DayZ: Will it Ever be Done?
By Jamie Ross
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My friends and I have been scraping out a living in DayZ for almost two years now, enjoying some truly epic adventures. We have dueled bandits, saved survivors from some pretty nasty gangs and slain hordes of the living dead. Bar perhaps a certain MMO that I don’t shut up about, it is probably the game I have played the most in the last year.
But it is not all singing and dancing in the post-apocalyptic waste lands of Eastern Europe. Even fairly powerful rigs seem to struggle with frames in busy cities. Loot is either bountiful or non-existent and zombie AI is rubbish, even taking into account they are the walking dead. Now, the game is covered in warning stickers telling potential purchasers that the game is in the Alpha development stage. You can expect changes to almost everything and features to not work properly. You even get a helpful reminder of this message everytime you log in. |
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But many of my fellow survivors are getting a tad ticked off with this state of affairs. As the game reaches its second birthday, it doesn’t seem to be nearing any kind of completion point. If anything it seems to moving backwards. I mean, the current build (0.58) has almost entirely removed zombies from the game, due to the server lag they were creating. Yep, a zombie game with no zombies. The developers seem to be lurching from one crisis to another, fixing one problem only to open up a whole new can of survivor related worms.
Updates to the game seem to be being realised more or less once a month at this stage of development, often adding some impressive new features. The current build seems to have sorted out many of the loot spawning issues, with gear seeming difficult enough to find, without making the game almost impossible to last more than five minutes without starving to death. This is a very welcome fix in this survivor’s opinion. Another important change was the addition of simple trucks, changing the game from a detailed running simulator to something more akin to Grand Theft Auto if it was set behind the Iron Curtain. |
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Other additions to the game are somewhat less welcome. Each update seems to come with a new spate of weapons. Now I like being tooled up with high powered assault rifles as much as the next chap. There is something quite satisfying about carrying an AK-74, an MP-5, a sawn-off shotgun and enough ammo to overthrow the dictatorship of a small island nation, but sometimes it feels like too much. I am fairly certain the game is being funded in no small part due to advertising revenue from Kalashnikov. There are four AK variants alone in the current version of the game, not including alternate stocks, handguards and scopes.
For me, the game is much more enjoyable when my friends and I are carrying more civilian weapons like handguns and maybe the odd hunting rifle. It seems more real, the type of things that would be left lying around after a zombie uprising. Tooling around like a spec-ops squad, with full military gear just seems a bit too easy. It takes away for the desperate need to survive if I know I can gun down waves of the shambling corpses that should be the biggest threat in the game.
Another feature that needs to be addressed is the lack of permanent camps. Every survivor needs a place to hang up his chainsaw at the end of a busy day. The Arma 2 mod that DayZ is based on included a simple but effective modular building that allowed players to fortify an existing structure or build something entirely new from the ground up. The standalone game currently has a couple of tents that can be deployed and used for storage, as well as an oil drum you can dump gear in. Better than nothing I suppose, but the unreliability of the game of results in these often disappearing almost at random, taking their precious treasures with them. I would love to see scrap metal forts and plywood structures dotting the landscapes, giving you a place to hide away and store the items you have looted, instead of lugging everything you own around with you until you die.
Now, again, it must be pointed out this game is still in Alpha, and as I have already pointed out, is broken on some very fundamental levels. But am i going to stop playing it? Probably not. The good massively outweighs the bad. The adventures I have had playing this game over the last two years are still spoken about in my gaming group. From ambushing a convoy of trucks with nothing but a lever action rifle, to sniper duels in tumbled down industrial cities, it's been a hoot so far. If you can get a good group of mates to play with, you will happily waste hours in this game. Just make sure you understand it is not finished, and at this rate, will not be for a long time.
For me, the game is much more enjoyable when my friends and I are carrying more civilian weapons like handguns and maybe the odd hunting rifle. It seems more real, the type of things that would be left lying around after a zombie uprising. Tooling around like a spec-ops squad, with full military gear just seems a bit too easy. It takes away for the desperate need to survive if I know I can gun down waves of the shambling corpses that should be the biggest threat in the game.
Another feature that needs to be addressed is the lack of permanent camps. Every survivor needs a place to hang up his chainsaw at the end of a busy day. The Arma 2 mod that DayZ is based on included a simple but effective modular building that allowed players to fortify an existing structure or build something entirely new from the ground up. The standalone game currently has a couple of tents that can be deployed and used for storage, as well as an oil drum you can dump gear in. Better than nothing I suppose, but the unreliability of the game of results in these often disappearing almost at random, taking their precious treasures with them. I would love to see scrap metal forts and plywood structures dotting the landscapes, giving you a place to hide away and store the items you have looted, instead of lugging everything you own around with you until you die.
Now, again, it must be pointed out this game is still in Alpha, and as I have already pointed out, is broken on some very fundamental levels. But am i going to stop playing it? Probably not. The good massively outweighs the bad. The adventures I have had playing this game over the last two years are still spoken about in my gaming group. From ambushing a convoy of trucks with nothing but a lever action rifle, to sniper duels in tumbled down industrial cities, it's been a hoot so far. If you can get a good group of mates to play with, you will happily waste hours in this game. Just make sure you understand it is not finished, and at this rate, will not be for a long time.
