[Discussion] DayZ, Total Conversion Mods, and You: A Call to Arms for Modders!

[darkmooninc 30]

I see a potential and I’m afraid that it will go unfulfilled. Modding.

Arma 1 2 & 3 had nice mod communities. DayZ itself was a mod, hell, there's a mod called Epoch that's a mod of DayZ mod (modception?). As of right now, Rocket says modding DayZ Standalone won’t be a priority at release. But the architecture it uses is a parallel to Arma 3. So all the resources to mod this game exist, and good modders can figure out how to make stuff work without support. But I think support will come, it’s a question of when.

And I’m not talking about modding the small stuff. New outfits, altered weapons, different zombies. Small stuff. There’s an impatience among gamers to rush mods in that the developers are already working on. Like with Skyrim’s DLC that addressed player concerns and made obsolete some mods. For example, we know huntable animals, shotguns, and bases are coming soon so there’s no need to mod in those. When the game hits beta or final build, sure, we’ll have piles of people trying to mod in alternate objects. But what I’m addressing is great complete mods that aren’t being addressed.

First, we need to agree what DayZ is. It is, at it’s heart, a very large scale, super-realistic simulation of a low-resource sandbox survival experience between multiple players. What really sets it apart from Arma is the limited supplies combined with no clear missio objective and no-team servers of 40 players. The zombies are (theoretically) inconsequential. Take them away, it’s a The Road simulator and most players wouldn’t notice much a difference on populated servers.

Modding is an ample opportunity. But modding takes a long time. If modders start now, they can have resources available and ready for when the game build finalizes. So I’ve listed down some ideas I thought people should discuss. Complete mod overhauls that don’t touch much of the base game-play, but change out zombies and Chernarus. Purists will auto poo poo on this. That’s ok. Pure vanilla DayZ is still an amazing game, and even if there were upcoming mods, it wouldn’t lessen the greatness of this game. Here’s what I’ve written.

Imagine, if you will, spawning outside Raccoon City. There’s more than enough resources on the internet to model a full hundred miles of Racoon and it’s surrounding cities. You get to keep the zombies. And occasionally we can spawn bigger things. Hunters, dogs. Maybe a very rare tyrant. Just… how cool would it be if Chernarus was Racoon City?

Or perhaps Silent Hill. During day it’s a foggy city with a few harmless monsters from the series. When night comes, everything slowly turns dark metal and *random other player’s game models are replaced with monsters*, so you never know who is human and who is a monster. When you’ve lived for more than so many hours on the server, Pyramid head starts stalking you slowly through the streets and countryside. You know that would be amazing with this game’s gameplay. Side note: Horror slashers.

Dinosaurs. Why not. Keep Chernarus. Replace the zombies with Compsognathus, Dilophosaurus, Velociraptors. Occasionally you break the tree line into a field and hear thundering, turning to see an ‬Allosaurus coming to wreck your shitt. I know there’s a group of people out there that tingle at the idea.

My personal idea is to make a 6kmx6km map that is 6km tall, comprised of endless floors of a HUGE prison colony. Pulling from the game Condemned, Saw, and the Hellraiser sequences in the labyrinth. Or, if you want to go vertical maps, something like out of the Fifth Element.

I was pondering an Alaskan tundra with small villages, adding in hypothermia, and changing the zombies out to whatever the alien was in The Thing. Making blood tests take on a new meaning. And trust between players even more razor edge. Which, I suppose, means we can shuffle in things from Dead Space.

And lastly, I kind of wanted a mod that adds in underground monsters. Like Tremors, or Screamers. And lastly I know it’d be real cool to import all of the STALKER material and just use DayZ SA’s engine to recreate a STALKER sandbox mode. Lastly jotted down on paper: Slither, Splinter, The Mist, Alan Wake.

Wish in one hand, shit in the other, I could post ideas all day.

To wrap up. I look at each of the mod conversion ideas above and think: Could I enjoy the game-play even with this changed material? And it’s yes. Always yes. The base core game-play is so fun that you could throw any monsters or map in and it’s still going to be a fun game of scrounging for supplies, braving the elements, and being murdered by psychopaths.

No matter what, this should be a call for Modders! I'm sure a lot of you have your own great ideas. It's time to start fathering what you need for it, using Arma 2 or 3 as a testing ground to import into DayZ. Get modding modders! And get asking for mods, non modders! And everyone, keep playing this amazing game!

Thoughts?

[gibonez 3633]

Sounds good the more mods for stand alone the better.

 

The only thing I really hope rocket enforces however is making sure the modders cannot make a profit like some of the dayz mods.

 

#1 wanted stand alone mod however is a ACE mod for stand alone and a wasteland variant.