What is your Dream Vision for Dayz - 2 Years from now?

[fubar_in_pittsburgh 409]

Instead of doing all that work making and sustaining HUGE servers like this, why don't we just work on bringing the zombie virus to reality?

I shall consult the Necronomicon, I'll get back to you. If anyone has some 2.4.5. Trioxin that would be a huge help as well.

[skeptikinhidef 7]

A river. No, really, that's what I want to see in Chernarus.

I too would like to see a river or two that would make boats a little more usefull. Even a couple streams here and there, I refuse to believe that a forested area like Chernarus has no flowing water...

Also I'd like the map size to be increased a bit, make vehicles (especially heli's) mean something, with new areas to more evenly distribute the loot table across the map. Lets take endgame away from stary/nwaf.

Lastly I'd like them to do away with the pooping idea... I mean going for realism is one thing but some things should just be left out, it is a game afterall. My two cents.

EDIT: Oh and sewers under Cherno and Elektro!

Edited March 3, 2013 by Shadoe

[Sutinen 635]

Better woods (Currently it's all flat and trees don't block out the sunlight it dense areas), tall grass shows up at long distance (With no lag), mount-and-bladey melee (Rocket stated he wants it) and bows.

Edited March 3, 2013 by Sutinen

[disorder 344]

I think the future of this game is wearing VR headsets while running on a treadmill for ultimate immersion.

Edited March 3, 2013 by disorder

[YassirX 54]

My "dream" features would be:

- Crafting (you can find resources which can be crafted into items, depending on your crafting skill).

- Better Physics (destroyable walls, better animations).

- Bigger Map with more diversity (more climatic zones).

- Rivers across the Map.

- All big cities are currently across the coast, there should be a "metropolis" city which is far in the landscape. (map should be made bigger to apply this city).

This city is very big and even has a few skyscrapers, it has big shopping malls, a prison, police office and student college... everything you expect from a really big city.

- Trees should look more different and depending on the forest density, they should although should darken the environment in the forest.

- Weapon-Customization (seems to be in the Standalone).

- Grouping-System (invite people in a group to be able to see their location and health in a "Group-UI"). The "location" feature is only enabled on Regular Servers.

- Ride-able Horses (farms should have a small chance to have "alive" horses, they need food to survive). There is although a horse perk, the player can improve the horse with some tools and interaction. Improved horses will move faster/have more hitpoints and such. To enable a horse to carry items, players can detach a backpack on a horse, the backpack will dissapear from the main inventory and can be seen on the horseback. If a horse dies it can be gutted to get 8 stacks of horse meat (which heals as much as cow-meat).

- More Melee/Missile Weapons (Bows, Shields (craft-able), Swords... its an apocalypse!).

- Players can use their Weapons while riding a Horse.

- Car-Wheels can get out of air (for example when they are shot at), which is making it a lot harder to control the vehicle.

- More Clothing and Clothing-Customization (Clothing can be modified with crafting).

- Helmets can give small protection against heads-hots (depending on the bullet caliber)

- More Bandit/Hero Levels (you get perks/additional clothing for getting a certain amount of negative/positive humanity points), for example: -20000 Humanity = 15% more damage with all weapons. +20000 Humanity = Meat has the ability to heal blood 30% stronger. + 30000 = Player acquires a police outfit which grants him more resistance against assault rifles (20% damage reduction).

Sidenote: This would actually be a endgame feature which would discern veterans from new players, the term "survivor" would only be used for fresh spawns... as every player has the ambition to get further in the hero and bandit tree, as Humanity stays after death the gained abilities are permanent. It should be harder to rise/reduce Humanity and it should no longer drop/rise by itself.

- Internal-Clan feature, people can get invited into a Clan, which enables them to get a "clan-chat" (similar to the side-chat, but only for clan-members). The "clan-chat" works across all severs. Clan-Members can interact across different Servers. If the Clan controls a Fort, Clan-Members have the ability to show the Fort-Location on the Map.

- Players should be able to build fortified camps, there should be a limit of fort-camps for each server (depending on the map-size). If the limit is reached players will need to occupy the existing forts, this would although be a endgame source. People will want to have the best forts to be able to defend their items/cars/tools/horses etc. against enemy players. If a group occupies a fort, they can switch the position by transporting the equipment to a new location (a lot of vehicles will be needed to transport a whole fort).

- Players can get infected with the Virus and transform into a zombie (this can be prevented by certain missions around Green-Mountain which would give you a medical cure with "single" use).

The transformation will take a lot of time and will only progress while the player is online, it will start with reduced movement speed and changes in the players appearance (like stains on the players body). The whole transformation will take about 12 playtime hours, so every player is able to prevent it. Optional: If the players transforms into a zombie he will still have control over the character, he will need human flesh to survive and he cannot use any weapons, instead he gets different melee attacks. Movement-Speed is reduced by 20%. Every Hit has a 20% chance to knock a player unconscious.

- There will be a bunker under Green-Mountain which has some very strong hostile NPC's (like Zombie-Soldiers who are able to fire weapons). Its a location that should only be visited by a group of players and it provides the best loot and if the player has the "zombie-cure" mission the bunker is although the final mission target. This means that the bunker is a PvP Zone as well.

- If a player dies he can be resurrected with a defibrillator (chance = 70%). Resurrection is only possible within the first minute of the players death, if the players organs/head got hit he cannot be resurrected.

Edited March 3, 2013 by YassirX

[DemonGroover 8836]

My dream would simply be that all doors are enterable and all objects are moveable.

There is nothing more frustrating in a game than to be blocked by a chair or table.

[Darkwater (DayZ) 63]

My dream vision for DayZ, and not neccessarily 2 years down the line, is that players desire to keep their characters alive, along with more "punishment" for whipping out your favourite sniper and take potshots at unsuspecting and quite harmless players half a mile away. But to list all the changes I would like to see (many would hate it and me for even suggesting them)

-"Leveling" skills through using them. Characters making trial and error and in turn bettering their grasp of it and doing it more effectively. Can be everything from weapon maintenance to picking flowers used for whatever as means of survival.

-Actual cities. Chernogorsk, Elektrozavodsk, Zelenogorsk and Berezino are now the biggest SMALL towns in Chernarus. Even in the standards of my country, Norway, those would be regarded as tiny towns.. maybe villages or even just a residental area abit more spread out. I would want to see a city that is big, a city with a size that would hold 30k + inhabitants at the least (even if that is in some countries still considered a town). Give me something that would take ages to explore, give me sewers to move from point A to B while avoiding snipers but risking to be tunneled in by zeds or bandits making a home for themselves there.

-They want to add splints and a more realistic hazards affecting your character, then I would also want to see that a character needs surgical care to remove shrapnel, bullets or deep wounds that doesn't neccessarily kill you, but leaves you dependant on morphine and bandages because it won't stop bleeding. Basically I would want to see a more static effect of taking part in firefights should you get hit. Medics with sufficient training can do surgury with enough experience (see my first "wish")

-Really, I don't like the 28 days/weeks later approach to Zeds, I can understand small bursts of speed but them going Usain Bolt on me is a pet peeve I've had ever since starting. Make them far more resilient, also as far as I know, a headshot is actually very hard to pull of and even if you hit there's no guarantee that it actually penetrates the skull, far more determined and in far, far higher numbers and we've got ourselves a deal. In addition, make it so that they grab a hold of your character instead of punching the snot out of you.

-Major change in scenery. I've grown tired of Chernarus after 8 months. I don't need a map, I don't need signs, I don't even need a compass. It's just like the inside of my pockets now, except they are not filled with murderous pricks and zombies. Hey, it's a dream vision, I am allowed to dream for major change. Big lakes, still ponds, dense forests and high mountains with caves.

-Actual trade going on. A valid currency that is limited in supply but there's a massive amount of. I don't mind trading weapons and supplies for other weapons and supplies, but a well stocked trader is always out after that thing that will never lose value and can be used in a pinch, cash. Think bottle caps, think razorblades, think anything that needs working machinery to actually produce, machinery that is long since broken down, and is not easily made by unexperienced hands. This would be saved on each server to avoid some servers becoming oversaturated with "money" and to avoid this becoming a profitable venue in real life. Like, your 1000 caps on my server can't be used on another mans server since they do not follow your character. But of course all the gear you bought on my server could be used on another.

-Weapon deterioration. This would be sped up, obviously. A good quality gun can hold for years, along with the AK's fame for being resilient beyond belief, so they would have to be "nerfed" in that way compaired to their real life counterparts. Weapons should never be found in pristine, fresh out of the box condition. Some might even have their scopes (if they have one) broken. The trigger rusty and not responding all the time. The hammer not always reaching the bullet. Frequent jamming. Anything that can happen in real life, rare or common. As far as I know, they are gonna implement something like this, but I would want it to encompass every part of the gun that is capable of wearing out. To fix it, either you throw it away and find a new one, or find one in worse condition and use it's spare parts for your current one.

-Give me the ability to make my own town. I don't want to use the horrible looking towns and houses of Chernarus and their 70's inspired wallpaper, carpets and furniture. It makes me feel sick to my stomach and I'd rather torch the place than spend one second in there longer than I have to. I despise the look of eastern Europe, post communist housing. For a setting, it's actually a good one, don't change that. But I refuse to set up shop/home in one of those houses. I'd rather live and sell from my tent. Give us the ability to make houses like in Fallout. Yes, you can bet your ass I will make Junktown, with Killians store, Gizmos casino, Skuzzpit and Doc Morbid and it will be glorious! You all will be welcome to see it and stay as long as you wish, but don't count on having your guns along with you.

-Reputation"meter". If you kill someone and people know it was you, they can give the info to any server there is. They are supposed to be set in the same place, so what goes on on one server should be known on another aswell, assuming the info comes through. Yes, that means people can lie about you, but they would also sully their own reputation if it gets known that they spread lies, and in the end a select portion would be trusted since the 14 year old kids have used up all theirs. That would need the "one name per account" rule. If you don't like it, step up to your own actions and make amends if you wanna change, don't just change your name.

-Wanted posters along with bounty huntings. That goes along with the reputation thing. Info is worth it's weight in gold here. Players killing others for sport should have a toe tag waiting for them with their name already on it. Bounty hunters will know where and when they play, but not down to the pinpoint location on the map, of course. Just the server. If I were a bandit, I would enjoy that. I would enjoy people taking note of my exploits and considering me a threat enough to want to hunt me down. It would and SHOULD also lessen the chance of finding those pricks along the coastline. Only players that have taken the bounty as a mission from, for instance, my town would be eligable for reward, but as soon as the bounty is dead, the bounty on them is removed. If a bounty hunter that accepted the mission kills the bounty, then they come back to the town to recieve reward. If a random player that has not accepted the bounty takes out that bandit, they will not recieve any reward. To some extent that avoids exploitation of the system seing as the bandit being hunted could just build up a bad enough reputation to make the reward high and then have a friend kill him, leave the loot for him to reclaim and then claim a fat reward from, say, me. In addition, a high risk/reward bounty would only be given to a Bounty Hunter that has built up his/her reputation and every bounty would be given personally from the proprietor/mayor/sheriff of a town to a person they trust and think capable of the job. A Lee Enfield wielding, coyote backpack wearing player with no previous confirmed kills would not be eligable for a high rewarding bounty. You gotta start somewhere. Build your own reputation. But that would also go the other way around, if you become a well known Bounty Hunter, then bandits might place their own bounty on you.

-The ability to actually blend in. Players and Zeds now stick out like a sore thumb in the scenery. Their pixels don't blend with the background, and trees, grass, bushes get their pixels lowered to the point that you can see a player behind a tree if you're far enough away. And you can forget about crawling in grass since the grass draw distance is not long enough. For that sniper 1km away, you're crawling on bare ground, wearing brown/black clothing and being a general eyesore (eye candy for the sniper).

I'm sure there's tons more I want but just can't think of right now... but that's just some of the things I would like to see changed/added.

Edited March 3, 2013 by Darkwater

[AshleyP 121]

I'm not really interested in the whole worldbuilding aspect. The problem is that it would encourage stagnation, like Wikipedia or Second Life. It would attract the kind of players who are willing to spend seventeen hours a day, every day, building a large base at a strategic location. Eventually the majority of the gameplay would consist of building bases or chatting about building bases. Then there'll be arbitration committees, a community liaison cadre, a layer of admins, a layer of super-admins, layer upon layer of bureaucracy. I prefer the idea of a game where you have to go out and hunt. Your resources consist of your brain, your reflexes, the stuff you can carry on your back and perhaps stuff into your jeep, and that's it. And the tents, which are vulnerable.

In fact the existing setup is surprisingly clever. You can't just hole up in a warehouse because you'll eventually be overrun with zombies, just like in Day of the Dead. They never stop, and after the most recent patch you can't simply log out and log back in to restock your ammo. Similarly, the respawning loot isn't realistic at all, but it neatly solves the problem of dwindling resources. A more realistic system would result in a game where the committed, seventeen-hours-a-day players eventually sweep the entire map clean. There will be players who want to do this, to just sit on a huge pile of loot, occasionally sniping unarmed stragglers (for seventeen hours a day). They'll have their fun, no-one else will.

Bribase's points are all very good, although I'm not sure about per-server maps. I remember reading a blog post on PC Gamer that introduced the game - the writer described his first "raid", and it was fascinating because I had just been to the very same location, a year later. I could recognise the terrain from his description (it was the north-east airfield). With per-server maps the war stories people share on this message board would be meaningless to people who are on other servers.

Still, my dream is a larger map, with more to see and do. The military are now a factor. Periodically, AI-controlled army soldiers are helicoptered in - or they land at the coast - with orders to secure an area, and if you're in the way they kill you. This is how you get military weapons; by fighting the military, which is hard. The cities are mostly free of zombies, because there's nothing there for them to eat, although there are stories going around of eight-foot-tall, nigh-on-bulletproof zombie leviathans that can run at forty mph and throw cars through the air. If you turn a corner and run into one of them, you're dead. Instead, the regular zombies have moved into the countryside, which is lethal for the unwary, filled with killer zombie wolves. As a player you are in danger from the military and other players in the cities, and from zombies and wolves in the countryside.

And there has to be a reward for all this aggro. That's up to the developers, because it baffles me. The team that runs Aces High II, the flight sim, posts a scoreboard at the end of the month. Perhaps DayZ could have you as a man seeking out rare metals - perhaps the area has been hit with a meteor filled with zombanium, a rare and extraordinarily precious metal that turns people into zombies unless they have been vaccinated - and your goal is to grab as much as possible. Again, this would favour the seventeen-hour-a-day crowd, but some things are unavoidable. By keeping the player vulnerable even persistence wouldn't be a guarantee of success.

In practice, given past form, DayZ two years from now will be almost exactly the same as the first standalone release of the game, with the majority of the development time spent on patching bugs. DayZ II will come out in 2017 and will be almost exactly the same as DayZ but with more detailed grass.

Edited March 3, 2013 by AshleyP

[ben_c 140]

Some good points in here.

I'd like to see a seasonal cycle that reflects the real world. If you're playing in the winter months then its winter in game; think more rain, colder temps, even snow fall (why not have footprints at that point while we are dreaming!). Players would have their temp drop faster when idle and the loot table could drop cold weather gear accordingly.

During the summer it's warmer so players suffer thirst more etc. Nothing too harsh for the seasonal effects but adds to the things players need to prioritise.

I think DCS Black Shark would change the ground textures and weather according to the calander date.

[shadowjack 254]

^{They already did this, it's called Darkfall. It was mildly successful, but after most players found out they could be raided by people who don't have a life they mostly quit. Nothing like working for months to build a city then loose it at 3 am to a bunch of college kids without a life....lol.}

^{Besides there was rampant cheating going on..but that's not the point. Point is what you are dreaming about is terribly hard to make happen with the cost of bandwidth these days...}

I thought Shadowbane had a decent way to deal with how player built content could be sieged/destroyed. Not really sure I would want that here.

[willey.erd@oundleschool.org.uk 506]

If you zoom out all the way on a map ingame, you can see a hell of a lot of empty terrain (which I'm not sure if it's height mapped). I would love to get the whole of Chernarus (rather than just South Zagoria, which is the current map), with the much larger cities (look at maps such as Mitrovice for ArmA 2).

Check out the Green Sea Expansion Project, a community mapper is creating all new areas of Chernarus such as other islands, a farming region, it all fits to the theme and the changing scenery and variety, and even the sheer scale of such a map would be amazing (and fitting with the DayZ theme).

[RuecanOnRails (DayZ) 23]

Two years is an odd amount of time. Not really that long to be honest.

It's not enough time to develop an entirely new game/engine. It would be a somewhat rushed project with little to no updates to the current DayZ standalone which has yet to be released.

But yet it's past the initial release and one year development time.

It's hard to say what will happen as I think everything will be in the context and direction which the game heads. Only rocket knows that right now, and everything is always subject to change.

In two years I'd like to be able to say "I play DayZ" and have that comment still be relevant.

I'd like to see the game become fully stable.

Once stable I'd like to see some new features added, a new official map perhaps as a DLC. As for the map, I'd like to see the TKOH Seattle map. Or a map of Vancouver as there are a few more trees and forestry areas a little bit further north which dayz thrives on. I know the seattle map already exists, but it might be more work to modify the seattle map than it would be to create a new map with dayz in mind.

The one thing I don't want to see is to have anything for the game rushed and pushed out half assed and broken.

One of the biggest things I'd like to see is once the modding api is created for dayz standalone, I cant wait for someone to make it into a military sim type of game.

[j0nathan27 2]

when u die u need to buy a new game

[bfisher 561]

I don't know. Just "more" of everything I guess. More map, more detail, more places to go. More things to do and see. More ways to interact with (and possibly destroy) the environment. More vehicles. More weapons. More cool and grotesque ways to kill zombies Dead Rising style. More ways to make your character unique. More ways to communicate to other players.

I think what makes DayZ unique is:

Open unstructured environment

Unforgiving

Constant threat of death

No rules

No safe zones

Draws heavily from established classic zombie lore - Romero, 28 Days Later, Walking Dead, etc

I haven't thought through all the gameplay mechanics, but buildings should be more than just loot spawn centers. They should be required for shelter and protection. Forget digging Ho Chi Minh tunnels as bases. How about just fortifying any of the hundreds of buildings in Cherno with some 2x4s over the windows and doors Night of the Living Dead style (assuming you could go into them).

Maybe make it so you don't disappear when you log off? You just go to sleep. The world still goes on around you so you better find someplace safe before you tuck in. And you better log back in every day or so in order not to starve or dehydrate and just to make sure some other player did steal your shit and/or murder you in your sleep.

How about your food, drink, rest and health and even how much stuff you carry affects your speed and performance similar to how shock or injuries already do? Actually force people to make a trade off between outrunning zombies and shuffling along with 30lbs of AS50, 10 lbs of DMR, plus another 50 lbs of ALICE pack gear.

How about dynamic fire like in FarCry 2 that will spread through trees and buildings?

But really I just want more stuff to "do". Light sniper hill on fire. Spraypaint my clan sign on the Electro power plant smokestack. Build a barricade around Kamenko and declare myself the Governor. Talk to other players using the radio transmitter on Green Mountain. Go on a long and dangerous roadtrip to somewhere worth going to. Try and get the lights on in Stary Sobor. Drive a train from Barezino to Kamarova.

Edited March 4, 2013 by bfisher