Feedback on current state of the game.

[SillySil 295]

First, it's going to be a long post, if you're looking for a fight and can't read more than 5 sentences in a row, go to one of the whine threads.

Second, I am well aware this is an alpha. But giving feedback is what testers do during alphas.

Third, this is about gameplay, I'm going to ignore all the bugs, hax, disconnects and whatnot.

The gameplay looks sort of like this.

(stage1) You start the game, you don't know really what to do (especially if you haven't played arma2, you might have a problem with controls), you aggro a lot of zombies, you spray bullets at them, you can't really find anything good and you constantly get either eaten by zeds cause sooner or later they break your legs or you get shot. Probably by snipers in cherno/electro. Then you figure out how to sneak and where to look for the things you need. After a quick snoop you stay away from the coast, you get some decent guns and know how to survive.

(stage2) You get a handle of things and are pretty comfortable with the game although paranoid of getting sniped. Your last attempts at being friendly resulted in getting shot in the face so now you just shoot first . You visit stary and maybe even NW airfield. You set up a tent(s) and start bringing things there.

(stage3) You and your group has been hauling military loot to your camps so much that there is no point looking for more. (I have a frigging list of servers with coords of camps and vehicles noted.) Now a question arises. Since you don't need anything else what do you do? Fight zombies? What zombies? Those skippy trifling things that pose no challenge? Why? They don't have any loot and killing them is just annoying. It's like fighting moskitos. And most of the time you treat them just like that, if they are following you, you just keep going and loose them. Once you get a hold of how they work, you don't ever have to shoot them (the only thing they are good at is indicating if there are players in a town you're approaching). If that's not a challenge then what? I know, PvP. Lets raid stary or cherno or electro. And that's the final stage of the game, PvPing without caring about dieing since you have a ton of weapons stacked in camps. But it gets dull. I mean the firefights might be more intense because you're actually penalized for death but, you could be just playing arma2 or some other shooter.

The gameplay in the endgame is like taking quake, making a very large map, putting weapons, health and armor here and there with some really weak bots guarding them, and that's it. Is it really that different gameplay-wise? Just deathmatching in hotspots. It can be so much more (and I hope it will). Right now there is no social interactions in this game. The only way we're communicating with strangers is by sending them bullets. And that's because there is just no reason not to kill everyone on sight. Not only you get their loot but they can't kill you if you kill them first. If you don't want quake on a large map there has to be an encouragement to group up or/and discouragement to kill everyone you see. Wouldn't it be much more interesting if the game would mostly be about survivors grouping up against bandits who are constantly hunting and infiltrating them?

And I know it's a sandbox. But "sandbox" implies you can do what you want, you have multiple choices and all of them viable. I know we should be making our own story. But here aren't many things to do here. People do what benefits them the most. And right now it's killing. Not only it's challenging but it gives you better gear.

The point is: there needs to be something to do other than mindless pvping once you no longer need to look for loot. The game feels empty in the end game. I've heard there are going to be camps? How's that going to work with being able to change servers? The standalone is looking promising, but in order for camps to work the characters would have to bound to the server and the server would have to be much larger.

I just feel that the gameplay is boring and not really satisfying after you get good at the game. Is it me? Is PvPing on a large map with scarce weapons and supplies really good and I'm just expecting too much? You know, I signed up for a zombie apocalypse survival, not Free For All Deathmatch on a large map where zombies are barely affecting the gameplay.

[icomrade 201]

There are servers which offer structured groups/factions you should look into those, I can't name any ATM, but do a search.

[Doctor Disfigure 29]

You do make some good points, and I have to agree with much of it.

You don't, however, provide any potential solutions.

EDIT: I find the real "endgame" to be in having a team/squad with a camp and raiding/engaging in large firefights with enemy teams. This can be difficult to setup for some people though.

Edited July 26, 2012 by Doctor Disfigure

[SillySil 295]

You do make some good points, and I have to agree with much of it.

You don't, however, provide any potential solutions.

Well, you don't have to know how to fix a car to say that it's broken if it's smoking and not running.

Other than that, zombies needs to be fun and necessity to kill. Making them super fast is not the solution.

And for the end game faction fights could be it. But I don't really know how that would work without characters being server-bound.

[SillySil 295]

EDIT: I find the real "endgame" to be in having a team/squad with a camp and raiding/engaging in large firefights with enemy teams. This can be difficult to setup for some people though.

So you have to set up fights? You can do it much easier in arma2. The entire zombie survival thing seems to be meaningless background.

[Guitar (DayZ) 6]

I was about to make this exact post. The game is getting stale. A friend and I have played roughly 50 hours or so in a few days, and we are kinda burnt out already.

You listed the exact things that I/we did. Don't know anything, pick up useless shit like heatpacks and all the chemlights we find, go north but not know where we're going and run out in the middle of nowhere for an hour before we finally just say fuck it. Get a bit better, look up stuff little by little on the internet, get killed. Get good shit, get killed. Paranoid of people, try to avoid people, get killed. Etc. etc.

Finally today I hopped up upon both a van (which we've found once before) and a Ural Civilian. I doubt it was someone's placement, but I also found a ghille suit in the van. We took both and headed to look for another offroad truck, ended up dumping the van (it is just a gas sucker). Ural Civilian has been taken all the way from the north up and down the coast a few times and we've yet to come across any people, and there were a good few people on the server. Granted it was night time, but the only person we came across shot at us. We were looking to maybe pick up some noobs to play with and show them some shit or something (or blow their minds seeing a car first thing). Now we have it, stashed it and a tent, and really have no idea what we want to do. We have good shit, but aren't afraid of dying, but don't want to die for no reason. There is no actual point though, we have nowhere to go, no quests to do, nothing.

[Kar98 27]

You address my issues perfectly. Great game when you first start out, but once you get the mechanics down you start to run out of ideas. Raiding NWAF, getting this awesome military loot then what? I guess I could keep going back for loot but then it just feels like a 3rd person shooter diablo which is not what I'm looking for in a game. If Rocket can implement that eve-like capital buildings he was talking about that would be great to give it more replayability such as raiding forts or holding down areas

[SillySil 295]

Sniping with einfields in cherno and holding stary are the only challenging things when you have nothing else to loot.

[zdzichu 0]

Its so fucking true do something with it

[SillySil 295]

Its so fucking true do something with it

Something as in end-game. Factions fights would be best. Some high end PvE content would be awesome too.