Demonskunk

In today's day and age, when I have literally over 100 games on steam, and at least a hundred sitting on my shelf, I'm not eager to force myself to play something I don't immediately gain some enjoyment out of. I'm hoping that some of this will get smoothed out, because I can see DayZ being an experience - a memorable one if not a fun one - but right now the fundamentals are just a little too rough for me.

I understand where you're coming from, but this isn't trolling. You were determined to get into it, I had a cursory interest. My negative experience with the game doesn't have to invalidate your positive one, but you must understand that not everyone can tolerate the same level of inconvenience to have a positive, enjoyable experience with the same thing you have.

I think you may have misunderstood me slightly, I've never played ARMA, OFP or any 'simulation style' shooters before. My realm tends to be in the more action/arcade oriented shooters. I understand that the game is still in an early stage, which I mentioned, and I'm hoping that the experience becomes closer to something I can enjoy. I understand that the game has some unusual functions that need to be taken into account, but I've played other games with similar complexity that give many of your actions context-sensitive cues - for instance, the V for Vault key is almost entirely useless unless you're in front of a low wall. The other main issue I have is that the key bindings are bizarre compared to more 'industry standard' 'AAA' games (Space to raise a weapon? space is usually jump/vault/interact with cover) and that initially is a big turnoff because I'm immediately not only in what I understand to be a hostile environment (Say what you like, but as far as I understand it, any other player is there to kill me, whether for sport or for equipment, and zombies don't discriminate), and dealing with uncomfortable, hostile controls. I understand Day Z is in alpha, but as I understand it, Day Z is a game that won't have any sort of interactive tutorial, or way to acclimate yourself to the way the game works, so the only way to get into it seems to be a trial by fire (or to somehow meet up with your friends who already know the game, and have them tell you), since much of learning a new control scheme is performing actions to make it into muscle memory (for me, at least). At least one of my deaths was due to my muscle memory telling me to do something that the game decided is a button for something else, which goes against standard conventions. I actually don't, because I dislike hotbar-based combat. But in most MMOs the core controls don't use more than a handfull of keys - it's mostly your hotbar and switching between hotbars that uses a lot, and that only becomes relevent once you get deeper into the game, and have to worry about managing tons of skills.

For me the controls would get in the way of that. I understand what the core experience of DayZ is supposed to be, and for me, the controls are too complicated and unresponsive/glitchy for me to even want to get into the rush. It's possible to facilitate a large variety of actions through a relatively small number of controls through intelligent use of context. For people that see a 100% need to have all those keys for all of those functions, the option should still be there, but from what I experienced, there is in no way a need for that many buttons for that many actions. I'm probably going to take some flak for this, but I played and enjoyed Nether, and from what I can tell, it's at least semi-similar. It's really more like hatevomit, but if you like the taste of acrid barf, more power to you. And in my defense, I told him not to buy it for me, and that "I will hit you if you buy me DayZ" so it's his fault for doing it :0 Also buying me DayZ is enough punishment, I don't think he needs to bitch slap me.

A friend bought Day Z for me the other day, and I decided that I'd give it a try with them. I had an overwhelmingly negative experience. I understand that this game is in Alpha, and I'm not judging the final product based on the current version of the game, but I have some suggestions - I hope the devs read this. First, I'll give a recap of my experience. I loaded the game up, looked around, went to try to jump and pulled my fists up instead - I then started changing settings around and yelling at the people who I was on mics with about how awful they were. After about 20 minutes, I wasn't happy with how much I had to compromise, and how many things I'm used to being relegated to one key were spaced out over the entire left side of my keyboard. I jogged around, having completely submitted myself to the fact that if anything or anyone saw me, I was going to die, and thereby having filled myself with a sort of reckless abandon that is unheard of in DayZ. I wandered around in an area I didn't understand for about 30 minutes, and found absolutely nothing over the span of several houses, a couple of small warehouses, and a long stretch of country road. After reaching the point of nearly starving to death, and nearly having hypothermia, I found a tall building and promptly leapt to my death. I was surprised at the... dullness of death. The rush of falling suddenly ending in a black screen simply reading "You died." I waited for about 5 minutes until realizing I had to hit ESC and click "respawn", and that the game wouldn't give me that simple convenience. I spawned near to where I died. I once again wandered around - this time I put a battery in my flash light and started looking through farm houses. I found a hand saw and promptly put it on one of my ears as a decorative ornament that would also serve to intimidate any possible bandits and zombies - nothing with a functioning brain would attack something that so recklessly put a saw so close to it's face. After wandering around for about 5 minutes, I decided to have a look around and saw that I was close to the coast, so I ran for the coast, and then took a sharp left, walking along the rocky shore until I encountered a light house. I cautiously entered. Finding items inside, my first thought was that it was someone's hidden stash, and that I was in danger, so I grabbed the burlap sack behind the ladder and promptly put it on my head. I stumbled around in pitch blackness for 10 minutes, trying feverishly to pull it off of my head, pulling it out of my inventory, putting it on the ground, climbing up and down the ladder, putting it back on and pulling it back off - nothing helped until I logged out and back into the game. After that I was instructed to stay put while one of my friends who knew the game better came looking for me, but I had other plans. I climbed up the tower and looked at the items laying around. I lamented my limited storage before playing some menu tetris, trying to decide what would be most useful, and I ended up deciding on a portable stove and a flash light. I wandered around on top of the light house for a few minutes before climbing down, figuring I was sort of an obvious target. I saw in the light house for about 5 minutes before figuring I was also a vulnerable target in such a tight room, so I climbed up the ladder, and decided to sit on the wall opposite the ladder, so that I'd be able to see anyone and ambush them with my hideously inaccurate fists. After backing myself up against the wall, my particles destabilized and I phased through it. I shrugged and stood up, walking over to the railing to have a look at the scenery - it was surprisingly beautiful in a sort of grey, sort of bland way. I then tried to jump, and climbed over the railing to my death. I went to the bathroom after that, left my computer and the game running since I had nothing of value on my person. I have a wireless headset - all I heard was the sound of a zombie beating me to death while I stood there and took it, but I really needed to piss, so I didn't care. I came back to find myself unconscious. I waited, came to for a moment, and was beat into unconsciousness immediately again by the same zombie. I hit ESC and respawned. On my final life, I spawned near some kind of apartment complex with a walled courtyard. I tried to punch a zombie to knock it over, but I kept missing because apparently my hand-eye coordination is awful, and the provided cursor is actually no way to aim in melee. I then hastily pulled the pitchfork off of my back (I picked one of those up), and tried to hit it with the pitchfork, but my wild swinging of what was clearly a took designed for stabbing was useless. I eventually ran into the complex and wandered around the building getting frustrated that I couldn't fit my meaty outstretched fists through certain doors sideways, and feeling like a massive giant because i'd turned my FOV up slightly. At this point, I was so upset at the game that every action I performed was done with enough malice to kill just about anything in close proximity. I eventually turned off the game out of sheer anger and decided that I wouldn't be bakc any time soon, while trying to argue with one of my on-mic friends about how the controls are genuinely bad, and that "you'll get used to them" isn't a good argument in any situation. So, after that recap, There's one thing that frustrated me more than anything else - and it's the controls. DayZ standalone has some of the worst controls I've ever encountered in a game, and I've never played ARMA, but from what my friends tell me, it has a control scheme that is very similar, and just as awful (IMHO) Since I know they're transitioning engines, I'm hoping that the controls are altered to offer at least the OPTION of mapping certain controls to be more like their more arcady FPS counterparts - things like Crouching, going Prone and Standing all being mapped to the same key via context, instead of using 3 keys separately. The ability to jump would be nice - the same button that jumps can also be used to vault based on context. Picking items up off of the ground is extremely finnicky - I had to position my cursor at a weird angle, and be dragging over it slowly in a specific direction to grab the saw I found, for instance. Melee combat is extremely unpleasant, especially since the cursor point is actually not anywhere close to where your attack will hit - at least form what my friends tell me - meaning that fighting in melee is more of a guessing game than actual gameplay, which is bad when you're trying to knock down a zombie, because they chase you quickly and tirelessly - and their attacks seem to hit me approximately 2 seconds after they swing, and no matter where I am in relation to their swinging claws. In addition, the movement felt really... jarring. starting movement was really jerky, and a lot of the time I wouldn't be able to move very freely through spaces, I'd often get caught on geometry that shouldn't be in the way, or get stuck while trying to move around an object because the room was too small and my model was too big (I was also apparently about eactly as tall as the door frames, so I don't know if my model was really big, or that's how it was designed - but the houses and rooms all felt too small. So, that's my piece. I never even got to experience the survival bit - though I'll say that food was so scarce that I literally found NONE before my character informed me that he was starving to death, and there was barely anything to pick up in any of the houses that I could possibly use as a weapon to hunt for some. So there's that. All in all, I had an overwhelmingly negative experience, and I probably won't be coming back to this game until the engine change happens. I hope my feedback is helpful, at least.