What are people's thoughts on the current state of DayZ

[Boruto89 1]

It's a game that I was always interested in from a distance but all I kept reading about was development hell and feature creep that slowed down development. I decided to see if the game still had a population and according to steam charts it's as popular as it's ever been. mobdro kodi.

Are there any current players here who can talk about the state of the game at the moment? I'm considering getting it during the next Steam sale if it's actually good.

Edited April 14, 2021 by Boruto89

[Caatalyst 46]

As a returning player, from my experience it seems that the community has fragmented off into modded servers.

IMO the current state of vanilla is barebones. The game looks and runs great but it is severely lacking in content or purpose. It's the same gameplay loop that it's always had. Spawn, run to mili sites gear up die and repeat. Base building may add longevity but even that's barebones (Few wood pieces and tents) and in order to introduce realism vanilla bases are sadly mostly a waste of time. What might take you days / weeks to build and store loot can be wiped clean in a matter of minutes by some bambi and a tool. If we had some tiered base building materials going up to metal and concrete that required explosives to penetrate that would be a game changer but it's unlikely at this stage.

The dev's seem to have wound down and are now focusing on smaller content updates that fix bugs and add back legacy content (the odd new gun and food items etc). I suspect they are focused on Arma 4 now.

One of the biggest downers is that vehicles were added but they behave terribly on servers and as far as I can tell work on this has been abandoned. It's a real shame because what this game needs more than anything is a mode of transport that doesn't involve getting serious hand injuries from holding shift and forward for what feels like hours and hours. Assuming Arma 4 is getting built on the same engine we may see a major update come to Dayz in the future that massively improves vehicle performance as large scale vehicle combat is a big part of Arma 4. We can only pray...

Your best bet is to grab the DZSA launcher and look at community / modded servers. Since mod support came out there have been some pretty big strides made with modders adding a lot of the promised content that never came and building on the vanilla game. A lot of mods are still in their infant stages and due to server performance they can be quite unstable. That said I've been having a blast so far. Expansion mod is probably the most polished addon for Dayz currently that I would recommend.

So yeah if you're gunna jump on, find a modded server community that tickles your fancy.

Edited April 12, 2021 by Caatalyst

[Tonyeh 454]

I came back to DayZ in 1.08 after a couple of years away. Some of the changes are great, like stamina etc (before players were sprinting everywhere which was dumb). There's some crafting mechanics are good too. I couldn't give a fuck about cars, so that nonsense doesn't bother me in the slightest and base building is rather pointless (as it indeed would be in real life in such a small area) and the whinging about it is beyond tedious now. Other mechanics, like the "count_in" flags, are an appalling addition and very close to game breaking IMO. Plus there's been some musing about regular server wipes which has many people unenthused about where the game is going.

There's also far, FAR, too much needless tinkering by the developers in every patch. Little, mickey mouse, things that don't need touching get altered for some bizarre reason. The durability of knives and boots, for example, is at a bloody stupid state at the moment when they were perfectly fine before. They're unreasonably flimsy now and it's ridiculous.

The majority of the player base are still massive cunts, it had to be said. But that's nearly always been the case. You will die repeatedly from a number of cowardly ways...sniped, ambushed, getting shot for saying "hello", or simply just shot in the back. Half the time the player that killed you probably doesn't even take any of the gear you have. A lot of the time you won't even have any gear worth taking. This is DayZ combat.

Nature is cruel too. It bloody freezing everywhere, even on custom maps like Deer Isle and especially Namalsk, which is a real test. Frankly I think there should be summer maps as well, but that's another story. Wolves, too, can have you for breakfast and bears can knock you into the middle of next week. Hopefully the devs are looking into more dangerous animals. There are diseases that will catch out the unweary or the desperate (drink that water at your own risk). The infected have been given a boost too, in 1.12, and they are more dangerous than they've ever been. Where before they were a nuisance (albeit one that could get the better of you if you were complacent), now they are a bigger threat and something to be really weary of in even small numbers, which was much needed.

You will, on occasion, come across other players that are cool and helpful and in some cases end up running with them for a while, which can be a great experience.

However, the one thing I will say for the game - and it's an important thing - is that no other game will give to the experience that DayZ does. It takes a long time to build up your toon to a decent state and all of that can come to nothing in an instant. That leads to extremely tense moments, which I have never experienced in any other game. There's times where I have finished a session sweating and my chest heaving.

Plus, the game is completely random, so it's what you make it. There's no endgame, other than survival. There's no tasks, other than the ones that you do to keep you alive. But bear in mind that this can be boring for some.

But it's the uniqueness of DayZ that keeps people coming back to it time and time again.

 

...one more thing. The game is as clunky as fuck. I just joined my server and immediately got attacked by wolves. I killed three of them and ran out of ammo for my USG45. Then about 5 zombies appeared, alerted by the gunfire, so I tried to change to my pistol...but the game wouldn't let me, as the hotbar was unresponsive, and I died. Thanks game.

That was after spending, literally, hours building up that toon on one of the most difficult servers out there (Spaggies Namalsk Hardcore 1). 🤬

 

Edited April 12, 2021 by Tonyeh