DayZ (Standalone): Discussion, Latest News & Updates

Hey guys,

Just started playing this game with a friend. It's actually quite fun, but it's still in development. Any feedback?

Main website: DayZ.com

 

I am getting very bad performance on my desktop, the specs are in my sig. In DayZ I get about 15-25fps, freezes.... which is really unplayable. I am able to play ARMA III on ultra settings at 60fps minimum, same with Crysis 3... so the game isn't optimized properly as of yet. The servers are packed though, and so far the game looks promising - I just hope they fix the optimization issue soon.

 

Yeah it's definitely in a really rough state right now but very playable. I picked it up knowing that I would be playing it down the road when it's finished and "officially" released (played a ton of the DayZ mod w/ good peeps). There are LOTS of packed servers, it's hard to believe so many bought into it day one.

The DayZ mod was known for its funky Arma II engine and its performance issues, but honestly, with everything either maxed out or nearly maxed out, the game runs really well and significantly better than the mod (which was my only real issue). I would say, if you've never played the mod, I would hold off from purchasing it in its current state. There's already so much whining and complaining about 1) no loot, 2) spawn camping, 3) bandits and kill-on-sight players, 4) deaths by starvation, breaking your legs, eating rotten food and falling ill, the list goes on. I'm guessing 90% of these complaints are from newbies to the DayZ experience. People see "survival zombie experience" or something similar and think GTA w/ zombies, but it's definitely not that. It's kinda hard to explain so I would recommend anyone who is even remotely interested to just find streams/Youtube vids on it and watch how a person "plays" DayZ.

On a side note, while having a bunch of buds or a guild you run with regularly adds a lot to the experience, I think it also takes away a lot as well. For my first 50 hours I just ran solo and got completely immersed in the game. Surviving by yourself is way more rewarding to me than relying on clan mates or friends to give me ammo, food or save me from a tricky spot. You can also pick up some bad habits while in a group, but that's a whole 'nother story.

But even in its simple alpha state, I'm having a ton of fun and am really excited to see what they do to it. So to sum up:
If you've played the DayZ mod and enjoyed, but are hesitant about the alpha state of the standalone, then I would recommend picking it up.
If you've heard of the DayZ mod but aren't sure about how stable or unstable, fun or boring the alpha state is, then I would do some research and watch some streamers/Youtube vids.
If you've never heard of DayZ before but are interested, hold off on purchasing it right now. Wait until more patches are released, more items are included, more zombies, cars, housing, whatever it is they want to do to the game. DayZ is a really rough experience for new players and it would be sad to see people buy the game, play it for 30min and then immediately write it off as a waste of money.

I'll conclude with a little story of my first death in the game (you always remember your first ). I spawn in a coastal town and immediately set off to look for food and something to drink. In its current state, you get hungry/thirsty very quickly if you're running around all the time, so it's best to walk as much as you can (for example, walk inside buildings as you loot, don't run). I run into a factory and find a can opener (one of the more valuable items early on since you aren't able to open cans of food w/o one, makes sense right?). I climb the ladder to the roof to get a better view of my surroundings when in the distance I see two people about 50 meters away from me; one is kneeling and the other is standing holding a fire axe. I immediately go prone and watch them for a few minutes. I guessed that they didn't see me since they made no movements. The guy with the fire axe suddenly runs away toward the nearby town and I figured that now would be a good time to leave the area. As I'm making my way down the ladder, I noticed some loot I missed, including a baseball bat. I arm myself and decide to confront the kneeling man, not necessarily to kill him but maybe rob him of some food.

I leave the factory and, while crouching, I slowly creep up on the guy (while making sure to check the surroundings so I don't get jumped out in the open). As I get closer, I notice the kneeling guy is actually handcuffed and looks like he can't move. I stand upright and run over to him, equipping my bat just in case. We have a conversation over our microphones and I ask him what he's doing. He tells me that he and his friend were trying out the handcuffs in the game but his friend didn't have a key to unlock them and went into town to look for some. The handcuffed guy was starving and, while he did have food on him, it was in sealed cans. With my can opener, I offered to open some for him. He thanked me and asked if I could feed him some food. I asked him why he couldn't just feed himself and he bluntly stated "my hands are cuffed silly" (well duh, that makes sense ). So I go into the interact menu and I see a "Force feed option" (creepy), so I begin to feed him some beans. He starts to feel a lot better and thanks me again.

As I'm about to leave, I hear footsteps behind me. I quickly turn around and see a guy holding a baseball bat running towards me. I ask if he's friendly and he says he is. I tell him the situation with the handcuffed guy and all of a sudden the handcuffed guy starts screaming into his headset that I was the one who handcuffed him and that I was actually torturing him (a little roleplaying never hurt anyone). I'm like "@_@ wut?" and without hesitation, the baseball bat guy starts beating me, saying how he'll "put me down." Before I can defend myself (I had put away my bat while feeding the handcuffed guy), I'm knocked unconscious and glitch out (basically dying). I later learned that the handcuffed guy and his fire axe friend were partners-in-crime and that it was all a trap to turn fresh spawns against each other. They would travel to high-pop locations with lots of fresh spawns and the fire axe guy would basically handcuff his friend in the open and wait for someone to come. But if nobody else came, the fire axe guy would just jump the newbie and take whatever supplies he had scavenged.

It was pretty amusing and, in my experience, you see it happen a lot (not just tricks and traps but memorable player interactions). It's what I love most about DayZ.

 

I have been playing since day one, your friend has greatly exaggerated servers are not packed 24/7, they are packed late afternoon, till late at night, but this has never been an issue to log on, even on a full server with a few friends .
At the moment the mod has waaaaaay more things to do on it, I am not saying Standalone isn't good, it is, the graphics are better, as well as the performance, they have added a lot of new features, proper melee, fully reworked inventory, weapon mods, completely reworked/revamped locations, logging on to a server is soooo much faster then on the mod, it takes under 5 seconds, for an alpha it is surprisingly stable, I was expecting more game breaking bugs .
Now for the bad, servers are still not running off private hives, you can literally hop from server to server to farm loot, or worse ghost behind an enemy with a better position, this is for me the biggest shortcoming of the Standalone, I mean come on, this was the main problem with the mod in the early days, I really was expecting this to be sorted, even on the mod most servers are private hive now so this problem was fixed .
For the moment there isn't much to do, well there is and there isn't DayZ is player driven, interaction is the key so the possibilities are pretty much infinite that said, there is a grand total of 3 different firearms (albeit with the weapons mods it adds a bit of variety) but once you have a Mosin with a long range scope there isn't much else too do, aside PVP, in the mod it took quite a bit more time to get your favorite gear, on Standalone I am basically fully geared in about half an hour, there also is no vehicles at the moment so there is a lot of running involved .
No base building, I played quite a bit of DayZ Epoch and this was actually really fun, not even sure they will add something similar, since they are talking about underground instances for bases (pretty dumb if you ask me)
The game needs some tweaking, your character whines all of the time, I am hungry, I am thirsty, my head hurts it is quite annoying, you really have to drink like 30 times and eat like 5 cans in a row to be good for an hour, this is a survival game, but the mechanics really need to be tweaked if they want to make it realistic .

All in all Standalone is really good, a solid foundation for what is to come, it is still missing a lot of what made the mod great, hopefully they wont take too long too add it all in, and when that is taken care of open it up to the modding community, then the game will really shine .

 

Great reads. Long write-ups, wow. Thanks for the information.

Some articles on Google are saying that the 'Pre-Alpha' release has sold more than 400,000 copies in a week.

 

I think it stayed #1 during Steam's entire holiday sale.

 

I may go ahead and purchase it. I've been watching videos on YouTube, it looks fun.

 

I found out that the performance issue comes from cpu's with 8-cores, but still - even with the issues I am still having a blast with friends. I have all my settings on low at 1080p resolution and I get about 25fps in towns and 55fps everywhere else.

 

after all the "memes" i've seen lately about DayZ, I'm probably not getting it

 

Considering it's only the Alpha, I am impressed with it. Hopefully we'll see some huge improvements as it gets closer to the official release.

 

Over 800,000 now.

I love the idea of an open world The Walking Dead game but I don't think this is it. By the sounds of it, you can be shot at anytime without warning by troll players who kill on sight. To be honest that's why I don't ever play multiplayer games. I like to have warning of imminent danger but in competitive multiplayer games with guns all you get is players sneaking up on you (or sniping from stupidly long distances) and the resulting instant one hit kills. I don't see how instant one hit kills that you have no time to prepare for can be any fun. Might as well set an automatic timer to kill your character at random intervals, it'd produce the same result. How can a game all about survival be any fun when other players don't allow you to survive for any meaningful amount of time to progress anywhere in the game? Maybe I'm not understanding how the game works.

 

It's just an Alpha. Supposedly a lot is going to be changed.

 

*oops double post*

 

Welcome to how this would play out if there were an actual zombie apocalypse.

 

There are actual PVE servers where players are not allowed to kill each other, so that really fixes that issue that you have brought up. What I do is just play on moderately populated servers because most of those "trolls" are on the full servers. The best thing would be to join one of the DayZ communities that have their own server with a password - that way anyone who is "trolling" is just banned.

But this is just a pre-alpha release, and it really shows so - not so much when you are trying to survive and gather supplies, etc..... but when you actually have everything you need. I have all of the best items in-game maxed out, and now there really is nothing to do. Really, once you reach the point that I am at in-game all you can really do is just be a "bandit" preying on other players for fun or just start over from scratch. A Lot more needs to be added before you can really play this regularly.

 

Been following this game for a while, really want to try it out. Looks like a steep learning curve though. Is it even fun for a noob?

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The Alpha isn't really fun for newbies. There aren't many zombies and the servers are full of people who just camp on new players. It's basically man vs man on these servers. When the official game comes out, I'm sure they'll have a ton of zombies and whatnot available.

 

You genuinely believe that people would kill each other for jollies in a real life apocalyptic scenario?

 

Eventually, yes. Perhaps not in the beginning. There may be communities that are good and remain somewhat civilized, but for the majority of the people, that side will diminish over time. Society as we know it would be completely destroyed. It may take years before it happens, but people will be ruthless - they'll hunt you down and take your things, and then determine whether or not to kill you. For women, I imagine it would be much worse. People are civilized animals. Take that away, what's left other than to survive?

 

Especially in a highly populated place like NYC. Sure there's plenty of great people but so often you see people more often than not losing their patience with each other over silly sh.... Stuff.

What do you think would happen in a city of 8M that survives on a fragile logistical situation of having to ship in the basic necessities daily to keep things running. Lose that ability widespread and it WILL go south. Desperation is a powerful motivator.

Sandy and 911, as horrible as they were, were rather localized and fleeting and didn't grind things to a halt widespread.

It would bring out the best and the worst in many. I just think the worst would end up chaotically dominating due to desperation for basics..

 

Buy this, noa!!!
https://www.humblebundle.com/weekly
If you pay more than $6 you get ARMA II + Operation Arrowhead addon, which lets you play DayZ.

 

I wouldn't consider kill-on-sight players as trolls (just my opinion). The great thing about the game is the fact that you can die instantly at anytime at any place. That's why player interactions in the game are the most memorable I've ever had in a "virtual world." The other day I was slowly dying of starvation when I happened to come across another player. I had an axe and he had a Mosin. I walked right up to him (seeing as how I had nothing to lose on the brink of starving to death) and pleaded with him to give me some food. He refused, saying "it's a touch world and I gotta look out for my own." As he ran away into a nearby town, I hung back and watched his movements. Eventually he entered a shack with only one entrance/exit so that's when I ambushed him, killing him with my axe (he didn't have his Mosin equipped) and robbing him of all his food. If he had just given me a little something, I wouldn't have acted the way I did.

I generally play the role of a "hero" (someone who puts themselves in harm's way just to help fellow players; I only shoot back if I'm fired upon first, which happens 10% of the time ^^) and I genuinely felt bad for killing him from behind. BUT I HAD TO!

 

While I agree with what you've said, playing it a bit changed the entire picture for me...
First attempt - got killed instantly by a gang of *censored*. Running away from a jeep under fire - an experience I will never forget.
Second attempt - a lot of zombies around and no weapons. Spent few minutes running away from zombies and later quit, since there were quite a few of them around and they made scavenging too problematic.
Seriously why not at least give a knife or an axe at start. I would gladly pick those instead of flares... There's no way a player can defend him/herself from others without at least a crappy weapon...
I know, it supposed to be "real", but this is ridiculous.
Well, I will give another go a bit later, but now it doesn't really look good in my books.

 

Real is ridiculous. I think it's pretty good, it makes things suspenseful and challenging.

 

I hear ya Kenny. For every interesting moment I have in DayZ, I have about 4-5 annoying or buggy ones that tick me off. The game is certainly not for everyone and I really hope people don't buy it because of all the hype/news surrounding it. The best way to see if this game is worth the $ is to watch the Twitch streams. Forget Youtube vids at this point since a lot of it is just edited and condensed and not an accurate representation of the gameplay.

 

Does anyone know if the day z mod included in Arma II is still actively supported and continues to have a following? I am considering picking up the humble bundle but the only game I really wasn't is day Z. Would I be better off just getting the SA alpha?

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The DayZ mod is still very active and supported, and compared to DayZ SA there is a lot more to do in the mod currently. The only thing that DayZ SA is better at is the Chernarus map, Chernarus fits the zombie apocalypse way better than the maps in the mod. I would suggest picking the humble bundle up before getting DayZ SA for you to see if you will actually enjoy the game for what it is.... DayZ is not a game for everyone.

 

Thanks for the info. I was leaning towards that way. It's only $5

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I really miss all the stuff you could do in the DayZ mod I played mostly Origins and Namalsk (sp?).

 

So, I went ahead and purchased DayZ and have come to love it. However, the "standalone" is a little boring after you've stocked up - it's more geared toward the "survivalist" aspect of DayZ as opposed to the "Shoot 'em up" mod we all know. Tip: Stay away from the forest unless you've got drinks and food, and preferably a map. I got lost in the woods for about 2 hours...really fun stuff.

I rented a server in Chicago, if anyone would like to play. I couldn't stand playing on other servers with tons of people. You walk around for 2 hours and find crap and then die from hunger... On my server, in two hours you'll have a pistol or rifle and a bunch of drinks, etc. It's much more fun. Send me a PM if you want the IP and Port to join!

 

Dayz does not seem like a game versus a grand social experiment.

 

Social experiment, lol? I don't think that's what the developers have in mind...

 

The developers may have not had that in mind, but think about the possibilities. Driven to the edge of the world, chased by zombies and constantly starving. It's no wonder why there are so many raiders and shnipers.
However, rust seems like a better survival world imho.Nothing beats killing a bear with a rock and having a group of screaming naked men as backup.

 

This video I love. Cracks me up every time.

 

I,I can't breathe.

 

The thirst for knowledge!

 

haha "where are you going child ?!|"

 

That's just ... creepy. Bunch of psychopaths playing DayZ.

 

That what I like about day z although I don't play the buggy mess much. What other game can give that sort of experience. lol

 

So, I've pretty much stocked up on as much as I need or want...now I'm bored. This game needs some more development.

Spoiler

 

I agree, the whole survival element has vanished. It's become a walking simulator.

 

Now go back and play an ArmA 2 DayZ mod .

 

That's funny you mention that, a friend of mine also suggested the mod. I've actually never played the mod more than an hour or so. I started with the "standalone" version, main reason being the installation process. If I had a better ISP, I'd do it.

 

Yeah the mod is still the better game at this point. At least there are zombies and vehicles.

 

Anyone still playing this?

EDIT: Guess not, lol.

 

Check out the new HUD concept. It can be toggled on or off.