Return to DayZ SA

[Mallow88 110]

Recently started playing again after a 1+ year hiatus. Last time I played DayZ SA I was rather unimpressed with the progress that was being made. Enough time has passed, time to give it another go! 

Just a few impressions after 2 days back at it. Overall the game has made progress, there are a ton of new features and weapons than when I last played. It's unfortunate that so many very basic bugs still riddle the game, but it's nice to see that progress is being made. I also understand their approach of releasing content before fixing bugs, even if I don't agree with it. The UI is still very troubled, the shadows are a bit wonky even on high, the hotbar is a piece of filth, and base-building and vehicle fixing seems more work than it's worth. Odds are your camp will despawn (your vehicle certainly will) and it's faster just to run around and re-gear rather than build a camp to store gear.

However, I'm rather impressed with the game. There is a much wider variety of weapons to be found (please put in the tooltips what ammo it uses. It's not more realistic, we have google). The crafting system is actually useful in some regards, but still fairly useless for hunting as food is not a problem to scavenge and if you don't like chicken you're doomed. The graphical improvements of 0.60 are very nice. FPS drops are much less of a problem than before. Audio is still completely jacked, but I've gathered from reading dev announcements that there is a new audio engine in the pipeline so it makes sense not to waste time fixing it now. Scavenging is much more rewarding and immersive with loot popping up in less obvious places. Much better than the little pre-determined piles of loot like in the mod. HOLY CRAP THERE ARE A TON OF NEW STRUCTURES ON THE MAP! No longer must you suffer giant vast stretches of nothingness between towns. There is still enough wilderness to get lost, but not so depressingly empty like before.

I could go on as I think of more things since my return, but overall I'm glad to see the game is improving and evolving (even if a bit too slow). Keep up the good work dev team.

 

EDIT: Oh yea, how could I forget about Zombies?! Probably because they are less frequent than chickens. It's a zombie survival game. 3 years later and the zombies are still broken. At least they no longer run through walls (that I've witnessed yet) or sense your presence from 500 meters away. I'd just like to see the game turn back into a zombie survival at some point.

Edited July 1, 2016 by Mallow88

[Parazight 1594]

Welcome back!

Camps are persistent! and working!

[BeefBacon 1185]

14 hours ago, Mallow88 said:

Recently started playing again after a 1+ year hiatus. Last time I played DayZ SA I was rather unimpressed with the progress that was being made. Enough time has passed, time to give it another go! 

Just a few impressions after 2 days back at it. Overall the game has made progress, there are a ton of new features and weapons than when I last played. It's unfortunate that so many very basic bugs still riddle the game, but it's nice to see that progress is being made. I also understand their approach of releasing content before fixing bugs, even if I don't agree with it. The UI is still very troubled, the shadows are a bit wonky even on high, the hotbar is a piece of filth, and base-building and vehicle fixing seems more work than it's worth. Odds are your camp will despawn (your vehicle certainly will) and it's faster just to run around and re-gear rather than build a camp to store gear.

However, I'm rather impressed with the game. There is a much wider variety of weapons to be found (please put in the tooltips what ammo it uses. It's not more realistic, we have google). The crafting system is actually useful in some regards, but still fairly useless for hunting as food is not a problem to scavenge and if you don't like chicken you're doomed. The graphical improvements of 0.60 are very nice. FPS drops are much less of a problem than before. Audio is still completely jacked, but I've gathered from reading dev announcements that there is a new audio engine in the pipeline so it makes sense not to waste time fixing it now. Scavenging is much more rewarding and immersive with loot popping up in less obvious places. Much better than the little pre-determined piles of loot like in the mod. HOLY CRAP THERE ARE A TON OF NEW STRUCTURES ON THE MAP! No longer must you suffer giant vast stretches of nothingness between towns. There is still enough wilderness to get lost, but not so depressingly empty like before.

I could go on as I think of more things since my return, but overall I'm glad to see the game is improving and evolving (even if a bit too slow). Keep up the good work dev team.

 

EDIT: Oh yea, how could I forget about Zombies?! Probably because they are less frequent than chickens. It's a zombie survival game. 3 years later and the zombies are still broken. At least they no longer run through walls (that I've witnessed yet) or sense your presence from 500 meters away. I'd just like to see the game turn back into a zombie survival at some point.

I don't code, but from what I understand bugs can be created by new content very easily. If you're constantly fixing bugs as they pop up you'll be doing just that - constantly fixing bugs. They fix the bugs that make the game literally unplayable, but for the most part they get ignored - which makes sense. Old bugs that everyone knows and loves - like dying randomly on stairs - will likely be resolved by the new player controller. There's no point wasting time fixing a bug if it's going to be made redundant soon™ anyway.

Yeah I'm a lot like you. I just tend to wait between updates, or play so irregularly that I don't get bored with it. I know a lot of people plough thousands of hours in, but I've not even got 300 hours in yet, and I've played every patch since December 2013. I think most of my time in-game has been over the past 12 months or so, since my mate bought it... and probably many hours spent on the .60 server menu...

I don't like the UI at all. I hope - in fact I'm sure - that it's temporary. It uses space just... horribly. It works pretty well, like technically, but it's not well designed. So far I've not bothered with vehicles or camps. I drove a V3S when vehicles were first introduced and I put something in a barrel once. Until it's more robust, that'll do for me.

As I understand it, zombie numbers will increase dramatically at some point soon™. This means that the food found in town and cities will be much harder to get a hold of, making hunting and foraging and so on a more attractive option. But yeah, for now there's not really any point in hunting. Zombies are much better now. They don't glitch through walls (though they can be a bit funny if you close a door on them), they'll be able to knock downs doors and stuff at some point and they can already hop over walls and other obstacles. Couple all that with more of them and they should be pretty lethal.

There's still a lot of work to do, but I think people are starting to get a good idea of how DayZ is shaping up. Certainly the massive improvement to performance has made people a bit more positive. However, even though I'm the sort of person who would defend DayZ's development pace as being pretty normal in the grand scheme of things, I hope we don't have a .60-style wait for .61.

[sneakydude 480]

1 hour ago, BeefBacon said:

I don't code, but from what I understand bugs can be created by new content very easily. If you're constantly fixing bugs as they pop up you'll be doing just that - constantly fixing bugs.

I don't like the UI at all. I hope - in fact I'm sure - that it's temporary. It uses space just... horribly. It works pretty well, like technically, but it's not well designed. So far I've not bothered with vehicles or camps. .

I could not agree more, the one thing is the drop down menus slip off and you have to tab re do it again.

 

[Mallow88 110]

3 hours ago, BeefBacon said:

I don't code, but from what I understand bugs can be created by new content very easily. If you're constantly fixing bugs as they pop up you'll be doing just that - constantly fixing bugs. They fix the bugs that make the game literally unplayable, but for the most part they get ignored - which makes sense. Old bugs that everyone knows and loves - like dying randomly on stairs - will likely be resolved by the new player controller. There's no point wasting time fixing a bug if it's going to be made redundant soon™ anyway.

I don't code either, but from a logical standpoint you could argue that the old bugs won't go away on their own, correct? Unless the original code that caused the old bug was replaced by the new code that coincides with the new content. That's the only argument that would defend this point of view. Otherwise, all you have by adding in new content without fixing old bugs is new bugs... and old bugs. 

I guess my complaint is old bugs that have been around for a long time, but have been neglected. The inconsistency of the hotbar is a good example, or trying to jump while running. There seems to be an unpredictable chance that you will stop and crouch step rather than running and jumping. These are bugs that would make sense to fix, because they will probably still be there a year from now if not fixed. Again, I'm not a developer or coder, but I always figured that devs realized that some of these bugs were coded in such a way that it would require countless hours of reworking chunks of code to fix these small bugs, most likely because the game was developed somewhat on the fly. So they'd rather work on new content than dump countless hours into fixing minor bugs. From being a player since the mod and watching the development, it's been kind of a mess if you think about it. A lot of these guys were amateurs before getting picked up by Bohemia. I don't mean that in a negative way, just the reality. For some of the early developers of DayZ this was their first real big project, so I figure it's only natural that a lot of early mistakes were made. Mistakes that are now going to take a lot of work to fix...

Edited July 2, 2016 by Mallow88

[sneakydude 480]

See the problem is also they had to recode the render. The bugs took a huge backdoor until the render was perfect. What use would it be to fix the bugs if the game needed a huge boost in the graphics engine.

Now they will hash out all the bugs one by one. I think we really don't know what steps they plan to take.

I just got back too, and so far I am very impressed with .60. If you look at the feedback tracker I spammed the shit out of it again with bug reports. NP on my side, I see everything.

Yes the infected are not exactly perfect, but lets be honest here.... they are starting to move and react much better then in the past?

 

[BeefBacon 1185]

7 hours ago, Mallow88 said:

I don't code either, but from a logical standpoint you could argue that the old bugs won't go away on their own, correct? Unless the original code that caused the old bug was replaced by the new code that coincides with the new content. That's the only argument that would defend this point of view. Otherwise, all you have by adding in new content without fixing old bugs is new bugs... and old bugs. 

I guess my complaint is old bugs that have been around for a long time, but have been neglected. The inconsistency of the hotbar is a good example, or trying to jump while running. There seems to be an unpredictable chance that you will stop and crouch step rather than running and jumping.

Well, as I said, there'll be a new player controller that will affect how players move, animate, interact with the environment and so on. There's no point in spending time fixing anything that has anything to do with player movement because it's going to get completely replaced. Again, if there was a bug that rendered the game unplayable (say your legs invariably broke whenever you walked on a road texture or something) they would fix that, but unreliable vaulting isn't worth the time to fix since the entire system that allows vaulting in the first place is going to be replaced. Given that the new DX11 renderer is going to exist in the final game, I expect that the devs will start working on renderer-related issues - flickering shadows, stuttering and so on - but these issues will probably take a back seat while they work on things like the new audio, player controller, AI and so on. When the basic framework is finally in (and they can start properly building on game mechanics) I expect we will see more bugfixing alongside new content, and then a final round of bugfixing before release.

[[Gen]Adzic 241]

So much optimism, oh how it makes my eyes water a lil' bit.. so when is the predicted release? a year, maybe two?