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Dayz - A mod for Arma II (PC)

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CardiacCavs

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For those who don't know, Dayz is a pretty popular mod for the PC game Arma II. It is essentially a zombie survival game that is surprisingly realistic. In fact, it is pretty brutal. I think the average life-span is somewhere in the range of 4-5 hours of game play. You need to find food, water, weapons, and a bunch of other tools and items that can aid you in survival. However, when you do die it is a perma-death, meaning you lose everything that you had with you at the time. It is currently still in the alpha stage of being a mod, but the developer releases patches and updates to it fairly often.

I just started playing this with a few buddies and it is really fun. Playing by yourself can get a bit brutal, especially if you enter a server with a bunch of other players (who are much more likely to kill you on sight to steal whatever you have then help you). Plus, being an alpha mod, it is pretty damn buggy but you can look past those.


Here is a video that I think does a good job of showing you what it is:

[video=youtube;a3op-Q1o5RI]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3op-Q1o5RI[/video]


Has anybody else given this mod a try? You can get it for essentially 19.99$. You can download arma II for free, but you need the Operation Arrowhead add on, which costs 19.99 on Steam.
 
This game is brilliant and I've been thrashing it for months
 
The average lifespan used to be like 15 minutes. If it's up to four or five hours the game must have gone all easy mode.

I just wish this game were built on an engine other than the ARMA II engine. The gameplay is so goddamn clunky and the controls are totally unwieldy for anyone who has played any other PC game ever.

That was really my main complaint about DayZ: the game engine and controls seemed to be doing everything possible to make me not enjoy a game I desperately wanted to enjoy.
 
The average lifespan used to be like 15 minutes. If it's up to four or five hours the game must have gone all easy mode.

I just wish this game were built on an engine other than the ARMA II engine. The gameplay is so goddamn clunky and the controls are totally unwieldy for anyone who has played any other PC game ever.


That was really my main complaint about DayZ: the game engine and controls seemed to be doing everything possible to make me not enjoy a game I desperately wanted to enjoy.


Completely agree. The game has so much potential, but it has to address those problems. The inventory system is needlessly complicated and the controls took a bit to get used to. I listened to an interview with the creator and he was talking about if he had his way he would make it 100x more difficult to survive, to the point where it would be absolutely necessary for cooperative play, at least in the beginning. Although, at the same time he has no intention of changing the way pvp works in that game. For those interested, here is the video:

[video=youtube;5CNh-Mp_KhQ]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CNh-Mp_KhQ[/video]

It's long, but interesting if you got nothing better to do.


What is the best set up you guys have been able to attain in the game?
 
Oh and I was interested if I was off with the 4-5 hour span of gameplay, so I did a quick google search and on the Dayz wiki site it says that as of Jan 21 2013 the average life span is 1 hour 5 minutes.
 
This game is brutal. Or at least used to be. I'm not a huge fan of a lot of recent changes. And I absolutely hate Arma 2 as an engine. Just awful. Don't even attempt to play at night. You literally cannot see a thing.
 
Completely agree. The game has so much potential, but it has to address those problems. The inventory system is needlessly complicated and the controls took a bit to get used to. I listened to an interview with the creator and he was talking about if he had his way he would make it 100x more difficult to survive, to the point where it would be absolutely necessary for cooperative play, at least in the beginning. Although, at the same time he has no intention of changing the way pvp works in that game.

My problem is that the difficulty feels incredibly artificial. The difficulty is derived from the engine itself and the poor game design as opposed to actual difficulty.

Now, I haven't played the game in about six months, so some of what I'm talking about may have been changed, but zombies were a fucking cakewalk. Once you knew what to do, getting by and around them was incredibly easy. The best strategy was just to sprint through a city, dodge zombies, grab as much shit as possible in various buildings, and then find the nearest steep hill or clump of trees and proceed to lose every single zombie with no difficulty.

The only thing that made the game difficult aside from the engine itself was assholes who killed you for no reason despite the fact that you clearly weren't carrying anything worthwhile. Most of my issues were with the inventory (which was clunky and not intuitive), the button design (not intuitive would be polite), the engine (seriously, playing at night is fucking pointless), and just about every other aspect of the shitty ARMA engine (I seriously have no idea how people enjoy those fucking terrible games).

All that said, I had some great times when I played this game with people I knew. Traveling long distances, finding vehicles, climbing to the top of mountains, raiding cities, getting into firefights with other gangs, mowing down hordes of zombies once we had great weaponry...all of that was awesome. It was just a shame that I had to fight the game itself every step of the way to have a good time. That's why I quit playing.

What is the best set up you guys have been able to attain in the game?

I had a fifty cal sniper rifle, a silenced pistol, plenty of ammo, basically all the support items (compass, map, matches, etc.), the binoculars, the biggest backpack, several water bottles, blood packs and all the other meds, and enough cooked meat to survive an actual apocalypse. My friends and I shared the load that we carried and each had a small amount of every necessity. We survived for a few weeks (of real time, not game time, obviously) like that.
 
Finally played this game again over the weekend after one of my friends talked me into it. Some notes...

I love the new private hive system that lets servers keep a private user database and allows for a ton of customization. It basically eliminates server hopping, gives bigger incentives for working together with other survivors, and just generally makes the game more fun. It also drastically decreases the chances that someone is going to magically spawn in out of nowhere and destroy you, as happened far too often in older versions of the game.

As mentioned above, server customization is great. Allowing for individual servers to start you with custom load-outs and increase various spawns makes the game a lot more fun. The server I have been playing in with my friend has increased vehicle spawns, meaning it's relatively easy to find a working vehicle, which in turn makes traversing the gigantic map much more feasible and enjoyable.

I'm not sure if this is unique to the server I was on, but zombies do seem more formidable. They're still dumb as a box of rocks, but their spawns appear to have increased, and the number you have chasing you can quickly get out of hand, particularly if you allow yourself to be trapped in a building with only one exit. My friend and I were raiding an airfield and I got trapped in the control tower. I had limited ammo and zombies just kept coming. It got insanely nail-biting and difficult, and eventually my leg was broken when I tried to make a break for it and I bled out while my friend desperately tried to save me, and then later desperately tried to get to my body to grab the helicopter rotor I was carrying.

We've actually had a good time scouting for vehicle parts and then using them to fix up vehicles. We're currently in the process of trying to fix up a helicopter outside of one of the cities, which was why I was carrying the rotor replacement to begin with. We've got two Humvees and an SUV and set up a base camp on the outskirts of the map. Now all we need to do is find some tents to really get our camp set up.

Of course, it's still the ARMA engine, and that's the biggest thing working against it. Can't have everything, I guess.
 
I need to try it some time. I love open world survival games like this.
 
I need to try it some time. I love open world survival games like this.

Just grab ARMA II (Combined Ops) when it's on Steam sale. Don't pay full price for it. It's a garbage game by itself. DayZ is the only thing that makes it even marginally worth playing.

Although at this point you might as well wait for DayZ standalone, which I think is coming later this year and won't require ARMA to play.
 
Yeah, I heard they may be releasing it on Console as well and have huge open world environments with like 32-48 players per map. That'd be cool, and I'm sure controls and the such would be ironed out a lot more on a Console, especially a next gen Console.
 
Yeah, I heard they may be releasing it on Console as well and have huge open world environments with like 32-48 players per map. That'd be cool, and I'm sure controls and the such would be ironed out a lot more on a Console, especially a next gen Console.

Yeah good luck with that. It's still being built on the ARMA engine, which means the controls are basically guaranteed to blow.
 
was playing the other night and some guy entered the server and was spawning dozens of buses, and helicopters, and if he shot you, you would automatically have the best gear available. Was an interesting distraction lol
 
I just had one of my more enjoyable DayZ experiences.

Myself and two of my friends were exploring the Northwest Airfield on a private hive server we've been playing on regularly the past week or so. I had recently found a fifty cal sniper rifle, which is a one-shot kill against anything in the game, human or zombie. We were trying unsuccessfully to fuel up a chopper. It was glitched and, no matter how much fuel I put in, the gauge stayed on empty.

While I was doing this, another group showed up at the airfield in their Humvee. We let them know we were friendly, but they promptly told us to fuck off and, if they saw us, they'd kill us. Given that we didn't really want to risk losing our weapons, we decided to hightail it. I hopped in our jeep, picked up both of my friends, and started driving away. Unfortunately, one of them accidentally hit the eject button, which meant I had to stop so he could run back to our vehicle.

During the waiting I noticed that the other group's Humvee was flying toward us at a high speed. I was initially going to exit the jeep, but then figured that that would probably just wind up with me getting ran over, as the Humvee was about to slam into the driver door. So I just sat there and let them ram me. My jeep was crippled and my friend got his leg broken, but I was fine. I hopped out of the jeep and decided to high tail it on foot, as my chances of taking on two guys in a vehicle weren't promising.

Naturally, the two assholes decided to try to run me down. I dodged their first attempt, or at least I thought I did. The ARMA engine being what it is, my leg was broken despite the fact that the Humvee missed me by about five to ten feet. This left me basically unable to move. Instead of panicking, I aimed down my scope and waited for the Humvee to circle around, which happily it did immediately.

I wasted no time and fired a shot right into the driver's window, and was instantly greeted with the wonderful sight of his body flopping out of the car dead, along with an equally satisfying "SOME GUY killed by friendly fire from Jack Brickman." I don't remember the asshole's name, but I'm willing to bet he remembers mine. The Humvee rolled to a stop, thankfully missing me for real this time. I flipped around as the other guy came around the side of the car and opened up on me with machine gun fire. He hit me at least twice, but all it took was one shot from my rifle to drop him.

I was bleeding out fast, but had just enough time to type "suck it, fags" into group chat.

Suffice it to say those bitches left the server after having their asses sufficiently handed to them. Meanwhile, I made my way back to the airfield on my next life, grabbed my fifty cal rifle off my rotting corpse, then dissolved both of their bodies so they couldn't get their weapons or items back even if they tried.

+1 Jack Brickman

We also later found a Viper chopper, one of several that the server admin has been spawning in. We even got into a midair firefight with another Viper, probably because I totally stole the one my friend and I were flying from a campsite that had two of them. We got gunned the fuck down, mostly because my friend is a godawful pilot and couldn't swing the fucker around so I could shoot back. Still, at least we made those morons blow up one of their own helis. I'll call that at least 45% victory.
 
If the engine wasn't trash, I feel like this would be one of the best games ever.
 

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