory warning that another player has magically appeared nearby. If necessary, you could also grant the spawning a character a brief period of invulnerability to prevent them from being ambushed and killed by nearby players immediately after spawning. I think some version of the above proposal would be an effective compromise to balance the advantages and disadvantages between players logging back into server and players who happen to be nearby when geared up players spawn back into the game.

So, guys, I get what you are saying about not wanting to make it easy for players in game to camp a player spawning in for an easy kill. However, the way things stand now, the player spawning in has a huge advantage over players already in game by appearing out of thin air ready to fight with no warning. A simple visual and audio cue, it doesn't have to be exactly what I suggested, would solve the problem and create a more balanced situation for both players. The suggestions I made use assets already in game and just seemed easy to implement I'm not looking to nerf the player coming in. The flare might drop 5 seconds before spawn or whatever works best. You could drop a different color flare depending on the proximity of other players. Say red if another player is near the spawn point or green if not. This would give the player spawning in the same kind of warning the player already in game is getting and should put both players on fairly even ground. The goal is that a player already in game would see or hear the warning cue and have just enough time to hide, get out of the immediate area, or get to cover. If the player coming into the game has a brief period of invulnerability and the same kind of warning they would have enough time to recover from the spawn sickness and get out of the immediate area, get to cover or engage a nearby camper with the advantage of invulnerability. There has to be some way to address this problem. If not, I can see myself quickly losing interest in the game again and not coming back despite the things the game does well. I don't mind playing a game where I die frequently if I can look at the situation and see that I made a mistake or could have done something better or the other guy was better than me. However, when I feel there was nothing I could have done differently to prevent my death, I don't really feel like playing that game any more.

As a new player who has about 50 hours of playtime in the game, I'd like to summarize three of the main issues that completely ruin this otherwise enjoyable game. DayZ purports itself to be a brutally realistic survival horror game that requires its players to employ cautious tactics and intelligent strategy to succeed in the game. Unfortunately, there are a few problems inherent to the game's design that prevent the game from achieving what it wants to be: Ghosting, Server Hopping and rampant kill-on-sight player killing. Each of these issues is a serious problem on its own, but all three problems in combination make the game broken beyond enjoyment. For those unfamiliar with the terms, Ghosting is what happens when a player joins a server and spawns back into the location they were in when they left the server the last time they played. While this persistent location feature is a great for exploring the vast and richly detailed map, it also causes some significant problems since players joining a server can spawn in close proximity to other players already on the server. Server hopping is the act of joining a server, looting everything in an area, then leaving the server to join another server and immediately loot the same location all over again. After playing DayZ for about 50 hours or so I have come to the conclusion that my tactics and strategies are irrelevant in the game. I can be as smart and cautious as possible and it doesn't mean anything. I can carefully approach an objective moving slowly from cover to cover to avoid being seen and use binoculars to scout the area out for several minutes carefully checking for bandits and snipers before moving into the area and carefully clear every room of a building before opening my inventory and managing my loot. However, at any time a player can spawn behind me in a room with no other entrances that I just cleared without any warning and kill me on sight and take all my loot. In a game where enemy players can appear out of nowhere at anytime nothing I do really matters and its all just a matter of dumb luck. There are some things the game designers could do to mitigate theses problems and make the game more enjoyable. 1. Make it so that a newly spawned player cannot kill other players or be killed by other players for about ten minutes. This helps alleviate the ghosting issues. 2. Give every item a timer that starts to count down from about twenty minutes as soon as you pick it up. Whenever you spawn on a new server, automatically remove all items in the inventory with a timer that hasn't counted down to zero. This would help alleviate server hopping. 3. Mitigate the rampant kill on sight player killing by making combat more realistic and riskier. Right now, there is little or no player interaction in the game. Typically, one player will happen on another player and kill them before that player even knows another player is present. Because of the way server lag works, a player can queue up so much damage that by the time the targeted player receives the first hit they are already dead before they can even react. I would rather see the player v player combat system continue to be lethal, but also far more risky for both parties. In real life, a person can suffer multiple mortal wounds yet continue fighting until their body completely shuts down due to loss of blood or oxygen. Weapons in DayZ should cause more bleeding and energy damage and less health damage. Taking a gunshot in the game should still be quite lethal, but less instantly so. Just as in real life, players would be more cautious of engaging in KOS behavior if they ran the risk of themselves being seriously wounded by a player that they have mortally wounded. In conclusion, I hold out hope that the designers can address the above listed problems and greatly improve the DayZ game experience so that the game can actually become what it sets out to be: A realistically brutal post-apocalyptic survival game that requires players to use cautious tactics and intelligent strategies in order to succeed.

That's my fault for mentioning it. As a new player, I didn't realize it was such a hot-button topic. The rampant KOS gameplay probably wouldn't have bothered me so much if it wasn't happening in the context of the other problems. Also, I understand that the game is in development and is still being worked on. I wrote the post to provide costructive feedback to the developers and to share some of my impressions with other new players who are just starting the game. As I said, I hope the developers are able to make some changes and fulfill their objective of making a brutally realistic horror survival game. I hope my feedback is well received by the developers and is helpful to them. The game has great potential, but stll has a ways to go before it achieves it.

Glad you liked it. ;)