My Personal Review: First Day in DayZ

[jk2l 0]

I started on this game recently due to a recommendation from a friend. Only got 13 hours so far with one character lived for 10hours till got shot without knowing where it came from. So here is the brief review that I hope the dev can read. Btw I am a software developer in real life so i truly know what Alpha release mean, and I am only making comment on what can be works on.

 

First Impression (Skip to Afterthought if you don't want to read wall of text)

 

My first impression when I got into the game is that it is big, really big. I got dropped in a random location without knowing where and what to do. To be precise i don't even know what this game is and how is it suppose to play. I spent about 15mins looking at control configurations and try out different thing, then i start getting hang of it. However I feel that this game lacking proper feed back for new player.

 

After I spend some times hunting for equipment and food and waters, I found it is a very weird things happen. zombie can run through wall. I guess this is a known bug and is being addressed in near future. Regardless it still give me a good laugh, i was like "oh shit oh shit". Finding weapon is difficult too so it give me a hard to find a proper solution to deal with zombie. In most case i can just out run them so it seem to be fine.

 

The first few hours of this game of learning how to play and getting familiar with the map is difficult mainly is it is written in Russian, but lucky found an online game map and i use dual monitor so one monitor playing DayZ and the other monitor showing the map. Which helped me navigate around the terrain by combing road sign and common sense on navigation.

 

Starting from this point I starting to get immerse with the environment, feeling i am a lone survivor in zombie apocalypse. the walking is long, the hunting for food is difficult, i need to travel from house to house to find stuff but maybe due to my game experience in other open world such as elder scroll, fallout series, i get used to travel around the map for hours without using fast traveling so this game doesn't really bugging me much on the long travel. In just first few hours, I got killed few times and starting to learn of trust no one (seriously, there was a new spawn that act friendly, we done little chat and when i turn my back to off to my adventure he try to kill me with crowbar, so i just shoot him with my m4a1). This reminding me The Walking Dead, you can trust no one. food, water. keep all for yourself (i will still try to be friendly first but i will keep my distance)

 

After I learned the basic of this game and I started again in new town (yep got killed again), but this time i picked a completely almost empty server to start by. Hopping to play in a real zombie apocalypse environment without dealing too much PVP. And now I realize loot is very easy to find, I started near Balota in night time, i went to the air stripe to looks for loot, within 30mins I found a mountain back pack, two clips of m4a1 bullets, fire axe, vest, ballistic helmet, gas mask, hand gun with 2 clips of bullets too. Then I head down south into Balota I further found lot of loots, by the time I leave Balota I actually holding like 2 water bottles, few soda, lot of can foods.

 

I travel east to Chernogorsk and hope to find can opener, after searching for hour i found two can opener in a house. at this point i was like "wow, i don't feel hungry any more". And now i decide that I probably should go north and see is there anything different. Went north into Dubky, look through lot of apartment and cars, but apartment seem to not worth anything at all. there are absolute no loots, no furniture, nothing. Instead i found a lot in cars, by the time i was leaving Dubky i was leaving with a compass, a map, and filled my backpack with completely lot of foods and water. (I hold 3 water bottles, 6 soda, with 10 can food) plus lot of medicine like anti biotic.

 

So far I met no one in my journey, met few zombies from time to time but they are no match against my axe. My journey to the north continue, i kept walking for approximate 3 to 4 hours (including some random break in between and also spent some time looking in other houses). I think I got into the NW air field. as I know this is a possible high loot place so I skipped the open field and walk around in the forest to approach it. as I was getting closer, "boom" and i died from 2 to 3 shots without knowing where it's from and here is the end of my journey.

 

Afterthought

 

This game in comparison to most game have a steep learning curve, not suitable for majority of gamer. I get used to hunt for food and water when playing in fallout so playing in this game doesn't really bother me much on the difficult of finding loot. but loot can really easily fill up your whole backpack within a hour if you don't stick with spawning area too much.

 

I found the zombie is too easy to deal with, the number is not too great too. I think big city should populate much more zombies. As much as like being bandit in future at some points, I think having a PvE server will help out learning this game and play it (characters items should not be sharing between PvE and PvP). I also looked at the possible "to be" implement features, and they look promising.

 

In my conclusion i think this game is good, having lot of potential. The game itself is too buggy at the moment i won't the game to my friends in near future, but once the basic bugs have been dealt with, i think this game will be a great game and hoping the dev team can keep up the good works.

Edited December 24, 2013 by jk2l