Rocket Interview with Sidestrafe

[ironman3112 11]

didn't see anyone post this yet, relatively new

Enjoy!

[01da 218]

There was a post about this somewhere

[wolfstriked 143]

WOw Sidestrafe was the player that got me interesetd in Dayz.

[[email protected] 125]

Had not seen this, thanks for the post have some beanz.

[FrostDMG 398]

Yeah there was a post mate. One of the mods responded to it as well

[Kiro (DayZ) 57]

I didn't, thanks for posting it!

[Worrun (DayZ) 108]

Rocket: "I don't do things for fun"

Lolwut

[Bumble - RMG MEDIC! 14]

Cool interview! Rocket talks about some good points and really interprets SideStrafe's questions quite well. Though Rocket does say a lot of the same things from the GamebreakerTV and FPSGuru interviews. That kiwi is all over the place!

Rocket: "I don't do things for fun"

Lolwut

Don't stop your

there, keep going. Get to the part, "I want the experience to feel authentic." Why would you even skip, "If I just want to do something that's fun then you know I'd go outside, I'd go for a run or watch a movie or something easy."

[Kiro (DayZ) 57]

Great interview with very interesting questions and answers. If he keeps going in this direction, this game will become the best game ever created.

1. He doesn't want to add fake "psychological" effects from killing other players. So no "depression" effect, no character becoming insane.

2. He thinks the main goal once you master the game is to hunt other survivors. He doesn't want to prevent any form of PvP.

3. He wants to add groups mechanics and bases building options. He thinks group spawn changes the balance of permadeath (if you can always respawn next to your friends the game will be extremely easy) and so he wants the game to be harsher.

4. He doesn't want a solo mode, as it's always been done thousands of time (Left 4 Dead, other zombies mods for Arma 2). He wants to do something that people always wanted: a multiplayer survival experience, and he has to focus on this player-driven open world.

5. The importance of the narrative: the world needs to make sense to the players. The narrative won't be forced down your throat but rather appears as you play. He doesn't want to give you a cop uniform and tell you "You're a cop"; rather you have to become the character that you want to be.

6. Death should be extremely traumatic. The game isn't as hard now as he wants it to be, death should be a greater penalty.

7. He talked about giving some players special skills that could be given to people randomly, like "special kind of healing", that'd give more opportunity for cooperation and people wouldn't shot on sight as much because they could need each others.

8. "The senseless killing is part of what makes DayZ magic and so terrifying.". Talking about the insane axe-muderer who run around killing new players for no reason : "It's what makes the mod so compelling, the fact that you can do that. That's why I'm so reluctant to change these elements because that's the magic of it. [...] So we have to be very careful with any penalty or deterrence we'd apply [to PvP]."

9. He admits there's a problem with noob killing, BUT he repeats again that penalties for player killing is a bad idea. The solution is to give to the players more options, to dig underground bases and giving players some specialized skills. That way, once you reach the "end game", you can either spend some time killing new players, OR getting serious and building something that makes sense.

10. Server capacity: his ideal would be to have Eve Online size server, thousands of players on the same server. Now the servers do a lot of stuff that is needed to run a realistic military simulator, and these parts could be removed and we could "cut the middle man and send the data directly to the main server", so it's not out of the realm of possibility to have huge servers. Previously servers could only have 50 slots, now they can have 100 slots, so there's already improvement, and we could see 200-players servers.

11. When Rocket plays the game, he always play with a team, purely cooperative, and killed only 1 player since he released it and still feels guilty about it. He prefers running around helping people.

Edited July 21, 2012 by Kiro

[dallas 5195]

Regarding 2. That's not what I got from it. That's just the way it is now, because people have nothing better to do.

Great interview.

Edited July 22, 2012 by Dallas