Day Z developer “really surprised” by positive reaction to pro release news

Will be interesting to see how it pans out; to see how much they get away with (again) or how much they can actually prove was poor infrastructure on the part of the Arma II engine. (Stuff like a poor inventory system, no melee etc) Honestly, if they just do the Minecraft and DayZ thing where they plop players down in a lifeless map, add mobs and call it a “sandbox” I’m not going to be impressed. Being a sandbox/freeroam game doesn’t mean you don’t need an artstyle, or ambient writing and design to actually bring a world to life, as well as add content for players to then experience that world.

If you’ve ever played STALKER or free roamed in GTAIV or any other similar games you’ll know what I mean. Those worlds are alive; they have atmosphere and substance and the rest is up to the player. Just because there are “things to do” doesn’t make them scripted and doesn’t take away from player interaction, even though both of those games are single player experiences.

Compare to Minecraft which has a little atmosphere, a little bit of substance, but whose experience is made up largely of the players own mind. Without that own sense of creation Minecraft is a shell of a game. You can compare it to things like obeying road rules in GTA. It’s something you can do, it’s of the players own accord, but it’s not really something that’s part of the game as say random fights breaking out in the street or similar experiences.

Anyway that’s my 2 cents.

^Also to add, something STALKER does really well (which is why I mentioned it) is the A-Life system, which basically means that stuff can happen regardless of player actions. Mutants and NPCs can spawn, can wander around, go about daily routines and can fight. You might see a group of NPC’s fighting mutants and decide to help them or just watch and see who wins. It might be that a large group of mutants, or NPC’s goes around a map wiping out other groups. There might be a base of bandits that gets attacked by mutants, and the next time you go past there the base is now empty and you don’t have to worry about them. It might be that the mutants lose, and now the bandits get pushy and decide to move out and start attacking the nuetral NPC’s and now suddenly you have a map full of bandits which could be a huge issue depending on your allegiences and their attitude towards you.

DayZ has absolutly nothing like that. It’s just a static world with static generic towns where static generic zombies spawn when you’re around. All the loot and spawning is generic too. Everyone knows to head to the military airfields or go to the costal towns. There’s never a mad rush to head inland to some small town because some good loot is there, everyone just goes to the same places to do the same thing and then it comes down to the rather shallow player interactions that can be found in any death match experience. Whether it’s a small Quake map where you see combat every 15 seconds or a huge open map where you see combat once an hour, the overall experience is the same; it’s just a drawn out death match experience.

The thing is I don’t think it’s been interesting at all. “Shoot on sight” isn’t interesting. Trying to help people only to have them shoot you afterwards isn’t interesting. Coming across other people only to have them run away isn’t interesting. I’ve played DayZ quite a bit because I do enjoy aspects of what I referred to as a drawn out death match (going from town to town etc). In *I don’t know how many hours* there was only ONE occasion where I had a worthwhile experience that was generated entirely in-game. It was when I came across a guy with a broken leg at the Balota airfield. He had lost a lot of blood. He had fire making tools, and I had animal killing tools, and he in good faith gave me his matches and a hatchet so I could get some wood (lololol) and help him get back to good health. We spent maybe an hour together and it was a fantastic experience. In my time playing that’s the ONLY experience that has made DayZ worth playing, but it’s 1 time out of maybe 50 or more that was like that. The rest ended with a little cough, or a crack or a zip followed by “You are dead”. That one good experience doesn’t make up for the rest of them.

I’m not saying that no one has good experiences, just that these experiences are quite rare because everyone is afraid to be friendly (or don’t want to be in the first place). I think in reality you’d band together more freely than has happened in DayZ. Camps, communities, families etc.

DayZ’s in-game mantra, community created of course, has been that of “kill or be killed”. If I want to enjoy my game I have to go outside the game and find people I trust, and play with them exclusively, kill everyone I see, or try and play alone and avoid other players. In all three cases I find those outcomes to be quite boring. I had high hopes of finding people in-game, getting cars working, getting settlements going, but it just never happens. It’s just kill or be killed.

And that’s when I give it the leniency it probably doesn’t deserve and ignore all the hours-wasting bugs, glitching and hackers.

I really think that sometimes games need hard set rules to keep things going smoothly. Imagine Monopoly if dice rolls were arbitrary. If people could take money from the bank and steal properties off each other as they pleased. It wouldn’t be very fun. DayZ has very little in game content (i.e. stuff to achieve that is part of the game). It has “stuff you can do” but very little “stuff to do”. (if that makes sense)

Calling it a death match actually had a lot to do with “how you get there”. Ultimately, even games like STALKER and GTAIV come down to kill or be killed (although in those examples you CAN stay out of trouble altogether). My point was very much that the getting there journey is the same, it’s just drawn out. You run around a map and you look for stuff. Looking for stuff might have it’s own dangers without including other players, but ultimately DayZ has nothing going on in its world. I’m pretty poor at explaining these kinds of things though so I don’t know how else to say it.

I’m not looking for an end game, nor am I looking for a CoD-scripted-linear game. I simply want to be able to sit back and see the world around me change. DayZ doesn’t have that because it has no dynamic aspects (towns don’t run out of supplies, they don’t get cleared of zombies, zombies dont migrate, player camps [the only ones that exist are OFF MAP for frigs sake] don’t move around, roads and towns don’t become safe etc).

Imagine for example that every house was open and that there was a much denser urban setting. Imagine now that a person had to go through 50 houses and apartments to find food. Imagine that people could stock pile these homes with food, but in doing so acquiring other items meant they had to leave the food behind and come back and hope it was still there. Rather than knowing that the brown house with a door way and awning has loot. Knowing that if it doesn’t spawn now I’ll go away and come back. Right now people kill and there’s no reason for it. They don’t need the food or ammo and there’s no in-game differences for being a bandit or survivor. In real life we’re hard coded with morals that stop us from doing things like that. Even if we were starving most of us wouldn’t resort to that.