First Impressions of DayZ

[TheHappyPeanut 10]

My friends and I have played DayZ since the beginning of the week and I would like to share my first impressions of the game. This is a completely unbiased opinion of the game as I have nothing to gain or lose from my statements. Well, here it goes.

Initial Thoughts

I initially thought the game was pretty interesting. My friend had shown me a video of the game last weekend and I decided to buy the expansion for ARMA II and give the game a try. The videos suggested that the game had a lot of teamwork and that's something I enjoy.

Moving on to my first day: I was killed immediately after spawning. After that, I decided to try to find my friends (I was playing with two friends). We all spawned at different locations so we had to use landmarks to find each other. Although it's not difficult to find out where you are and walk along the coast, it does take a good bit of time and I felt that it unncessarily wasted my game time. I feel like I spent more time trying to find my friends than I did playing with them.

I'll fast forward to a couple of hours ago: my friends and I were planning to go north and then on to the eastern coast. As we were going along, we decided to clear a barn and see if it had any supplies in it. Well, we shot our way through the front of the barn and cleared the wave of zeds that were obviously going to come; what we did not know is that they were going to keep flowing in non-stop. Within the next minute there was at least 20 zeds blocking our exits; we eventually ran out of ammunition and died -- and, before you say it, we DID try to escape.

I'm not sure if it was a glitch or if that's how it was supposed to happen, but it wasn't fun. We tried it again but died in a similar situation because the zeds overpowered us in numbers.

The last thing I would like to talk about is playing at night. Well, I tried it once and at first it was really scary. And then about ten minutes later it got flat out annoying and boring. When I'm playing a game, regardless of how realistic it is, I want to be able to see. I certainly understand that this is a realism game, but there's a point where you have to make a compromise; starting out, I was not provided with a flashlight or any valuable light source -- before you say it, flares are not a valuable light source because they can't help you travel.

Let's say you start out as a complete newbie at night and you have just set up the game. Okay, let's go down our check-off list:

1. It's pitch black -- check

2. I can barely the ground in front of me -- check

3. I have absolutely no way of traveling because I cannot see -- check

It just shouldn't work like that. A new player should begin with the materials he needs to survive his first night. Flares aren't going to help him find a safe place. If anything, they're only going to get him killed by bandits, who obviously don't care that he's new.

In the end, this new player is going to hate playing at night. You can tell me that isn't true all you want, but there's a reason all the Americans move to the Russian servers at nighttime in the US; in its current state, no one wants to play at night because it's just not feasible.

With all of that being said, I do believe there are many wonderful things about this game and I especially want to thank Rocket for developing it. I believe with further development it will turn into a fantastic game, especially with the support the community shows. And to show that I'm not here to bash the game, I'd like to tell you some things I really like:

1. The thought process behind the game is incredible. It's the first zombie game that I've been truly interested in playing.

2. The teamwork this game requires is a wonderful thing. It brings players together in ways you wouldn't normally see.

3. The fact that you have to eat and drink to stay alive is pretty cool; it's actually something I prefer in games.

4. The choice to use ARMA II was a pretty great choice. I believe it was a great game to base DayZ.

With that being said, I'm going to sign off for a little while. I'll come back in a few months and see how things have come along. I look forward to keeping track of the progress of DayZ and I certainly look forward to playing it some time n the near future.

Again, I'm not bashing the game. I'm simply stating my thoughts on the game.

[pat_bennink@hotmail.com 0]

I can kind of see what you are saying. Though in my opinion this is what the game should be like. In the end it comes down to what you like. Verily, I shared much the same experience with you, I cannot see at the best of times but to me, it's still fun. In my opinion these flaws you state add intensity and tension. The night time is the best time. And I am not saying this because I have a character going along the coast killing noobs, in fact I lost a character the other night with 25 hours of game time and 200+ zombie kills to some random noob with a makarov. I lost my concentration and paid the price. I love it. In the end, it seems your problem is with the night, to be honest though it wouldn't be the same game without the pitch black. It's unforgiving, it offers no help, it is something sorely lacking in games these days. As to the zombies, yeah I think they respawn a bit too quickly, but it is an alpha, still lots of tweaking to do. Back to night, there are a few things you can do to increase visibility, like tweaking gamma and hdr. The moon helps a lot, but sometimes it doesn't come out for ages haha. Anyways of course it comes back to opinion, I spent two hours running through forest without incident last night. I loved it.

[Blaaaaaaag 75]

I must be the only person that likes playing at night... all my friends hate it too, consider it unplayable, but it's not, really. Just requires some adjusting. Travelling at night is difficult when you log in back in the deep dark woods and all you see in any direction are trees, but if you can make out anything distinct on the horizon, navigation is at least possible.

[dallas 5195]

Again' date=' I'm not bashing the game. I'm simply stating my thoughts on the game.

[/quote']

You didn't come off as bashing the game.

I think you chose a particular unlucky week to try out the mod.

First of all the last update was trying to address zombies not respawning correctly, but the fix turned out to accelerate the zombie spawns. The overwhelming hordes of zombies you're experiencing this week, has been labeled an "experiement" because of the exaggerated spawn rates. This means you either have to avoid firing your guns in built up areas or stuff your pockets with ammo, make every shot count or sneak around like a pacifist.

Secondly - the game engine comes with a calender, a day/night cycle and a lunar cycle. Most servers' time cycles are 1:1 and at this ingame date, it get's dark after 7PM and the moon rises at 1AM, which means you have six hours of pitch blackness in primetime. You can either find a server in an eariler timezone or attempt to find a server with reverse day/night cycle. The moonless part of the night is pretty much unplayable, unless you have courage or enough manpower to light up the night with flashlight, chemlights and road flares.

As for you wanting to play with your friends rather than looking for them, is also kind of reasonable. However I think that it's an important introduction of the mod to experience the fear and confusion of taking your first steps on your own, alone and worried about zombies and terrified of other players. With experience you'll become better and quicker at navigation and safely traveling the map.

If you overcome this last insane zombie update, get some playtime in daylight and get a little more comfortable with the gameplay, a bunch of friends is a very powerfull factor in the game.

While we're still is an alpha, it's hard not to get infected with the hype, but it does require the player to patiently endure all the abuse the game throws at you. If you were to give it a second go, I'd suggest you try to play in daylight and avoid fighting in large settlements, where too many zombies roam closely.

[crazierivan 2]

Again' date=' I'm not bashing the game. I'm simply stating my thoughts on the game.

[/quote']

You didn't come off as bashing the game.

I think you chose a particular unlucky week to try out the mod.

First of all the last update was trying to address zombies not respawning correctly, but the fix turned out to accelerate the zombie spawns. The overwhelming hordes of zombies you're experiencing this week, has been labeled an "experiement" because of the exaggerated spawn rates. This means you either have to avoid firing your guns in built up areas or stuff your pockets with ammo, make every shot count or sneak around like a pacifist.

Secondly - the game engine comes with a calender, a day/night cycle and a lunar cycle. Most servers' time cycles are 1:1 and at this ingame date, it get's dark after 7PM and the moon rises at 1AM, which means you have six hours of pitch blackness in primetime. You can either find a server in an eariler timezone or attempt to find a server with reverse day/night cycle. The moonless part of the night is pretty much unplayable, unless you have courage or enough manpower to light up the night with flashlight, chemlights and road flares.

As for you wanting to play with your friends rather than looking for them, is also kind of reasonable. However I think that it's an important introduction of the mod to experience the fear and confusion of taking your first steps on your own, alone and worried about zombies and terrified of other players. With experience you'll become better and quicker at navigation and safely traveling the map.

If you overcome this last insane zombie update, get some playtime in daylight and get a little more comfortable with the gameplay, a bunch of friends is a very powerfull factor in the game.

While we're still is an alpha, it's hard not to get infected with the hype, but it does require the player to patiently endure all the abuse the game throws at you. If you were to give it a second go, I'd suggest you try to play in daylight and avoid fighting in large settlements, where too many zombies roam closely.

+ 1 good post Brotha i agree

[TheHappyPeanut 10]

Again' date=' I'm not bashing the game. I'm simply stating my thoughts on the game.

[/quote']

You didn't come off as bashing the game.

I think you chose a particular unlucky week to try out the mod.

First of all the last update was trying to address zombies not respawning correctly, but the fix turned out to accelerate the zombie spawns. The overwhelming hordes of zombies you're experiencing this week, has been labeled an "experiement" because of the exaggerated spawn rates. This means you either have to avoid firing your guns in built up areas or stuff your pockets with ammo, make every shot count or sneak around like a pacifist.

Secondly - the game engine comes with a calender, a day/night cycle and a lunar cycle. Most servers' time cycles are 1:1 and at this ingame date, it get's dark after 7PM and the moon rises at 1AM, which means you have six hours of pitch blackness in primetime. You can either find a server in an eariler timezone or attempt to find a server with reverse day/night cycle. The moonless part of the night is pretty much unplayable, unless you have courage or enough manpower to light up the night with flashlight, chemlights and road flares.

As for you wanting to play with your friends rather than looking for them, is also kind of reasonable. However I think that it's an important introduction of the mod to experience the fear and confusion of taking your first steps on your own, alone and worried about zombies and terrified of other players. With experience you'll become better and quicker at navigation and safely traveling the map.

If you overcome this last insane zombie update, get some playtime in daylight and get a little more comfortable with the gameplay, a bunch of friends is a very powerfull factor in the game.

While we're still is an alpha, it's hard not to get infected with the hype, but it does require the player to patiently endure all the abuse the game throws at you. If you were to give it a second go, I'd suggest you try to play in daylight and avoid fighting in large settlements, where too many zombies roam closely.

Finding your friends wouldn't be so bad if you didn't have to continuously do it. Don't get me wrong... I love a lot of zombies, but when they respawn faster than you can kill them, it's ridiculous. Not to mention the fact that once they start chasing you they will stop for nothing. So basically, you run out of ammo and with no melee weapon, you are screwed. So you die, find your friends all over again, and repeat.

That's just not fun to me. You look at games like Killing Floor and there are a lot of zombies in that game, but they are pretty balanced; they don't respawn in five seconds.

And then there's the pathetic pathing of the zombies but I'm pretty sure that's not so easy to fix due to the engine.

I'll see if this next patch does anything decent.

[WildGunsTomcat 78]

Yeah I can see how this would be hard for someone that has never played Arma before.

In Vanilla Arma it's not really hard to find your friends because you have access to choppers or cars....so in this mod it's really the first time everyone is forced to be foot mobile.

Also, in Vanilla Arma everyone has ready access to Nightvision...so the devs didn't really think about how hard it would be for everyone to travel at night. That's why the night is pitch ass black...to really emulate the night in reality.

But yeah I agree with you on those two points...many people I know get sick of trying to find each other....and they also can't stand playing at night.

I guess the only reason I like playing at night is because I know Chernarus so well I can navigate pretty much without the map.

Stick in there man, I'm sure Rocket has plans for the night problem.

[daedrick 90]

What is this insane talk about zombies respawning faster than you can kill them. I never had that problem, never. I funnel them in a building and head shot them with my pistol, after 15-20 MAX they stop coming, great, and then I start looting. You find a winchester or any decent rifle in any barn and voila, you have enough ammo to fend off any horde, unless you aggro the whole town, which you deserve to die for if you did.

Never sprint near towns, crouch, when inside a town or near zombies, crawl, you are praticly invisible to them.

About the night, yeah I hate it too. But rocket want to keep it, so I play during the day. No big deal... but still I wouldnt mind shorter day cycle so people would be forced to play at night, because it wouldnt worth to dodge a server because night last 2-3 hours, imo.

[TheHappyPeanut 10]

What is this insane talk about zombies respawning faster than you can kill them. I never had that problem' date=' never. I funnel them in a building and head shot them with my pistol, after 15-20 MAX they stop coming, great, and then I start looting. You find a winchester or any decent rifle in any barn and voila, you have enough ammo to fend off any horde, unless you aggro the whole town, which you deserve to die for if you did.

Never sprint near towns, crouch, when inside a town or near zombies, crawl, you are praticly invisible to them.

About the night, yeah I hate it too. But rocket want to keep it, so I play during the day. No big deal... but still I wouldnt mind shorter day cycle so people would be forced to play at night, because it wouldnt worth to dodge a server because night last 2-3 hours, imo.

[/quote']

I'm really not sure if it was a glitch. We were funneling them in a building and there were three of us. They literally DID NOT stop spawning in. As for the nighttime situation, I want to be able to play at night because nighttime gaming is extremely fun. But it's just not possible right now.