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Dellema

A Newbie's Impression

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So I just started playing the Day Z Alpha. I never played the mod. I've been doing my best to catch up knowledge wise to those who have been playing a while, but I just haven't. Point is, I'm very new to Day Z and this is how I feel about the game as I've seen it. For the purpose of this thread, I'll ignore praising the game except to say that I like it and will continue to play. I understand it is in Alpha, but without criticisms like these, Alpha testing is pointless. So I'll just take you along with me through my first hour or so of play and highlight the problems that I felt should be fixed right now. I won't be suggesting ideas that would be cool for the game's final release, and for the most part, I'll ignore talking about bugs and glitches as I understand this is not the place.

 

Character Customization:

 

Character customization was understandably raw. However, two things specifically bothered me. My character was standing directly in front of the sun, which put a terrible glare on my screen and made it difficult to see what he actually looked like. Also, the text boxes describing the clothing items were not big enough and didn't scroll. Luckily I'm intelligent enough to figure our that "tic shoes G" was green athletic shoes, but this feels like an easy pair of fixes.

 

Night Time:

 

My character spawned in at night. And this is where the lighting effects became a huge issue. I'd seen some of the dev blogs and such, and I realize this is a sore subject, but they need to face this. Exploring at night time is painfully broken. The moon and stars apparently give no light at all. I turned in game brightness up as high as I could, but I could see nothing without my flashlight. I know this game strives for realism, and this is something that needs to be fixed immediately. In real life, I can see at night enough to make my way through a house, or at least around it without running into it. I encountered my first zombie at night too, which was a very painful experience, and the zombie was completely cloaked in a veil of night. I could use my flashlight to see it, but couldn't swing back without being completely blind. Exploring buildings was a nightmare because of lighting as well. My beam would constantly disappear or shrink drastically in size from getting too close to objects, making rounding corners disorienting.

 

Combat:

 

Zombies are very difficult to kill. This is fine, and I'm not complaining about that. What does bother me is that running away from an aggroed zombie is apparently impossible. They are relentless and will find you regardless of broken line of sight or distance. Getting seen by a zombie before finding a decent weapon is a death sentence. In one of my most promising games, I was killed because one zombie got in one hit and I went to "bleeding". This was frustrating for me, because I never stopped bleeding. Surely after taking just one hit that "bloodied" me, the injury would be light enough to eventually stop, but it didn't. I bled to death. Surely, this is something that some people will disagree with me on, but purely from a realism standpoint, it seems broken. One final note on combat: combat logging. A simple solution that can probably be implemented tomorrow would be to make every person visible in game for an additional 15 seconds after logging out. Simple as that. Logging out in combat or when threatened paralyzes your character and leads to an easy kill for your attacker.

 

Survival:

 

Don't have much to say here, other that the rate at which my character gets hungry or thirsty seems unrealistically high. In a game with realistic distances from town to town and realistic day night cycles, it would be nice for that to be realistic as well. It would also be nice if my character drank from a well until no longer thirsty, instead of needing to click on the well 5-10 times to quench my thirst. Finally, it seems that every time I log in to a new server, my thirst is reset to the spawn value of "Thirsty". Not sure if this is an attempt to prevent "World hopping" or not, but it fairly annoying and easily punishes players who only play for short periods of time, or players on servers that time out.

 

Miscellaneous: 

 

It would be nice to add friends in game, so you could form a functional group of survivors. One of the biggest reasons KoS is so dominant in game is because working with other people is so difficult. It would be easier of groups could be formed more easily, and you could see which server your friends were in, to facilitate working together. I know this observation seems out of the scope of what I've done so far, and it absolutely is. But this seems like a feature that would be easy to add and something that could at least see a test drive before the end of Alpha, and so is included.

 

Concluding remarks:

 

I can predict a few comments right now:

 

"This game is in Alpha, idiot. It is bound to have problems."

 

Which is why I'm writing this.

 

"You just started playing, your opinion is invalid"

 

True that my opinion is different in many ways, and carries a definitively different weight. This project however, should look at feedback from all groups of people, especially when people like be should be its largest client base once the game is deemed ready for release.

 

I'm sure there will be many responses that I can't predict. I hope they are all constructive, and rise above petty name-calling. 

 

 

om

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The extremely high hunger ratings are to keep the game more realistic, while taking a toll at the same time.
The mod did nourishment more realistically, as you had to eat every 30-45 minutes. While it was realistic, it lost its pacing. Hunger was not a danger in the slightest if you spawned in a city, or if you found an animal. I think the new eating reqs are fitting, but they should be about ever 15-20 minutes, rather than every 10 mins.
Your post was well written, thought out, and actually felt good to read. You proved quite a few points. I know the "15 second paralyze after logout" function works fairly well, as I've seen it at work in other survival games.
You earn a walrus.
EDIT- I doubt this carries much weight, though. nobody cares for my opinions.... :c

How the fuck do I post a video? I need sad violin music in here ASAP.

Edited by The Aquatic Land Walrus

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I agree with the food and hydration, by the time I finally reach a town that has spawns with food in it I'm basically dying of hunger and thirst. And I rarely ever find food, and if I do it happens to be canned so I can't even eat it.

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It's not that you're getting thirsty or hungry fast, it's just that you don't eat enough.

 

You spawn in the 30% threshold, when you get hungry you can be at let's say, 25%; so if you eat until the hunger status goes away then you're back at 30%.

 

Eat and drink everything until it says "My stomach feels stuffed" (It says it if you drink a lot of water too, this does not mean your hunger is satisfied so keep eating until you see it for the food too!)

You'll be at 100% food and water once you do it for both. Sit down and drink some sodas along with eating lots of cereal too, eventually you will see "Healing" in your character screen followed by "Healthy".

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Good, I like to see that kind of post, you're not arguing with the game, but you have some points. Have you ever played the dayz mod?

 

I like to see this posts, because, I played a lot of Dayz mod, and I'm used to the game, but I don't know what the begginers pass to learn how to play.

 

Just somethings I have to say

 

1º Miscellaneous: Actually you can see, what servers your friends are, as you can see, in the photo, and you can see what friends are in this server, but you can't actually add friends in game, you add friends on steam.

RRCDQyI.jpg

2º Survival: have to say that, it's Alpha, balance a game like that, isn't a easy task, the game have to be difficult to survive, but not impossible, so it's still a working in progress, if you add some of that, and remove some of this, you can screw up everything, so we all have to be patient, and a lot of features like drink until satisfied will be implemented, to not have to spam the well.

 

3º Combat: Well, the zeds are still a work in progress, they're like 10% done, they still clip through walls, like I said before, there's a lot of balace to work on, almost everything we see now, can be changed, Just a tip for you, you can rip off your shirt, to make rags and bandage you, the combat logging, is there, but not activated yet, I think it was because of servers performance, or something like that, is the same thing for ragdoll, is there, but not active yet ;).

 

4º Character customization: the devs already said that will be implemented more things, like beards, hair, and hair color, and I don't know what more.

 

5º Night time: well there's a lot of work to be done, with lightning, so night time will be improved, but not today, not tomorrow, in the future.

 

Almost everything is working in progress, but the dev team is competent, we already had a lot of updates, since release, we just didn't have more because of christmas and new year.

Edited by lets4dead
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Night Time:

 

My character spawned in at night. And this is where the lighting effects became a huge issue. I'd seen some of the dev blogs and such, and I realize this is a sore subject, but they need to face this. Exploring at night time is painfully broken. The moon and stars apparently give no light at all. I turned in game brightness up as high as I could, but I could see nothing without my flashlight. I know this game strives for realism, and this is something that needs to be fixed immediately. In real life, I can see at night enough to make my way through a house, or at least around it without running into it. I encountered my first zombie at night too, which was a very painful experience, and the zombie was completely cloaked in a veil of night. I could use my flashlight to see it, but couldn't swing back without being completely blind. Exploring buildings was a nightmare because of lighting as well. My beam would constantly disappear or shrink drastically in size from getting too close to objects, making rounding corners disorienting.

 

 

 

The reason you can see at night is the light pollution, without it it turns pitch black, you need to get far away from cities for this to happen.

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-snip-

 

It's nice to see a post like this on the forums, dozens of people only say things like "It's alpha", which is true, but unhelpful in certain situations.

Thumbs up to you :thumbsup:

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