Heiduk

This is a feature not a problem. Wearing a big backpack IRL also obstructs your view, in fact it is often a bigger obstruction than it currently is in game as it can prevent your head from tilting back far enough to look up. If you want an unobstructed view use a smaller backpack. Interesting choices.

Meh, I probably can't add anything I haven't already written in the last 100 page thread on this topic. I'm just glad Bohemia decided to release the Alpha as yet another 3rd person deathmatch game rather than the original zombie survival game it may ultimately become. It made my decision to not buy the Alpha easy and now I get to spend more time with my family this Christmas. :)

I hate third person (in DayZ), but like 3rd person enabled servers better. Why? Because it is a multiplayer game and I want to play with other people. Is that really so hard to understand? Don't tell me someone needs to make yet another post about tipping points, lowest common denominators, etc. etc. I'm probably being nostalgic, but I swear 3rd person advocates were able to mount a better defense back in the good old days.

I'm afraid you may end up greatly disappointed when standalone is released.

I don't remember which one it is off the top of my head, but one of the target range mods/missions allows you to export bullet trajectories so you can analyze them in a spreadsheet. It may even allow you to make plots of the trajectory while you are in the mission, but it has been a while since I played around with it.

I wouldn't be so sure about that. Four hours ago he posted the following on reddit in response to a suggestion that players gain fitness the longer they stay alive. http://www.reddit.com/r/dayz/comments/1lvxt1/dayz_devblog_7th_september_2013/cc3j2tw I think a JA2 style learn by doing system that was largely hidden from players could add a lot to DayZ.

I love how differently people see this game. Anyone for 200 pages? I'll begin, water is in fact not wet. I get mine from: http://www.buydehydratedwater.com/

I think this is a bigger reason for the current server populations than many people on both sides of the issue would like to admit. 3 of the 4 default difficulty levels enable 3rd person. If I was a new player introduced to ARMA by DayZ setting up a server last fall when player and server numbers peaked I would have picked one of the default server profiles. More than likely I would have picked a profile in the middle of the difficulty range, and that would have meant yet another third person. Like so many of DayZ's current features that we take for granted I think the dominance of 3rd person is an accident as much as anything. Having hooked up a few sling loads in real-life and knowing of a couple helos that went gone down because of improperly loaded slings, I think this is exactly how it should be. This shouldn't be a skill that you master in 20 minutes. Hell even though they were less than 1.5 meters tall and nearly 50 m from the LZ helo-ops made us move a couple of the tents at one field camp because they were underneath the flight line that the pilots preferred. That being said, functional mirrors would go a long way towards making vehicles, including helos, much more realistic and easier to operate..

If DayZ has taught us anything I'm pretty sure it's that violence is always an option.

You mean you won't immediately quit your job and start a life long quest to punch every Kiwi on the planet in the face just in case their last name is Hall? How dare you post on an internet forum. :)

I'm not sure why night is an argument against linking a rest state to distance from an active campfire. The idea is to only enable third person when the player feels safe. It is entirely up to them where that threshold lies. Sure fires are more visible at night, as they should be. Now instead of trying to hide the smoke you need to hide the direct illumination, meaning you need to build your fire in a different place than you would during the day. Interesting choices that add to the complexity of the game. The only problem with this line of reasoning is that there are a million lines in the sand for what is viewed as game breaking. Just consider Dslyeci and ShackTac, they consider 1st person to be game breaking, but use (modified) crosshairs, and very often coop player markers, and radar that shows were the other members of your fire team are. Fraggle is exactly right, ARMA has thrived by allowing 100s of niche communities to develop around their individual definitions of how the game should be played. I don't think that model works for DayZ. Choice is good, but design is better. In one of his interviews didn't he say something to the effect that he mostly played the mod in 1st person but has been spending more time in 3rd since working on the standalone? When first reading that I remember wondering, given the state of the standalone, how much actual playing is going on, compared to simply running around testing features/bugs. I think it's pretty hard to divine his personal opinion at this point.

Way to miss the point entirely.

I'm starting to like the idea of a rest state with additional viewing perspectives, animations, perhaps other mechanics tied to proximity to an active camp fire (or similar 'beacon'). It brings back the whole risk/reward calculation that is currently missing from third person usage. Sure you can check out your cool new green jeans, but somebody might just spot your billowing cloud of smoke. Maybe you want to make your 'safe' zone a little safer so you get all of your buddies to meet at Devil's castle, fill it with fires, and start a third person dance party, weapons bazaar, medical clinic, whatever. The biggest drawback I can envision relates to the Devil's castle scenario. What happens to the party crasher's who want to murder all those happy ravers and steal their precious beans? They are forced to use 1st person while going up against a foe behind solid cover who can take full advantage of 3rd person. An easy fix would be to force everybody within earshot in to 1st person for 15 minutes after a shot is fired. With those two limitations, (X meters from a fire, and Y minutes from an audible gunshot) I don't think there would be a need for any other limits, e.g. stance, view distance, time to initiation, etc. Of course, the effective radius of a fire would need to be set small enough so that it would be difficult for periscope campers to use it as bait, while scouting in 3rd person, but that is probably obvious.

You may not remember, but way back in spring of 2012 there was a series of YouTube videos called The Days Ahead. Some people might even say that they started the whole DayZ frenzy. If you listen really close you might recognize the voice of the guy playing alongside CHKilroy. Yes that's right, its the same guy whose video started this whole thread. Also, since when is good game design synonymous with what streamers like?

DayZ, now with hands free hospital roof camping. Actually, I suppose this could work. Personally I don't see the attraction of watching my character, but clearly some people do so hey, whatever you're in to. What do you think the difference is that makes low-frame rates in 1st person so much more unpleasant than in 3rd person? Is it something that could be fixed in 1st?

I liked it, but slightly less that giving Zeds 3rd person.

Well at least the movie angle is a creative line of argument. Unfortunately, I'm quite sure that any working cameraman would strongly disagree with your assertion that viewpoint doesn't matter. When you see a 1st person shot in a film rest assured it was done for a very specific reason. Consider the following quotes from the 5 C's of Cinematography, a book that even after nearly 50 years is still considered one of the definitive works on the art. In the following quotes subjective refers to a 1st person view and point-of-view refers to 3rd person. If you read the entire 10 page section discussing these camera angles it is clear that in-terms of the viewer's identification with the protagonist: Subjective (1st person) > Point-of-View (3rd person) > Objective (3rd person) It also goes in to why the subjective view doesn't work very well in movies. Hint: You are forced to view events as if you were an active participant, even though you have no control over them and this disconnect is rather uncomfortable. I'm not sure what any of that has to do with DayZ but I'm a movie nerd and its Saturday morning so there you go.

I finally had a chance to watch this video, good stuff, thanks for the link. Things I learned: We need more data, also more pain suits.

Time is the most expensive part of software development. Furnishing an office is cheap, renting time in a mo-cap studio is cheap. Paying talented developers and artists is expensive.

For me this is the bottom line. In the specific context of DayZ it is the type of player interactions that this implies which interest me most about the game. Maybe it's also possible to achieve with some modified 3d person view, I don't know. No matter what, it seems likely that getting 3rd person right will require a nontrivial investment in development time. An investment that Bohemia has not seen a need to make up until this point. Rocket has limited resources and big dreams with lots of "wouldn't it be cool if..." scenarios. I would like to see some of those scenarios play out. So I'll repeat a suggestion I made many pages ago. Launch in 1st person and add 3rd person when it is fixed. On Day 1 you're going to be walking from Cherno to Stary anyway, might as well do it in first person.

That formula also includes zombies that teleport through walls, doors that break your legs, and rifles that vanish when placed in a backpack. Is it logical to stick with those features too? I hate 3rd person but have never played DayZ for its PvP so I'm afraid I don't fall into your, or Ken's, neat little categories either. In ARMA its called Mercenary, I think a lot of the Mod's servers renamed it to Hardcore, whatever that means. We wouldn't even be having this discussion if hosting companies had used it as the default for new servers rather than Veteran or Normal. Just call it a heart-beat sensor like they did in COD, totally legit. You can already do this. Just crawl forward a little then backup. I would be pretty curious to see the response if one of the popular Streamers who uses 3rd person did a rebuttal video on why 3rd person is awesome. Does anybody have any connections? Enough with the self pity. I'm sure Rocket hasn't read all 70+ pages but I would be surprised if he isn't aware of the discussion. Besides, it not like its a new argument, 1st/3rd person wars have been going on ever since I joined this forum and they have happened on the ARMA forums since the game was released. Suck it up, make your points like everybody else, and maybe just maybe you might have a tiny influence on the final game. The operative word in Ken's post is "can". The issue is that for them to actually be tactical they need to be designed around that view point from the ground up. Everything from level design to the weapons available need to consider the view point. The problem with 3rd person in DayZ/ARMA is that you take a world and set of game mechanics that are based to a very high degree on a real place and real-world mechanics then add one little tweak. You give the player a floating camera on a 4 m tall pole that follows them around. That one little change instantly invalidates a large number of real-world tactics and strategies, so now you have a bunch of players running around your carefully crafted representation of the "Real" world doing completely unrealistic things. Maybe that makes for a fun game so its a reasonable tradeoff and you leave it as it is. Maybe you want players to behave in a more realistic/authentic way so you start making tweaks to the mechanics of the world that counteract your original tweak. How will you define authentic? What metrics will you use to determine when players are acting authentically enough so you can stop tweaking? How many man-hours are you going to spend making adjustments to meet your goal and what unintended consequences will those adjustments have? Or maybe you take a step back and decide to let the design be driven by a single goal: "Make the world and mechanics as physically plausible as possible." All of a sudden design decisions are radically simplified because they are driven by the immutable laws of physics and biology. There is nothing more authentic than that.

I thought you would like that one. We can't take ourselves to seriously now can we.

They may be meaningless to the player, and the player doesn't need to know them, but they are far from meaningless to the people who are designing the game. And their design decisions directly influence our in-game experiences. You may not have noticed, but in my post you are replying to I was very careful to say typical rather than average. As you sort of imply, knowing how much variability there is around the average is just as important as knowing the average. If the average life expectancy is 1 hour +/- 5 minutes that tells you something completely different than if it is 1 hour +/- 30 minutes, and it tells you something else entirely if 95% of players are dead within 20 minutes, but there is one guy who has been camped out west of Kamenka for the last 250 days. Note Rocket isn't stupid and I'm sure he has already thought about how to answer all of the questions I posted. In fact, I seem to recall that one of the reasons he didn't want to start allowing private hives last fall was because of all the data mining they were doing on the public hive.

My experiences, and gut tell me that this is an accurate assessment, however it would be really interesting to have some actual data on it. If I was Bohemia trying to solve this issue the first thing I would do once the game was minimally playable was set up identical instrumented 1st & 3rd person servers and start asking questions like: What is the typical life expectancy? What is the murder rate? What is the Zombie kill rate? What is the typical player loadout? What is the typical distance between living players? How much time do players spend in town? How much time do players spend in each stance? How much time do players spend moving at each speed? Where do players spend the most time? When do players typically visit each location? I guarantee the answers will be different. Having some data on what those differences are would be really useful in identifying what the true impacts of 3rd person are, something we can only guess at right now. Signed, another Carebear 1st person lover.

Hell, even the bloody YOGSCAST videos in early to mid July of last year were done mostly in 1st person. I blame it on FrankieonPC, he ruined it for everyone, and everybody already knows he's a cheater. :P I thought it was still a bit of an open question as to whether anyone will be able to host their own servers or if they will all be run by Bohemia?