Here is a crazy idea, what if there was no weapon attachments?

[DemonGroover 8836]

Coke bottle + duct tape = optic

[HazZarD87 166]

Optics can be fragile and can go out of whack fairly easily if not mounted properly. 

This usually applies to civilian, hunting type rifles. Shotguns shooting a lot of slugs or heavy loads can beat up a cheap scope too.

 

Military guns are generally (let's pretend) well mounted with good rings and rails. It would take a heavy hit to knock them out of zero.

 

I'm all for survivors needing to do some windage/elevation adjustments on a found scope though.

It would mean you have to waste a few shots, and possibly give your position away by taking some shots at a target, or your gun might be randomly off a bit.

 

If it's a picantinny rail then it doesn't matter if you have military or civilian issue, even the military one is just a matter of a few screws tightening a clamp. (And giving them a few nudges every now and then to ensure they still are.)

 

The zeroing I fully agree on. When you bolt a sight on it's not magically zeroed in. You have to shoot a few nice groupings at a set distance (100 metres usually) to determine your centre-of-shot and then adjust the sight accordingly. That's the textbook way however, to conserve ammo and not draw any more attention then you want to you can also just fire off a round, adjust after you see it land, and fire again to see if it's on target now.

 

But then again getting that to work in a game might just be another detail not worth the effort it would take. Just like mounts that are going to be universal in SA while they wouldn't be IRL.

[SalamanderAnder (DayZ) 1747]

I wouldn't say scrap it if they'd already done it. It just seems like something that would be very low priority.

Theoretically you could find anything in the world. It's... the world. However I don't think it's worth modelling extremely obscure firearms / items when that time could be put to use in better ways. Some weapons need to be more rare, but I don't think we need to have something that's so rare only one player will ever see it at a time.

 

I'm not talking about .50 cal sniper rifles here. I'm just talking about attachments. I can go to almost any basic hunting store and pick up an optic for a rifle. These things are widely available to the civilian market. Even different tiers of attachments would have different rarities. I guess I just don't see what the argument is. Findings something like a basic scope for your rifle I feel is totally believable and can really narrow the weapon spectrum - since as you said, it's not a priority it to model extremely obscure firearms. If guns are more basic when you find them - like an m14 with nothing but iron sights - then people who find and attach optics can gain a small advantage. More powerful weapons would be even rarer than the basic ones, so for most survivors, basic equipment can be modified and still get the job done. If they are cunning, then they might survive long enough to find rare equipment, or take it from other players. Having high tier, high rarity items is one of the motivations to survive - since they in fact aid your own survival.

 

I mean personally, I'd like to see the more programming related, gameplay heavy features addressed first, of course. I think things like cooperative projects, more intuitive humanity systems, persistence issues, ect, ect., are higher priority than the variety of weapons. But it all funnels toward the same goal so I just don't see what the issue is. The release is only an alpha, so they aren't running out of time to develop the game or anything.

Edited July 26, 2013 by SalamanderAnder

[Dagwood 680]

While I agree that hunting rifles and scopes would be fairly prolific in a real world situation like that being depicted in dayz, I think that every single player having the means to kill other players at long range would throw the game out of balance.

Imagine relatively fresher spawns being able to throw an acog (or any 3x+ scope) onto his easily found lee enfield or Winchester rifle. This would put even more of the focus of weapons on defending yourself or attacking other survivors rather than protecting yourself from the infected.

If magnified scopes are implemented as attachments, it must be done very carefully.

Perhaps scopes that are user-attached rather than already existing on the weapon will have a random zero. For example, an m16 with a 6x rifle scope that was attached by a player could be zeroed anywhere from 100 to 400 meters. I think maintaining some distinction between already top-tier weapons and improvised-to-be-top-tier weapons would help keep things balanced

[Lady Kyrah 1109]

Yes we can go get optics in pretty much any store.

 

But this is the end of civilisation, there is no store fully stocked of goods, this isn't the aftermath of hurrican catrina, this is a situation of social and industrial meltdown that has been going on for several years. Finding scraps of food here and there isn't unreasonable, same for guns and all kinds of accessories.

 

Finding them in any abundance or working order? not so likely, nobody manufacture batteries for nvgs, flashlights, radios, there is no power grid anymore to recharge anything, so you have to manage with whatever methods you can find.

 

A lot of movies and books picture survivors calling on the radio a few minutes a day to save on their precious battery life, this is what's going on in DayZ in my opinion. A slightly less primitive, slightly more resourceful "stranded on a desert island" scenario.

[TacticalN29 89]

Yes we can go get optics in pretty much any store.

 

But this is the end of civilisation, there is no store fully stocked of goods, this isn't the aftermath of hurrican catrina, this is a situation of social and industrial meltdown that has been going on for several years. Finding scraps of food here and there isn't unreasonable, same for guns and all kinds of accessories.

 

Finding them in any abundance or working order? not so likely, nobody manufacture batteries for nvgs, flashlights, radios, there is no power grid anymore to recharge anything, so you have to manage with whatever methods you can find.

 

A lot of movies and books picture survivors calling on the radio a few minutes a day to save on their precious battery life, this is what's going on in DayZ in my opinion. A slightly less primitive, slightly more resourceful "stranded on a desert island" scenario.

Yeah and resources don't respawn in the real apocalypse either. And we don't really know how long the zombies have been around in DayZ. It really could only have been weeks since the outbreak. Or months or years. They never said.  

[Chaingunfighter 917]

No optics? No way!

 

DayZ doesn't take place in the early 1900s, it takes place now. People will use optics on weapons if possible, and if they don't have optics they will put them on.

 

You can find many pictures and even videos of people fighting with Mosins, SKS rifles, old Mauser rifles, hunting rifles, etc, to which they have affixed random hunting or military optical sights.

 

It doesn't make sense that in Chernarus they've been magically sheltered from superior sights.

 

 

Exactly, I recently had the opportunity to fire some pretty awesome guns, one of which included a black Siminov SKS made somewhere in the 1960's/50's and it had a customized, lightweight stock and a westernized optical sight from the 1990s (Not sure exactly which one).

You can bet that not everyone there is going to be using completely Russian-based firearms.

Also, his post gave me hope that the M-14 or M1A will be in the standalone :-)

 

 

Yeah and resources don't respawn in the real apocalypse either. And we don't really know how long the zombies have been around in DayZ. It really could only have been weeks since the outbreak. Or months or years. They never said.  

Based on the general state of destruction and overgrowth, it's quite obvious that it hasn't been very long since the outbreak began. All of the roads are (for the most part) completely fine. While the asphalt and concrete roads would obviously last a while, most of the dirt roads and paths seem fine, so not enough time has passed for plants to overgrow them. Hell, even quite a few of the houses and lawns still have short-enough grass, so the general outbreak probably occured less than a year before DayZ takes place. 

However, a lot of the cars and vehicles are heavily destroyed, but my only guess is that they were probably set on fire in the destruction and spread around, or just picked apart from other survivors.

I'm probably thinking into it too much, but the signs are there.

Edited July 27, 2013 by Chaingunfighter

[SalamanderAnder (DayZ) 1747]

Yes we can go get optics in pretty much any store.

 

But this is the end of civilisation, there is no store fully stocked of goods, this isn't the aftermath of hurrican catrina, this is a situation of social and industrial meltdown that has been going on for several years. Finding scraps of food here and there isn't unreasonable, same for guns and all kinds of accessories.

 

Finding them in any abundance or working order? not so likely, nobody manufacture batteries for nvgs, flashlights, radios, there is no power grid anymore to recharge anything, so you have to manage with whatever methods you can find.

 

A lot of movies and books picture survivors calling on the radio a few minutes a day to save on their precious battery life, this is what's going on in DayZ in my opinion. A slightly less primitive, slightly more resourceful "stranded on a desert island" scenario.

 

Well yeah, radios already require batteries, which I assume would be quite rare. Let's also not leave out the possibility of finding generators to create electricity - since generators are already an object in game. They just need implementation.

 

I just can't buy the argument on optics. It's not like they disintegrate. They're constructed from metal and plastic, just like most guns these days. If it's believable to find a rifle, or a working car for that matter, I think it's just as believable to find a scope, if not more so. I would guess that weapon attachments are actually more abundant than guns themselves. Even if that's incorrect, living humans would take those supplies and use them. People would take care of certain items because those items are particularly useful to their survival. Plus, those left untouched wouldn't be destroyed for no reason at all. Even in pre-apocalypse terms, most gun owners also own optics or sights for their guns. I myself own a red dot sight which I originally bought for an airsoft gun years ago, but it's still in perfect working order. There's nothing to stop me from attaching it to a real firearm with a picatinny rail and sighting it in. Just needs a battery - which I could find. I could even theoretically take a small solar panel and hook it up to the thing, bypassing the battery entirely. Moreover - scopes don't need batteries. They're purely mechanical.

 

Don't get me wrong, I think weapon attachments should be fairly rare. I just don't think it makes sense to remove them from the game entirely. They've already programmed the attachment system. It would just needlessly waste a bunch of time and effort the devs have already put into the game.

Edited July 27, 2013 by SalamanderAnder

[-Gews- 7443]

It depends what kind of optics Kyrah is talking about. Communist bloc scopes? Basic hunting scopes? They shouldn't be impossible to find.

 

Modern Western optics should be more rare, and not simply because they are modern and Western... but because they are usually far more expensive.

 

 

 

Also I kind of hope you won't be able to instantly mount an ACOG on a ratty old Mosin and have it perfectly calibrated, like what happens in ArmA 3... certain types of optics should match various guns and mounting systems, if not then they should not work properly or should not be able to be attached at all.

 

 

 

Edit: also, I am not fully understanding how removing all forms of scopes would improve either gameplay or realism? They even had scopes in the American Civil War. Fixed-power optics can be extremely rugged. Even variables, if you're willing to pay.

 

Edit: whoa, that first sentence above makes me sound like I just learned English. :huh:

Edited July 27, 2013 by Gews

[HazZarD87 166]

Let's not glorify scopes out of their nut here btw. I can't count the times in dayz where I've shot some guy running around with a .50 call at a 100 metres or less. Because he can't get on target as fast as I could with iron sights or a red dot. It's why I love the G36 to bits since you can switch between it's scope and red-dot.

 

For some reason people in video games assume that a bigger scope = better. That goes for shooting at range but at closer ranges a scope is a liability since it takes longer to get on target. Dutch army rifles for instance have red dot sights with a magnifiying scope behind them. When you go into CQB the magnifier can fold to the side and you have your regular unmagnified red-dot that works much better on closer ranges.

 

In dayz you're going to have to make a decision. Do I want a long range weapon that I can effectively engage targets with at greater distance, or do I want a nice open sight picture that will get me on target quick during a close range shootout?

 

Weapon customization isn't "levelling your gear" like in standard MMO's. It provides you with different options for different scenarios. It's up to you to plan ahead, think about what you expect to encounter and prepare your kit accordingly. It's what I love about dayz most, always thinking those few steps ahead.