Bandit ‘sensing’ with intuition and music

[The Death 2]

At first: Greetings to the community, I am new.

I don’t know whether this has been suggested/discussed already, but the search function didn’t spit out any results on this topic specifically. So if it already exists, please delete this thread, send me a bomb and take my beans.

As there is a lot discussion about the humanity/bandit skin, a perfectly logical argument is made against bandit skins: In a real zombie apocalypse, one could not distinguish bandits from survivors only by the looks.

However, a human being is a strange thing, it’s body movement/language/facial expressions/voice shaking/eye contact/reaction time says a lot about it. It can tell us many subtle things, whether one is afraid, lying, aggressive, sleepy, ashamed, dangerous… etc. And it can reveal our intentions.

Many of these psychology thingies aren’t noticed by us, but sometimes we have some kind of “gut feeling”, intuition – an important part of the human mind which could play a major role in harsh environments, like the Stone Age, or a zombie apocalypse.

Now implementing some of the factors into day z could be rather difficult, others, like the “gut feeling” would be perfectly possible imo.

Think about it: You meet somebody in the environment of a zombie apocalypse, wouldn’t you listen to your guts when facing a stranger? I would and I would trust them, as they are a tool which mother nature gave me to keep my ass safe. Yet while playing day z many “signals” which we would sense in RL simply don’t exist.

So I noticed, that many people turn the music off, to hear the zeds/shots/steps better. Yes it may be more realistic that way, yet I think it kind of affects the atmosphere, while I turned the music off myself, as I don’t want to get any disadvantages, just to have more atmosphere. Yet there is less horror feeling there, sadly.

Music/atmospheric sounds could perfectly be used to represent the above mentioned gut feeling when facing a stranger and no bandit skins would be necessary.

Music could represent the intuition of our survivor, when he faces a stranger. It shouldn’t be too obvious though, like subtle sounds, or it could be the same music which plays when facing a survivor, but in a slightly more dangerous tune, or a bit louder, but not too clear, so one has to actually train ones ears/intuition. With the right amount of ‘marking’ bandits still would have a fair chance to kill the survivors without being noticed.

This method could also be used as kind of a ‘radar’ when crawling among zombies. The closer they come, the louder/more aggressive it gets. One also could combine this with shaky views and other things (like nose bleeding when too much tension, when being pointed at with a gun, or loud heartbeats when facing a dangerous person, because of the fear, sweat…)

You know the feeling? Sometimes you just feel, that somebody watches you, turn around and the person observing you suddenly looks away? Well, how about your intuition giving you a really bad feeling when a sniper watches you? Yet again this could be made really carefully, so a survivor actually has to lurk around and listen to really carefully and the sniper still has a fair amount of killing him.

People are funny things, we’re not explored fully and there are people with strong intuition, who survived accidents/disasters, because their guts told them not to go into the plane, not to get in the car of their friends etc… I even remember getting extremely sick as a family member got beaten up, yet I didn’t know about it. So ‘sensitive’ people would have increased chances to be the survivors we play in Day Z.

Plus the atmosphere/music would be used and actually an important element for surviving.

Sorry if this is written badly, English isn’t my mother language.

So what do you think?

greets

[Deathcall 101]

Interesting idea but hard to implement.

Considering the abundance of long-range weapons in this game, it would only work when you are so close to the person that it'd be mostly useless, unless he or she is trying to trick you.

[DryGulch 32]

Total nonsense, OP wants badman radar.

Edited July 20, 2012 by DryGulch

[terrvik 2409]

You got my respect for actually thinking your idea through and giving a lot of time to write it down and present your suggestion. Sadly I do not like the actual idea but hey, that's what a suggestion forum is for, right? :)

This kind of system would be really creepy in a full blown horror game, but I don't think it really fits what DayZ is trying to do.

[brightlitefilms 37]

I like this, as often when I first spawn in Cherno or Elektro and don't care whether I die or not, I often run into people and say friendly right before they pump me full of lead, even seeing that I have a coyote patrol pack and no weapon... they do it for the lolz, which is NOT what this game is meant to be.

[The Death 2]

Interesting idea but hard to implement.

Considering the abundance of long-range weapons in this game, it would only work when you are so close to the person that it'd be mostly useless, unless he or she is trying to trick you.

Hmm, there's a lot "close" killing going on though, also your intuition could alert you when the crosshair of a sniper gun points at you - while I'm not convinced about this though, as it already goes into the 'paranormal' direction, would work in close combat though.

You got my respect for actually thinking your idea through and giving a lot of time to write it down and present your suggestion. Sadly I do not like the actual idea but hey, that's what a suggestion forum is for, right? :)

This kind of system would be really creepy in a full blown horror game, but I don't think it really fits what DayZ is trying to do.

hmm... dunno, it would solve some problems and I think it would go well with Day Z. Anyways, it's Rocket who decides :)

Total nonsense, OP wants badman radar.

Nice arguments right there...

Psychology in stressful situations is an aspect of reality, your brain (I hope) does a lot of subconscious work, it goes even so far that it senses the best genetical partner, the intuition isn't all that far away from reality, which works with signals day z can't offer... So a bit of 'intention-hints' adds to the realism imo, because mother nature actually gave us a weak kind of a 'bad man' radar.

Maybe the hints shouldn't be that clear, or difficult to differ from the sounds when facing a friendie

I like this, as often when I first spawn in Cherno or Elektro and don't care whether I die or not, I often run into people and say friendly right before they pump me full of lead, even seeing that I have a coyote patrol pack and no weapon... they do it for the lolz, which is NOT what this game is meant to be.

Yeah, agree on this. While I think there would be a lot 'killing for fun' in an zombolypse, most people would still save their ammunition, avoid too much noise and unneccessary contact, not too realistic to shoot a survivor, when sitting in an zombie infected city, being afraid to get the nuts bitten off

Edited July 21, 2012 by Droctopus