Another Justin

I bought the game as a Zombie survival simulation - the permanent death feature is amazing because it actually makes you care about staying alive, and the player interaction makes things unpredictable enough to make that actually a challenge. In particular the brutality of a post-apocalyptica makes contact with other humans particularly tense - finding another human alize is a rare and exciting event! Are they friendly or are they going to kill you on sight and steal all of your stuff? Should you ask them for help, run away or shoot first? This kind of brutal realism is unique to DayZ and combined with the permanent death make for an incredibly tense experience truly gripping experience that is like no other FPS I've ever played. Of course once you have played DayZ for a while you come to realise that the only players who won't shoot you on sight are the ones that don't have a gun. I know this because even I now shoot on sight - this completely ruins the tense atmosphere of these interactions. Either you are armed in which case it becomes a fairly standard (albeit very tactical) FPS experience, or your not, in which case there isn't really much you can do except wait to respawn (one of my favourites was the guy stood right next to me who was desparately trying to kill me with a crossbow. It took him a couple of minutes, but seeing as I didn't even have a hatchet there wasn't a whole lot I could do about it). I like that I get killed a lot, what I'm not keen on is that every player interaction turns into a fairly standard FPS encounter - For me the appeal of the game is the immersion in a brutal battle for survival (against both humans and zombies) and I'm simply not the sort of person who goes around shooting people I see on sight. At the moment it seems that my only alternative is to simply avoid other players, but without player interaction the game lacks depth.