Toops

I like the idea of one big parrybox. Throw the concept of Low/Med/High in there and suddenly everyone's playing street fighter. If you combine single hitbox with weapon trumps, it could work. For example, If you try to parry a hockey stick with a combat knife, no dice, you're getting hit. You would have to spot the hockey stick, and know to use a dodge. If you try to block a baseball bat with a fire hydrant, no problemo. But the fire hydrant attack would be crazy slow, so it's hard to counter against the faster baseball bat. That level of complexity would reward gamers for practice and expertise. If any more precision were required, I feel like it would be too cumbersome and difficult to keep reliable, given the realities of latency and open-world multiplayer gaming.

I think the melee system should have enough complexity to allow players to get good at it, but it shouldn't become a meta-game. The interface needs to be simple, but not lobotomy simple like it is now. Two attack types: stab and swing. Two defend types: dodge, and parry. The complexity would be knowing how each item's timing works, which items trump which, where the block and hitboxes are, and when to use a dodge vs. a parry.. Melee fights should be slow and kind of awkward. That's how they are in real life. It should be hard to dodge attacks, but totally doable. Tired, hungry, dehydrated civilian survivors aren't veteran UFC fighters. They're not that strong, they're not that coordinated, and it's hard to block a baseball bat swinging at your torso. Edit: I would also like to see your vision get blurred as you get hit more.

Beans, sir. I really like your simplified take on it. It seems well within what's possible with the existing design/framework, and would avoid a lot of the balance/micromanagement problems that could arise. One single fitness stat that adds palpable (but not game-breaking) value to your character over time is exactly what I expect from Bohemia if they want to make a game that will actually live up to the hype.

If we just make weapons more rare, but leave them as effective once assembled, the problem will get worse. It will just widen the gap between haves and have-nots. The uber-dedicated gamers will inevitably get armed, and when they do, they will become godlike because no one else has the time to farm for crazy hours. The griefing will be brutal, relentless, and unstoppable. The fights will become tragically one-sided, and ganking crews will just run the coastline and make everyone hate this game. In reality, hitting a target with a gun is EXTREMELY difficult, and takes years of training to be effective under pressure. Most survivors are just civilians, they would be awful with firearms, and would get really nervous when looking at a human or a monster through the sights. IMHO what we need is at least these things: -Way less accuracy: If you've ever shot a gun, you know that feeling of aiming right at a target, and it missing, and you're like, WHAT? I was aiming RIGHT AT IT! -More general gun sway when aiming down sights. Novices don't know how to hold or balance a weapon, and their hands typically get uncontrollably shaky once they mentally commit to firing the weapon. -firing from the hip: It's clownshoes, and should miss like 90% of the time, like it does in real life. -an "under fire" or "adrenaline" system: Reduced accuracy when you're in a high-pressure, adrenaline inducing situation. Watch real video of a person killing a deer sometime. After they shoot, they hyperventilate like crazy because of all the adrenaline that comes with killing an animal, and the extremely violent reaction shooting a gun has on your body. The only reason they hit the animal is from years of practice and experience. -Guns jamming constantly (the frequency with which you have to clean your weapon so it doesn't jam takes OCD-like dedication). make weapon cleaning kits extremely rare, so everyone's guns are always jamming. Overall, there's just way too much run and gun, FPS CoD cowboy shit. They need to make hitting something with a bullet really hard, that's the only solution I can see.

Yeah I agree this would probably be a major redesign, and is unlikely, but I'm glad you like the idea. It would be a core mechanic in my dream survival game. A part of me hopes it would tie in well with their current health/physiology model, but that's not likely at the module/class level. Or, maybe a redesign is on the backlog but hasn't started yet, and this could influence their design choices. Still a long shot, but soo many systems feel like placeholders to me. Anyway, the balancing/tuning would definitely be tricky, I agree. I think part of the challenge with DayZ is making it so you're always fighting for survival. The minute you hit Godmode, the game would lose all meaning. In that way, the design would have to prevent fitness breakpoints (like being able to infinitely sprint circles around zombies), and eliminate "min-max" builds, which would make one particular "fitness spec" THE must-have. That's why making you get cold faster the more fit you are (low body fat) would help offset the game getting too easy as you get really fit. Also, people who exercise a lot get sick easier, because their body is always recovering. Stuff like that. I imagine the alternative approach being a fat dude who can't run but has a truck full of food and guns. Still highly mobile, and he would be much better off in the winter. But he would constantly have to search for fuel, constantly be drawing attention to himself, stay on roads, and in the summer, he'd have a really hard time staying cool, what with all that extra fat. So he might have to drive that truck to an old deserted school track and run around it a few times to shed some weight. But you're also right on the other side, the devs would have to tune and balance the interface. If micromanaging the fitness and movement of your character is too hard or cumbersome, you'd just get slowed, run down, and murdered constantly, and that wouldn't be fun at all.

Use-Case: The quick-looter Goal: Maximize your ability to sprint quickly into a house, loot it, and sprint back to safety or to the next house Starting Attributes: Create a character with low base aerobic and muscular fitness, but very high anaerobic fitness. Fitness Strategy: sprint everywhere you go. This will build your anaerobicModifier. Benefits: No one can catch you! You will be able to sprint extremely fast (faster than zombies), and for a much longer amount of time before you need to stop. Drawbacks: Once you run out of sprintStamina, you're a sitting duck. You can't travel long distances on foot very effectively. You can't carry much gear without having your sprintSpeed compromised. Nutrition: Tons of carbs. Atkins ain't gonna cut it. Strategy: Pick out high-value buildings in big cities. Sprint right past zombies. You're moving so fast it's almost impossible to shoot you. Lock the door behind you. You can then recover your sprintStamina while looting. Once you get the sweet lewts, throw open a different door, and sprint away to your exit-route. High risk, high adrenaline.

Look, let's not even pretend that we want to simulate a realistic apocalypse. A real apocalypse would be so miserable the idea itself is ridiculous. What we want is the exact opposite: immersion and belief in a fantasy portrayal of an apocalypse. Thing is, we humans are naturally hard on ourselves. It's damn near impossible to live up to our own expectations, every day, in life. But we need to believe that if tested, we could rise to the occasion. So let's dispense with the idea of "realism" and instead talk about the core mechanic we actually care about: Maintaining immersion. It's my opinion that maintaining immersion is what actually keeps the dopamine rolling in our brain. That big payoff when we "find" a "weapon" is what constantly drives us to push into towns, crawl past zombies, and plan our next route for our next loot. There's a part of our hunter/gatherer/scavenger brain, way down the stem somewhere, that actually believes we are bettering ourselves by finding a "sniper rifle" in a "hospital shelving unit". The minute that sniper rifle is clipping through the ceiling, and a zed noclip shambles through the wall and 1-shots you, it breaks immersion, and even that low-down lizard brain goes "uhh, this is bull dude. That's not a zucchini." It's all electrons sprayed out onto a screen at a noticeably non-real resolution, and when we're reminded that we could be hunting for real food, beefing up at the gym, or getting ahead in our day jobs/school/relationships, that's a negative user experience. That's the one that makes you go "Wait why am I playing this? What's the point of this game?" In the end, we want a compelling, immersive experience so we can forget the brutish realities of our everyday lives for a while. Whatever the devs do to strengthen immersion will strengthen the game.