What is your honest opinion on the future of DayZ

[igor-vk 909]

I think maybe there is not too much loot. Sometimes I found only few useful items in one village. Problem is we don't have to work hard for gear. Last time I died to either zombies or elements was more than year ago. It was frustrating, I found matches and just as I was about to light fire I died. I wasn't hungry/starving since 0.40something.

Zombies are even worse, now that we have them they are weak and slow. They used to break our bones, ruin our gear - now they barely make you bleed. I know pushing new items is easiest thing to do, but some things should be worked harder on.

Year ago devs promised to bring back Z in dayz. We got zzzzz instead.

Edited January 17, 2016 by igor-vk

[Salty seadog 125]

OK, long post incoming, hold onto your hats!

 

So if I could completely change the direction that this game is heading, and build my "perfect" experience of DayZ, these are the changes I would make. I think the first point is a must though.

 

---1)  Spawn players over 1000s of possible spawn sites, as any charachter, any clothes, any health condition, and if dev time wasn't a problem, maybe a short 10-30 second clip playing a vague backstory of your character. Have maybe 40 of these made out ie. Arrived in a boat in fishing gear and really thirsty/boat capsized or ran out of fuel a mile off the coast/ woke up in a wrecked Cessna and need some morphine or have the other dead occupants that are now zombies biting at you ankles as you crawl out/ parachuted in as a convict with handcuffs on and left for dead/ woke in hospital/ opened up the door of a preppers bunker because your out off supplies/ car runs out of fuel as you arrive at a town/criminal that got locked in one of the police stations(have to make enough noise in direct for someone to let you out or commit suicide!)/escaped from the boot of someone's car/ last of your platoon that hid under some dead bodies from zeds and you lost your gun and so on.

    If some props (such as the cessna or car) were to spawn into the world with you, have them despawn as soon as the player/players leave a pre set bubble of distance around the props.

 

---2)  Add in missions. I think if you gave a poll to the whole of the DayZ community on weather people like missions in or not, Im pretty sure the vast majority prefer them in. So now this time we have an experienced and talented dev team working on the game, I dont understand why this section of the game is being ignored. I would have worked on implementing 100s if not 1000s of possible missions across every inch of Chernarus. Have top end loot spawn at the missions, maybe get lucky and find missions with armed pick ups or hueys with door guns, have the ammo spawn in barracks. Most missions would just be bandits with damaged AKs and IZH rifles with one or two winchesters, rarer ones could be militarised with one or two top tier guns. So many possible missions that people wont learn to run the equivalent of "the crash site route", the only way to find them is to travel the map which ever direction you want. This will promote more random travel, and also might help promote survivors to band together more, for the common good. IDK how many missions is the right amount to have active so people can find them, maybe 6-10?

 

---3)  Zombies need to be way more abundant and not feel so clunky, they also need to be a threat and there needs to be a reason to kill them. They need to get hordes working and massive numbers of them, also they need to be everywhere in varying numbers not just towns. Instead of trying to luck out and find a mission for top gear, maybe design some static locations that have a chance of spawning the best loot but you would have to clear the area of zombies before you could get to it eg. An oil rig with some crashed chinooks that sometimes spawn the best gear but you have to clear the rig of walkers, Those quarry doors (i forget where) could have loot at the end (best basebuilding loot) but you have to go in with a flashlight and clear the whole mining area of zombies to get to it, That crashed ship could have a static heli crash on top but 100s of zombies around the entrance and throughout it.

 

---4)  Some vehicles that dont take 8 hours searching for parts to maybe have a shot at driving. The focus needs to branch off from constantly spending all your time searching X building for Y parts to build Z. The rarity of everything in this game drives people to just sit on a stockpile of guns in the bush with no drive to actually use them. Thats not what Dayz is all about to me. Some things should be difficult like surviving with food/having to hunt/fish, Basebuilding, Finding you Fave gun (not ammo). And then some things shouldnt be hard like finding car parts/ ammo and stuff. ATM 99% of your time will be searching houses, there needs to be more action/other things to do/ more new places to explore.

 

---5)  Food and health. Hunting/fishing is a novelty and nothing more ATM. Your player should only be able to stay at 70% health unless he has eaten fresh meat/veggies that day. It should take 8x longer if not more to build back blood from being well fed/watered. Dropping to 2x if you have eaten fresh meat/veggies in the last 30 mins. It would also be nice if you could self blood bag/IV for solo players (maybe it takes a full minute to do so to balance it) because its not hard to do IRL, Ive done it after a loose night and I was extremely weathered (friends a paramedic) so i dont see why this has to be an advantage only groups get.

 

---6)  Random stuff.

Be able to carry a full backpack in your hands at the cost of speed.

Craftable suppressors for boltactions and pistols using oil filters/wire/ductape/whatever.

Ghille suits to work because the grass doesnt render past a certain distance/ Be able to use a small backpack with it (schoolbag or craftable equivalent)

Random deaths to stairs to be removed

Fix the horrible desync/people just desyncing through walls and getting shot.

Throw in some more junk loot or mildly usefull stuff so houses dont appear so barren.

More things should be spray paintable like tents/ craftable ghille blanket for tents that cant be exploited be having low graphics.

Radios that actually work and let you communicate with other survivors.

Base building that doesnt take someone 30 mins to get in when it took you 100s of hours to build. Maybe a flag is raised in the base when the owners are online, during this time its easier to break into and MUCH harder when the person isnt on?

Dynamic weather that forces you to make tough decisions.

IDK but maybe some way of turning off the gamma goggles at night time and a need to use an alternate light source.

 

---7)  Heli crashes should also be completely random/on the same amount of spawn points as the missions so people cant just run a loop or server hop NW airfield. Have a few AI there aswell, put the loot on them, maybe sometimes there zombies hanging around the crash site. Would be cool if you could actually see them fly around and crash ala breaking point.

 

Thats what im hoping this game will become! Truly random interactions with players all around the map, keeping your eyes peeled for ai and a chance to take them out, reasons to kill zombies, and a map that isnt stagnant everywhere but spawn towns.

Edited January 17, 2016 by Salty seadog

[Killawife 599]

Honestly? By the time its released I'll probably be playing something else. I have great fun in Dayz Sa and understand the development process is hard but its taking way too long and its taking its toll on the players. When I started playing you could have fun random encounters every day. Something really exciting happened almost every time you played and people were really up to trying new things and doing stuff. Now, Its just KoS, all the fucking time. And that gets boring really fast. I can partly understand that people are bored and cant think of anything else to do but kill other players and frankly I dont see this ever going away. It doesnt really matter how many cars, helis, new enterable buildings and other stuff comes around. They just become a short time novelty thing and then its back to the killing.

 The game might change but the players most likely won't.

[Kirov (DayZ) 585]

They just become a short time novelty thing and then its back to the killing.

 The game might change but the players most likely won't.

 

Strongly disagree. There is a myriad of elements you can manipulate in order to elicit a behaviour you want. Several ideas, all of them discussed on this forum:

 

- make ammo count

- scarce loot - force people to hunt before hitting the tent bases

- tougher factors like wetness, hunger, sickness, etc. - make vitamins no less essential to carry than additional mags

- medical system which requires you to seek assistance of other players

- personalized skills which allow for synergy and also make you more committed to your current toon.

 

Just start with greatly reducing ammo spawn and Tyson punching - in order to KOS, you need to have something to kill liberally with in the first place. Then cut canned food ten times and people will start to prefer shovels over Mosins. Seriously, this is one of the few problems with DayZ which can be solved with a handful of tweaks to the loot table.

 

Of course, the resistance would be just massive.

[Rammur 59]

They are literally still adding stuff to the game they havnt even got to the point of fine tuning everything but being away for 6 months in that time they have added quiet a bit.who is using arkham knight as a example that game is highly playable it just had a crappy port is all.But thats beside the point.Dayz is getting bettter each patch minus the little bugs but as they say its aslpha and thats a development cycle.And tbh when the game gets its mod support all the ideas people are posting will come to pass rathers its a kos server or a immersion server it will all be there the game will eventually cater to all playstyles,much like the mod had its overwatch and dayz origin servers etc etc.People need to quit being so quick to moan about every and anything sit back and relax and enjoy the ride at least we get to play and experience the game as it grows most people when they buy the game after release wont be able to say the experienced what we did.

Edited January 17, 2016 by Rammur

[Coheed_IV 381]

I really liked reading everyone's perspective. It's all understandable, its been pretty tough. Good thread. :thumbsup:

 

When they did the item refactoring around 9 months ago, which was a necessary step to get the CLE online, it was just crazy how difficult this was. They just didn't have the man power to squash the bugs that came with implementing it. Probably had to take Devs offf their work to get it ironed out. Since then, their approach seems to have changed with implementing large changes. Right now it seems they're in a holding pattern, till once all basic features are low level functional. The player controller was on schedule to be put in months ago, but if they did, the game could have come to a standstill.

 

All these big tech changes like player controller, animations system, audio, UI, render, they have as much to do with taking out the old parts as implementing the new. I can't see how they can do it without more Devs committed to bug smashing. Which is what's supposed to happen in a couple months. I think it will get to beta soon, but the beta looks to be long (least over a year IMO). But atleast it stands to be pretty fun once the infected numbers gets up. 

 

In my honest opinion, developers are not doing their best. They are doing good work, but with budget that DayZ made and head-start DayZ made begin first real apocalpyse survival simulator, they should be doing much much more. If they don't know how to fix this stuff, hire someone who can.

The hard part about what your suggesting is that they use their own in house engine, you don't just go out and hire people who are highly experienced with RV or Enfusion. They often hire from their modding community, who has experience, but that pool is not endless. On top of that, they're in Prague.

 

 

My honest opinion is, everything still rests on infected numbers. Huge numbers are possible, maybe just not in the way they had planned on. But, still the game must have huge numbers, the Alpha hasn't seen anything close to what it needs yet. If or when it happens, no one is going to care about all the things we bitch about now.

Edited January 17, 2016 by Coheed_IV

[Coheed_IV 381]

I made some of these comments in the Status Report thread but the parsed version is that we're following a pretty traditional BIS theme of introducing new "stuff" while not demonstrating equal enthusiasm for fixing things that are broke.

That's not just a traditional BIS theme, it's intentional. Once they get to Beta, Hicks has said they will go to 80% bug fixing, from the Alpha's 20%.

Edited January 17, 2016 by Coheed_IV

[Deathlove 2286]

Im kind of hoping in the end the game will be sort of be like Project Zomboid. Heavy infected and the chance of dying trying to obtain loot or food needed to survive on a daily basis, weather that can kill you if you abuse your characters health to much, weight penalties with risk of fracturing limbs if your carrying to much, etc. Oh and also massive hordes you can draw attention to by doing specific actions like chopping down trees and firing guns.

[karlkurtz32 59]

It is interesting reading everyone's opinions.  Initially, I pretty much gave up on the game.  But after reading through the thread I guess I still have a glimmer of hope left in me.  If they don't start making serious progress soon though people are going to forget about DayZ.  Especially with games like Escape from Tarkov just around the corner.  

[Espa 711]

Honestly, I'm losing my damn patience with this progress. The Devs don't seem to be very socially adept at all or have a good work ethic. I have no clue how large the team is, but it's clear that they need more people or a new manager to whip their ass into work. 

 

Biggest gripe is the focus on MORE guns/clothing? Why the hell do we need more so quickly? It is not even relevant to the whole theme of this game as a Zombie Survival game if there are NO Zombies to survive from! Gah. >:(

 

There is much more to add to make this a gem, but man is my faith wavering hardcore.

[eno 1049]

 The Devs don't seem to be very socially adept at all or have a good work ethic. 

 

I think they're more active on Twitter and reddit... Forums seem so yesteryear. And I'm not sure that from any perspective, no matter how bad, that we can criticize work ethic. And I'm not a fanboy- I'm as frustrated as anyone else... but we literally can not make an assessment like that in here. 

[Espa 711]

I think they're more active on Twitter and reddit... Forums seem so yesteryear. And I'm not sure that from any perspective, no matter how bad, that we can criticize work ethic. And I'm not a fanboy- I'm as frustrated as anyone else... but we literally can not make an assessment like that in here. 

 

Just getting quite frustrated. I am sure that they are working as best they can - and I'm no programmer, I'm in the USAF - but it just seems like so little potent information comes out to stir the masses. I'm so utterly tired of seeing more guns and clothing. There's no mention of Zombies in .60 at all. . I just want to hear even a tidbit. Even a damn hint haha.

[Bororm 1156]

I think they're more active on Twitter and reddit... Forums seem so yesteryear. And I'm not sure that from any perspective, no matter how bad, that we can criticize work ethic. And I'm not a fanboy- I'm as frustrated as anyone else... but we literally can not make an assessment like that in here. 

 

They really need to hire a PR guy, because the way they get information out is complete garbage.  Having to glean tiny tid bits of information off twitter and reddit is a chore.  This game's community has a ton of poorly informed people and it's hard to say its their fault.  I try to follow development as best I can and it's a mess.

 

The status reports should be the place to get this info across and they're garbage.  Hicks for whatever reason can't make his deadlines.  He writes more on his twitter in a day than he does on a status report each month.  Going from weekly, to bi weekly, to monthly and he still can't get them out on time.  And then they're usually a few poorly worded paragraphs.  I don't wanna get down on the guy, but his writing is terrible and he often conveys information in a way that leaves room for confusion.

 

Let's take a few examples off the latest report:

 

 

Over the last week as far as Steam goes - we've pushed a small update addressing some security issues, as well as merging over some pending filters changes for the New UI. Enough about that though - you all want to know whats going on with the under the hood type stuff - so lets get to that.

 

A single line of hardly anything informative about what the hotfix actually did followed by "enough about that."  It's just terrible writing.  I know that seems nitpicky but it's a perfect example of the attitude he's conveying, which feels unprofessional on multiple levels.

 

 

 

Internally we're hoping to have our next .60 update out late next month.

 

This is a bit confusing.  Is he saying that they expect to have .60 out on their internal build late next month?  Is he saying that the team is internally hoping, as in privately/keeping this hope to themselves (this doesn't make sense because of course the hope is coming "internally" who else would it come from?), that it will be out on stable late next month?  Experimental?  It's extraordinarily vague.  You can see the effect by people in the status report thread speculating when it will be out.  It's bad writing.

 

In previous reports there's been lists of completed tasks/features.  The way they're represented is that they've been completed internally, however the wording is vague and I've seen people multiple times confused thinking they are completed on stable.

 

 

I highly encourage everyone to check out Rust's devblogs for a comparison.  NSFW contains nudity: http://playrust.com/devblog-88/

The tone is still casual, but it conveys a ton of information and actually shows people what they're working on.  There's a real sense of progress.

To save people the trouble here's the dayz status report: https://forums.dayzgame.com/index.php?/topic/231389-status-report-15-jan-2016/

 

Different games, different teams, different people sure.  I just think they could do a whole lot better.  This is one of my biggest gripes about development and I think it leads to a huge amount of discontent by the playerbase because they are ill informed.  I think Hicks tries, but he's just not up to the task and they need to hire a PR person.

Edited January 18, 2016 by Bororm

[Komalt 27]

 

 

---1)  Spawn players over 1000s of possible spawn sites, as any charachter, any clothes, any health condition,

 

---7)  Heli crashes should also be completely random/on the same amount of spawn points as the missions so people cant just run a loop or server hop NW airfield. 

 

 

I very much agree with these points especially.

 

There should be more randomization in DayZ in all aspects.  After all mother nature is very random and hard to predict in a survival situation.  

 

More over spawn points of vehicles should also be in the thousands and be able to appear nearly anywhere in the map.  Of course they would still be rare but it would make it so much better because you can't farm them and when you find a vehicle it will be such a delightful surprise.  As it is now you pretty much know what areas vehicles can spawn in so you know you won't be surprised with seeing a vehicle.  Unless its the rare occasion that someone broke down and left a vehicle in the middle of a town somewhere.  I mean it can't be that hard to add a bunch of additional spawn points all around the map for vehicles.  Why even have these vehicles in certain sections of the map.  

 

Same can be said for items,  I understand items are categorized and very rigid right now and that should be the case for things like guns but there should be items, items that are even super rare and might be useful that can be found anywhere on the map.  This gives incentive to search every building.  As it is now there is pretty much no point to search your average civilian buildings after a few hours of play but this can be fixed easily.  

 

This game should be all around randomness in these aspects because thats what creates the best replayability and the best challenge in a survival game.  

Edited January 18, 2016 by Komalt

[eno 1049]

 I'm no programmer, I'm in the USAF - 

 

Well I suppose then to put it into perspective DayZ would be BIS F-35... trying to do too much at once while not doing anything pertinent really well- outrunning budgets and timelines almost as fast as promised performance. But also too big to fail.

[emuthreat 2837]

I think maybe there is not too much loot. Sometimes I found only few useful items in one village. Problem is we don't have to work hard for gear. Last time I died to either zombies or elements was more than year ago. It was frustrating, I found matches and just as I was about to light fire I died. I wasn't hungry/starving since 0.40something.

Zombies are even worse, now that we have them they are weak and slow. They used to break our bones, ruin our gear - now they barely make you bleed. I know pushing new items is easiest thing to do, but some things should be worked harder on.

Year ago devs promised to bring back Z in dayz. We got zzzzz instead.

Did you sleep through the Famine of .57?

[igor-vk 909]

Did you sleep through the Famine of .57?

Yes. I didnt play it because of turned off zombies. I think .55 or which ever it was (first try of new loot spawn system - lootsposions in outhouse toilets) was last update with lack of food on coast. And there was one experimental build with no loot up to one km from coast. Then was last time I starved.

[Grimey Rick 3417]

What is your honest opinion on the future of DayZ

 

Darkness... Death...

 

Recycle Bin.

[CJFlint 357]

I took about a 6 month break.  Came back recently and am pretty disappointed.  No players to engage, not many zombies to evade, loot seemed very boring and repetitious. Not a whole lot seems to be changed at all.  Honestly though, I haven't been following the development process so I'm sure I am unaware of a lot of small changes.  I guess after half a year I just expected more.

 

Whats the general consensus?  Are people giving up on this game or is there still reason to believe it will soon be something worth playing?

I think DayZ SA is what it is right now. I still love the concept of the game, and enjoy playing it. Like you I also took a break for a long while, and mainly sat back and watched. With that said, its a alpha and its not going to be done for a while. So why should I burn my self out on it. I paid 29 bucks  quite a while ago. I got lots of play time out of it and had a great time when it runs well and vary different game exp out of it then with other games.

 

It is worth playing to me, and would never want to see it just shut down. BUT I'm not dumping all my free gaming time into playing it right now. I play patches that I think look fun, If its buggy or there is nothing added that interests me. I simply wait. There's tons of other games and things to do then to get to hung up on it, unless they just dumped it. I would rant and rave then, because it would be allot wasted. But I don't think that will ever happen. So If you enjoy the concept, I would say just be patient with it. There going to finish, and in fact the plan is to even make it mod-a-ble by players. So were talking unlimited game play with in the confines of the engine.....At the end of the day I think it will be pretty dam interesting. 

 

It's kind the problem with early access. Software development of any kind, can be a painful process. This new early access game thing is kind of a double edged sword in my opinion. One one end you get to get in on a game your really interested in early with out waiting. On the other end, you have to go through the growing pains patch after patch and slow. Games take years to make. It also is cool to see indi developers make the idea into reality who other wise would not. Players have to understand it though and made vary clear what it all means. Which sometimes steam doesn't always do well.

Edited January 19, 2016 by CJFlint

[q.S Sachiel 470]

I don't really understand.  Still being worked on, will hopefully come out eventually.  I won't play it like i spammed it in the early release versions, or with as much frequency, but i'll still come back.  They've sold however million units, and will probably see at least a short-lived influx of new players upon launch to enliven the game... If there's still a server or two of 60+ vanilla when i want to play then the whole 'when it comes out it will be outdated' is BS.  There's not really much else like this game, even the copycats are fundamentally different (for better or for worse).

 

From my standpoint, it's basically a more advanced version of the vanilla mod, with arguably more stability from when i last played it, and the same if not more features (as vanilla)...

Every other EA program out there takes a swing at DayZ as  'abandonware' in an attempt to sell or further market their product, and their radical zealous playerbases just circlejerks all over eachother until there's nothing left but chaff giggling like the bully from South Park muttering 'yeah, yeah' while looking their neighbour straight in the eye without blinking.

 

Niche, notorious, ambitious, slow, broad & vast... it's a whole lot of things, and i'm young and patient enough to wait for it.

Project Zomboid is a smaller game, that's been in EA for god knows how long (i only just hopped on board) and is in what i'd consider an extremely polished state.  That said, people still bitch and whine about features not being in yet, when the devs stated multiple times they aim to honour their promise.

 

Some people just can't be pleased, or perhaps just need to vent from time to time.

[SMoss 2101]

There is a lot of concern in this topic regarding the direction DayZ seems to be going and I can understand where it's coming from. While bigger elements of the game are still in development it can look like we're just throwing new gear and weapons at players and not much else in an attempt at hurling DayZ towards becoming another PvP title. However, the vision of having a finished product where you have to work hard in order to survive ingame is very much still there. Obviously, that is not the current state of DayZ, but that does not mean that we do not have that goal in sight - The infected will be back in larger numbers, and with better AI, when performance allows for it. Spawn rates for food for example can and will be tweaked (most likely many times over), but I could imagine that it will happen after, say hunting for example, becomes a more viable source for survival.

[Kirov (DayZ) 585]

There is a lot of concern in this topic regarding the direction DayZ seems to be going and I can understand where it's coming from. [snip]

 

Thanks for your reply, nice to see the devs reaching to 'concerned Survivors', thumbs up. We all know it's alpha and all, but some reassurance as to the future every now and then is welcome.

[SMoss 2101]

Thanks for your reply, nice to see the devs reaching to 'concerned Survivors', thumbs up. We all know it's alpha and all, but some reassurance as to the future every now and then is welcome.

No problem at all. Developing games is a long haul and there'll be plenty of times in the future when we'll have to keep reminding ourselves that even though the Alpha was released in december 2013, and even though we are getting closer to the Beta, nothing at all is finalized yet. There is a TON of work to go still.

[SniperV (DayZ) 43]

Based on what I've seen so far, I don't think it has any future.

 

The developement... it feels like we had plenty of status reports where great plans, ideas were announced, they either ended up being massively underhwelming (barricading, horticulture, cle, new persistence) or are just still work in progress that we don't get to see. Yet again, great things are announced for .60, but I don't believe it anymore. Too many disapppointments in the past.

 

There are other concerns aswell. Supposably there are some builds that are only dedicated for internal testing. What's the point of experimental servers then? Why every single experimental patch comes without a changelog? Why not just list the new additions and let players test them? What's the point of players wasting all those extra hours on exp, trying to find out what's new?

 

And if the SA actually is doing fine and you are confident that massive positive changes are just behind the corner, then what's the point of censoring negative posts both here and on steam forums?

[pjano 34]

The devs should hire some more people with the money they got. But at the same time they need to remember what actually made the mod fun:

1. A limited number of highly contested areas such as stary sobor military tents and NWAF which gave a sense of being in danger and risk. You were always 1 shot away from death.

2. Vehicles and tents which gave the game depth - especially including boats and chopper

3. Zombies which you used to literally have to crawl passed to avoid alerting. Night time. Dark atmosphere and sound effects

4. A variety of items including stuff like barbed wire fences, NVGs, a variety of sniper rifles and other rare loot (e.g. mountain dew)

5. Seemingly endless forests which you could get lost in and stumble across random bases.

 

Unfortunately I think they took out this stuff and made some mistakes which I'm not sure can/will be fixed. The main advantage SA still has against the copycat games is that is it still a massively larger map. Maybe I already played the DayZ formula to death in the mod but I'm not gonna bother playing until they fix up this stuff or modders do some interesting things