How to make DayZ perfect

[maninthewall 470]

These are all my opinions and ideas on how to make this the perfect zombie survival simulator, feel free to agree or disagree:

 

Currently, this game is a deathmatch, yeah I know, "Alpha". But honestly, it will remain a deathmatch if important changes aren't made

Here are some of my ideas that will improve the game.

There's no survival in this game as of now.

 

Make loot harder to find: I can easily get my character fully geared in less than half an hour; food is too easy to find, there should be a constant struggle to find food. Like in a real zombie apocalypse, food would be #1 priority. Yet, for just a casual DayZ player it is impossible to starve to death. Weapons and ammo should be extremely hard to find, and so ammo. Pistols should be easier to find than rifles, not sure why it's the opposite at the moment. This will make the player think twice before shooting at another player; engaging combat with a chance of running out ammo, or hitting the other player so badly it ruins all of his gear, making the shootout pointless. With other words; make this game hard, it should take hours to get geared.

 

Make the zombies a threat: No, zombies shouldn't be there to fill up space or be annoying, it should be your #1 enemy. And there should be many of them. not 3-4 in a city, but 50-60 zombies. Not only will this force other players to cooperate with random players, but it will also make great moments to remember. Just imagine you looting a town, then getting an aggro of 30 zombies. Then all of sudden the zombies get shot at from another direction, it's another player saving you. Awesome!

Hordes is a must in this game. 100-150 zombies passing towns, going random directions, being chased by one will probably mean death, since zombies are faster than players.

 

Private hives: I know this will probably come eventually, and I'm unsure if I like it or not.

DayZ mod got pretty much ruined by these, since it's pretty much impossible to find a server that's vanilla dayz. But I think if SA gets it right, it'll be awesome.

Roleplaying servers, and whitelist servers where the players on the server aren't 99% a-holes. I know there's no way this game should be played, but players literally have no morals.

 

Consequences: For every move, there should be consequences. Sprinting should burn much more calories than jogging, so you would need more food. It should also make you exhausted, and running for too long should make you nauseous. The characters after all aren't professional marathon sprinters.

Wearing too little clothes would make you freeze, eventually giving you a cold.

Being shot at should give you a suppression effect. Character starts breathing heavily, harder to aim, maybe minor screen shaking.

This list could go on forever, but as in a whole, giving everything more detail, making it more realistic.

 

Base building and farms: Base building will come, yes we know. My idea is that you would either build yourself shelter somewhere, or take over a old house, making it secure from zombies.

I want there to be farming aswell, building fences for animals to either eat or breed. Also farming with seeds so you can grow all kinds of vegetables and greens.

 

Vehicles: Yeah, these will probably come, we don't know yet. But I hope they get it right. Most vehicles should be broke down, and please no military helicopters. You would have to search and search industrials for engine parts, fuel etc to fix the vehicle you've found. They should not be found operational, there has to be some work to make them to work. 

 

I'm too tired to write more, but imo, if they implement all this, it will be the game I'd fall in love with.

[OrLoK 16185]

Thread tidied, pointless replies removed.

 

L

[Slyguy65 499]

Dayz won't be perfect, its a protoype, a pioneer.

 

It introduced players to hardcore survival genre. Now the only thing to do is wait until a better engine with a better game comes out.

 

Though making hardcore survival possible in an online setting is kind of hard since it will always be filled with trolls out to simply kill the ones trying to stay alive, so until there is an actual solution to that no game like dayz will be the best it can be.

[daringd 88]

I was having an idle conversation a few days ago with a friend and we came on to the subject of being able to play as a Zombie...  I know, before people jump on me and say "but you would have the intelligence of a human!" so it would kind of be hard to balance it, but we came up with some ideas for keeping things interesting.

 

So they would have to deal with dumbing down the senses of who ever was playing a zombie, and I though aboutth e first AVP game, you could play as an Alien, and they had this funky fush-eye vision, which was pretty cool, and they saw in a different way, you could spot people from the aura they gave off and it made things interesting, you began seeing the game world in a totally different way.  So what if they had a sort of black and white, or kind of black and red vision, so it killed colours, so you wouldn't see players as the guy with the bright orange rain coat or the ttsko pants, and borrow from Jurassic Park a little, have only things that move as completely visible, so when players move slowly they can't be seen very well at all, kind of like predators, but the faster they move the more distinct they become.  the same would also go for zombies, so all other zombies would be the same, you wouldn't really see them unless they moved, so picking out and sorting between them and players would be hard too.  The point of playing as a zombie would be to survive, that is basically what they are, living dead survival machines, so you would be trying to kill things to stay alive too.

 

Maybe if you are killed by other zombies you would have the option to continue playing after a short time as one yourself (I nicknamed new zombie players as Zambies), still geared but now unable to use that gear, if you are killed by another player then they win your gear covered in infection.  

 

Maybe a lot of people don't see the point in this, but I do think it would add a new dimension to the game that is interesting, especially if as a zombie you could kind of collect other zombies and lead or cause small hordes.

 

But why?  how would you play as one?  It would completely change the way we see zombies in game, they would no longer be just NPC fodder, but slightly smarter, more cunning and devilish.

 

For me, that would be something worth seeing.

Edited June 13, 2014 by daringd

[Chaingunfighter 917]

Pistols aren't hard to find as it is, they just have magazines which have incredibly low spawn rates and can only appear in military locations, regardless of whether the the pistol itself is a military spawn or not (even Sporter-22 mags only spawn in bases)

They'd need to expand more on the pistols (I know, it sounds ridiculous) before they could make them the majority weapons. The P1, 1911, Magnum, and Longhorn are okay contenders (no pun intended), but the CR-75, FNX-45 and Amphibia S are probably intended as military weapons. My problem with the acceptable pistols is that they wouldn't make sense relative to some of the long-guns in-game. Maybe the P1 is fine, but I can't imagine finding more Kimber Warriors, Colt Pythons, and Thompson G2 Contenders than IZH-43s and Mosins. Gameplay-wise they'll need more pistols before that can be done, but even then, I'd say long guns like the IZH-43, Sporter-22, Blaze 95, and to a lesser extent, the Mosin (since they seem to be regulating the attachments more now) should be as common as the pistols.

 

I'm speaking, of course, for gameplay reasons. Realistically the Mosin, SKS, IZH-43, and AKM would be the most common weapons of the ones currently in-game. The P1, Sporter-22, and M4A1 are also entirely reasonable.

However;

• The CR-75 is based on a CZ-75 SHADOW variant that is only in the prototype phase and hasn't been adopted by anyone. The CZ-75 itself is a fine weapon and since DayZ (probably) takes place at some point in the future, it's viable to suggest that it would be in service by then, but as of today it is not.
• The 1911 is a tactical, Kimber Warrior (although modified), that you'd likely not find in Eastern Europe. Like the CZ-75, the 1911 series of pistols is perfectly reasonable, but you'd find many more M1911A1s than you would these.
• The AWC Amphibia S has been in service with the Navy SEALs (and other special operations forces) before, but it runs a high price on the civilian market and no standard military has adopted it. Like the aforementioned pistols, the Ruger MK2 it's based on is perfectly fine, but the variant they chose isn't the best (though they obviously did so for gameplay reasons)
• The FNX-45 is a brand-new pistol released in 2012, and hasn't seen any major sales outside of the United States, at this point.
• The Blaze 95 is based on an incredibly expensive and limited-production hunting rifle that you'd probably not find in Eastern Europe
• The Magnum, which is the now-discontinued Colt Python, costs many thousands of dollars and isn't something people reserve their money for unless they make it a hobby to collect guns.
• The LongHorn, while not entirely bad, isn't something you'd be likely to see outside of the United States. It's probably the least bad of this list of weapons, but it's still pretty far fetched, as cool of a gun as it is.

 

Also, zombies need to be more of a threat, but I wouldn't say they need to be pushed to the point that people are forced to always cooperate and that the threat isn't just shifted to the opposite. Firing a gun should attract a ton of zombies (relative to your location), but there should still be a reason to fear a bandit that comes across you with a loaded rifle. I'd be much less afraid of people who are armed if I knew that they were almost certain to break contact rather than engage, and that's a problem for me.

Elevating the threat of zombies should not come at the cost of making players a secondary factor, I.E., people should not have to work together to survive.

[Hikurac 115]

I agree with Chaingun, it seems many of the guns were included simply because they have a "cool feeling" to them in the apocalypse. I can see many of them being implemented, but the issue is that they are either the limited edition or the discontinued versions. Just implement cheaper and more common versions. As for the FNX-45 and Amphibia S, make them rare and only on heli crashes. It's a zombie outbreak and i'm sure the United States Special Forces would be involved.

 

As for the zombies, yes their numbers need to be immensely high but you should never expect players to be friendly due to a common enemy. I don't get the misunderstanding revolving around the shoot-on-sight mentality. If I was in the apocalypse, especially after a long period of time, chances are I would kill others on sight as well. If I don't then its just a higher chance that I will be killed, and there's no reason to take that chance. Of course if I see some medium geared guy looting buildings, chances are i'll just let him be. However if I see some heavily armed guys, damn straight i'll shoot them, or run away. It's just too big of a risk and its a survival simulator. Take a hint.

 

Don't get me wrong though, the death-match kiddies are annoying, as they don't give a flip about survival. However I tend to categorize them with the extreme, no-chance, survivalists. When it comes to kill-on-sight, they both fit the bill.

Edited June 13, 2014 by Hikurac

[Lionel Hutz 34]

Hmm.  I agree with a lot of this.  My thoughts:

 

 

ManInTheWall (OP)

 

• Make loot harder to find > Not so sure about this.  I think the availability of basic loot (food, clothes etc) is about right.  There's a threshold below which the game will become too much of a grind to survive, and will no longer be fun.  As the game expands in complexity, it makes sense to free players up to do the fun stuff like base-building etc.  Maybe the issue at the moment is that there's not enough other stuff to do once you have geared up with the essentials.  
   
• Make Zombies a threat > Agreed, but having hundreds of zombies is going to be difficult to achieve in this engine, no?  I think even hordes of 10-20 would be a huge improvement on what we have now.  This shouldn't be implemented until we can secure buildings against zombies though.
   
• Private Hives > Dunno about whitelist servers etc.  To me the whole point of the game is being able to choose whether to be friendly, or an a-hole, or somewhere in-between.  I think the more idiotic strains of KOS behaviour will become less relevant once the gameplay acquires more depth, and there are real bonuses to playing in groups and trying to build something significant.  Not that everyone will play nice all of a sudden, but more effort/aggression will be channeled into raiding bases, holding territory, acquiring vehicles etc.
   
• Base building and farms > Yes, would love to see this.  Would be good if you could stockpile food and equipment in persistent storage containers.  Again, the fun will be in building up a secure and well-equipped base, so that other players face a choice between asking for your help, or infiltrating and betraying you, or raiding you outright and taking over.  Imagine if you could hold down an entire town, and control all the resources (fertile land, fuel, machinery, building materials) that go with it!  I think this kind of thing needs to persist over multiple play sessions / server resets, allowing an epic ebb and flow of who controls what.  I know this will require a lot of thought and possibly re-working of the way servers work (e.g. what happens when the "owner" of a base logs out, or where two groups build a base in the same location but on different servers and then try to log in to the same server as each other).  Still, I think it's the key to DayZ becoming about more than just running around looking for trouble.  
   
• Consequences > Agree with everything here except suppression effect.  For less experienced players, getting shot at will induce panic IRL, while more experienced players will keep a cool head.  Adding "meta" mechanisms over the top of this will get annoying.  One extra "consequence" that has been suggested before: dying should mean a ban from the relevant server until it resets.  This would go some way to reducing death-match style play.  Even more so if death meant you could no longer log in to a map containing a base that you'd built (maybe for 24 hours).
   
• Vehicles > Yes, agreed.  Scavenging parts, tools etc should be important, and you shouldn't be able to carry massive items like tyres etc in your backpack (thought that aspect of the mod was a bit odd).  In line with my other comments above, I see vehicles as an incentive to co-operate (to acquire/fix them) and a way to dominate territory.

 

Daringd

 

• Playing as a zombie would be great - I like your ideas for zombie-vision etc.  Maybe you could also have a zombie growl/snarl/yell that attracts other zombies, so individual zombie players could also influence the movement of zombie NPCs?
   

 

[11tw 106]

Farming doesn't seem like a necessary inclusion, because crops take months to grow. Now if they are implemented, and somehow protected from resets (which hopefully all bases will be too) then that would be fine, but do you want to wait for real-time months for your crops to grow? I assume they would grow while you were logged out, but would you have to stay on the same server? The whole thing seems too complex to bother with. Foraging and hunting make more sense.

[JIJOK 49]

 

 The characters after all aren't professional marathon sprinters.

 

 

Anyway .... 

 

-Make loot harder : as you can see ( I think ) there are servers with high loot and even high power gear at spawn, what that means ? CoD kids like that so ... you know

-Zombies : agree, but number of AI affetcs a lot pc's so can fill server with them and you see all glitched zeds every where ( even on SA ) so ... you know 

-Private hives : I just play on private, but really annoying the register stuff and its a small comunity ( most of times ) 

-Base building and farms : sorry but .... http://store.steampowered.com/app/220260/

-Vehicles : 100% agree ( be happy lol )

Edited June 13, 2014 by JIJOK

[slippery gypsy 107]

sawn off .22 sporter .. is ALL dayZ SA needs to be cool.....

[arturchik210 1]

No way! Dayz had become so fu...ing bad...Rocket is sh..t!!

Edited June 13, 2014 by arturchik210

[liquidcactus 719]

hmmm..