I'm uninstalling DayZ. If you care why, read on, otherwise, move along. I spend more time trying to play than playing. Sometimes, when I want to relax and play a game in my limited downtime, I boot up a game, play it, and then quit after playing enough. With DayZ though, I do it a bit differently. - I wait for a character to be created and ponder what that even means, I watch a minimum of 2 loading screens that too often hang for more then 10 minutes, load into a server at night, with no gear, and start over. - Then I wait for a character to be created again, and play for 20 minutes before my legs are broken in a doorway,so I spend 10 minutes crawling to a zombie so he can put me down. -Then I wait for a character to create, and load, again. -I have a 30 minute session where I stumble onto a sniper and jack her Enfield. Then I lose my connection. - Wait for character to create (pondering all the while), mystery loading screen lotery: loading?... Loading?... no, it's hung - sixlauncher is hung too?? -install dayzCommander (yay, so much better) - wait for a character to create (ponder), load? Yay! ... Yay? I spawn in a house... an unlootable house... I try to crawl out of it. 'You have been glitch-killed.' -... All this loading, I better figure out how to play this in windowed mode so I can do something other than stare at a loading screen for 5 out of every 20 minutes. Alt-enter? Sweet. Oh, it's stuck on 4:3 aspect ratio.. crap. -try desperately to change the windowed aspect ratio. give up. Notice that I cannot change video settings (they always revert to default). Fuck it, framerate isn't too bad on high settings... I've only got an hour of downtime left anyway... -wait for character to create (seriously, wtf is it talking about?! If you wait for it before you create it, then you'll be waiting forever!). load? ... load?? ... I mean really, LOAD? ... yes. loaded. -20 minutes, find a shotgun. Running to Palona through the woods - Oh, wait, no I'm not... This isn't the woods. I've been teleported to a room? A room full of Bear traps? (Ouch) A room full of bear traps and the other 30 players?! We all look around in a moment of confusion. Then somebody shoots. An explosion of gunfire and beartraps. "You are dead" -Unistall. Honestly it boils down to one single problem: load time. All could be forgiven if I could just jump back into the game, but when each upset costs 10 minutes of loading and reloading... Honestly, I've booked more hours restarting and glitching than I have actually playing. Yes, it's an alpha. I can't change that, but honestly, I think it inherits most of its instability from Arma. I've tried playing the base game as well, and that is a similarly glitchy experience. (Is ArmaII in beta phase? I can't tell. Why does a beta have expansion packs?) And Arma3? Hands on the steering wheel is all they could say about updating the vehicle engine? I dunno, I'm just not seeing any bright horizon here. "But it's free!" No, it's not. It cost me $23. Amra2 sales are up 500%. People are buying DayZ, not Arma. And I don't blame them. Arma vanilla is an interface nightmare. DayZ does it right by eliminating 90% of the Arma engine right off the bat. When your base engine is as rough as this, then less is truly more. I'll sit back and wait for WarZ, and hope. And in the meantime, I'll try MineZ...
