I have never really been into the whole tactical realism thing, it has always put me off games before, heck, even when they added the food meter in Minecraft I was disappointed! My online gaming background goes back nearly 10 years now. I started with FarCry, which is still the best gaming experience I've ever had, moved onto competitive Call of Duty 2 and then 4, a few years back I stopped playing competitive due to finishing university and getting a 'real life', however I remained casual, playing WoW and Starcraft 2. Looking at the games in my history, DayZ should not appeal to me, and it didn't. A few of my friends got ARMA for DayZ and were raving about it to me, I resisted, 'knowing' that this wouldn't be a game I would enjoy. I had stuck like superglue to Diablo 3 since it had been released, had a great time progressing through it until my Demon Hunter got the nerf bat, and I found progressing through Act 4 inferno impossible. Refusing to regear I decided to give ARMA and DayZ a go. From the get go, I found myself fully immersed. I had never been so scared playing a game before, even though I am a big sissy when it comes to scary stuff, this was on a level I had never experienced. My friends have a veteran server, so you could say I was dropped in right at the deep end. I had no idea what I was doing and the slightest noise around me was causing me to cower and whimper. After a couple of deaths I managed to find myself a gun, only to realise that a gun is probably the worst thing you can EVER have when your used to spraying the s*** out of anything you see (the downfall of CoD!) so this experience was short lived (literally). My next attempt proved more fruitful, and I managed to find my way to my friends and we raided for hours. I died during that nighttime because I fell off a ladder :( During my first few days I racked up 2 murders, whilst assisting in around 5 others. Our favourite tactic was to find someone and stalk them, occasionally saying "mine mine mine mine" over in game talk (
) to freak them out. The results often being hilarious.Last night, after 4 day(Z) of playing we ventured into a military airfield. My friends, who are very careful with everything they do, made me wait for 15 minutes while they tried to figure out who was spawning zombies on the other side of the field. Eventually we found the source as gunfire went rampant, there were 2 people in a barracks, pulling hordes of zombies. After 20 minutes, I had had enough, I decided I would go for a "LEROY!!!" and legged it across the field towards the barracks, where fire was still raining down and more and more zombies were being pulled. About half way across the field I realised I had made a big mistake. I had worked pretty hard on this guy and I really didn't want to lose him. So I hit the deck hard, petrified. My friends were laughing at me on TS, because they could hear how much I was terrified and how dumb I had been. But I decided "no guts, no glory" and began to crawl the good 400 meters to the barracks, where still more fire was going on... 30 minutes after initial contact, I got within 20 meters of the barracks, my hand now shaking, I was losing my bottle. We were not sure of how many people were in there, our best guess was three by all the weapons we were hearing, and we thought there might be more hanging around, especially as they were being so noisy. I slowly crawled to the window, observed by my peers, who were actually trying really hard to keep me alive now, they had taken protective positions in case I got into trouble. Standing up at the window, I immediately spotted a tango proning on the ground looking out of the door. Too scared to shoot, I quickly proned myself and told my friends in a very shaky voice that I had spotted one. They wanted me to check the other windows before taking action. I stood back up, walked my way passed another window, clear, another, clear, last window, clear. I was now out of my head with fear. We knew there were more than one, why could I only see one??? After some motivational speech from our group leader, the time had come to "do or die", I got up at the first window again, took aim, and unleashed hell on the body on the floor. At this point, my adrenalin reserves were running dry. I screamed... very loud....it was time to run. Fast. I ran for cover, regrouped with my team scouting began again to find our missing perps. We eventually found them and killed them, and for our troubles, stumbled across their camp which came fitted with a HUM-V. The HUM-V lasted about an hour, we had a great time in it, crashed it once but managed to fix it. Until our server restarted or crashed (we didn't work out which) and when we logged back in it was gone :( Why am I telling you all this? I'm sure its not the most gripping story you ever heard.. Well, I have never experienced a game with so much immersion. Which invokes so much emotion and takes so much effort to play. In my eyes it is a turning point in gaming and I can only see it getting bigger and bigger. Sure there is a lot wrong with it, but the thing that makes it so spectacular, is that there is so much wrong with it, yet its still excels (if that makes sense?). I don't think I've ever experienced a game still so heavily in development and seen so much potential in it. If the team keep adding to it, and ironing out its flaws, this game will go far, very far. So there is an essay full of positives, it seems only fair I post some of the negatives as well as to offer an objective point of view. Movement feels very clunky, to the point of being very slow and unresponsive, however I am unsure as to whether this is the game rather than the mod (?) Navigation is very difficult, I'm awful with maps (male...go figure!) and struggle to get around using the in game map, most of the time I have to get my friends to come and get me! I feel not allowing server admins to actually kick or reserve slots in their servers is overly harsh, although kicking to create room is bad, reserving slots would be a lot kinder considering they are paying for the server, but I guess this issue has been brought up a lot :) That's literally all I can think of. Any other negative aspects I can think of are clearly bugs or WIP's and will be sorted in due time. So I would like to thank the DayZ team, for giving me a gaming experienced unparalleled by anything I have ever seen before, and I hope that we have only seen the tip of the iceberg! TL;DR Game's good, go buy it.
