DayZ Standalone Alpha Review

[lrp1984 199]

If you review the article above ^ you will find that it is obvious that we all want different things for different reasons. I would prefer this game were WAY different than it is, but I appreciate its current design and think if it can reward dedicated players a larger fan base may stick around, and lets face it even for those of you who say "colored beanies have no place in DayZ" you have to admit, it would be a small price to pay to ensure we have more players on the servers.

 

People all want different things from the game, but right now it's just a basic shell of a game. It's early alpha, and we're really just game testers that have paid for the privilege. We don't get the game we paid for until it's finished, and that won't be for well over a year. So enjoy the ride, endure the game breaking updates, and by the end of next year hopefully we'll have an idea of what game we're playing. I've paid a lot more money for finished games that I didn't enjoy anywhere near as much as this alpha mess.

 

If an unfinished, glitchy, buggy mess with no end-game keeps so many of us this addicted then we're in for a great finished product!

 

My first experience of an MMO was 15 years ago (not counting various MUDS earlier than that) on a game called Asheron's Call, playing a mixture of Thistledown PVE server and Darktide PVP server. Death wasn't final in AC but you lost your stuff and got a reduction albeit temporary in stats. I used to run around exploring the AC map for hours, it was a slow grind, and on Darktide PVP server seeing a red dot on your mini map was an adrenaline rush. But it was fun, and exciting every time I played. When it was released, it was a very tough game, you had to combine so many different ingredients for spells, there were limited portals so you had to run around a lot. Getting gear was hard, and it took time to raise your stats. Over the years players moaned it was too hard, or too easy, and each update and new expansion they'd tweak it, they took away spell ingredients and just had a single item for each magic class, they added more portals, they made XP easier to get, they added ways to keep your gear on death,  they kept tweaking it and tweaking it because of player demand and the game ended up a pile of crap. Who the playerbase blame? Themselves for demanding so much from a game, and ruining everything that was fun? Nope, they blamed the developers.

 

My hope for DayZ is they stick to making a really difficult survival game; no stats, no achievements, loads of crafting/farming/survival/base building mechanics, max players per server in the 100's, zombies in the 1000's, military gear scarce, and please no helicopters! That is what the core game should be. Once the game is released the modders will be able to make the game they want from DayZ, and perhaps those mods will be more fun, but lets keep the core game about survival.

[Death By Crowbar 1213]

Greetings and welcome to DayZ! My condolences on your many upcoming untimely deaths, I hope I'm not responsible for any of them. :)

 

Some tips:

1. Use street signs outside cities to know where you are, try to learn the major locations on the map (Cherno, Balota, Elektro, Kamyshovo, Berezino, Svetlo, Novo, NWAF, etc).
2. You can catch rain in a bottle/canteen as a source of water in a pinch.
3. Search for apples & berries as a source of food in a pinch.
4. Almost any edged weapon can open cans (I think the sledge hammer even does still)? However, with varying degrees of loss, only the coveted can opener opens them cleanly with no spillage.
5. Zombies and dealing with them - tou can easily kill zombies with your fists, search YouTube for some recent tutorials on it. You can also lock them in houses (run in, have them chase you, then run out and shut the door on the way out). You don't have to die senseless deaths to the infected! I can't even recall the last time a zombie killed me.
6. Kill someone, then use a knife to carve them up and eat them raw. Enjoy the crying and screaming as your character goes mad!
7. Try to lean the key buildings that spawn important things, such as Fire Stations, Police Stations, and Hospitals (guns, ammo, axes, food). There's several types of houses that are more like store houses (lots of shelves) and also the super markets, where there's a greater chance of finding food and drink. In general almost any building can have something useful, but the "best" stuff is targeted to certain types of buildings.
8. If you want to live and you're on a high pop server, avoid Elektro, it'll sound like a war with guns going off constantly. In general the coast from Cherno around up to Berezino is like the PVP playground, be careful and trust noone. If you find people who are friendly in those areas you've found a rare and wonderful thing.

[tommyboy937 4]

Last night I decided to spawn in for a few hours of adventure after my last death. I am starting to really enjoy starting over and I was pretty excited about getting myself together and making another trip off the coast and inland. Hoping of course, that this time around I may be able to actually survive a few nights of playing in a row. Unfortunately when I spawned in I couldn't find anything beyond chem lights in the town I was in, for about 30 minutes searching every shed and house top to bottom. Normally I find rope, burlap sacks, clothes, cans of soda and if I am lucky canned food/tools. Just chem lights in that town. So I started running north along the road to try and get to another town as soon as possible as I needed food at this point and water as well. I reached the second town and got an apple from 20 attempts on the grove of trees, so that held me over for about 10 minutes. I continued combing through this next small town and again didn't find any food or water! I found a gun (would have preferred a screwdriver at this point) and a warmer coat and hat but that was it. Most of the houses had nothing at all in the bottom floor kitchen/dining/living area and the bedrooms upstairs only had books.

 

So I didn't play too long, just an hour or two but I am pretty sure when I log back in if I don't find a decent amount of food quickly this life will have been wasted just searching empty buildings. The server I was on was a public east coast, with no other players online.

 

Is it normal to log in to a fresh spawn and die of starvation/dehydration because you cant find food or water soon enough?