DayZ Mod

I recently heard about the DayZ Mod for ARMA II. It’s a zombie apocalypse game where you play a survivor trying to scavenge, loot and murder your way to survival. I haven’t yet played it yet but after watching quite a few Youtube videos of it I’m sure to get it soon. I figured I’d see if anybody here has played it yet? Does it get boring once you finally figure out how to survive?

Link: dayzmod.com

I’ve been wanting to try this, but I hear its pretty brutal. Maybe we can get a few dopers together. Groups do better.

Yeah the Rock Paper Shotgun guys have been talking this up. And yes, I hear it is brutal as well. I don’t know if there is a way to figure out how to survive, since you are in a world with not only AI zombies but also other humans, played by real people just like you. You can just as easily have your head bashed in by another player as be eaten by a zombie.

I’ve been THIS CLOSE // to installing this mod the past few days, but then I look at my games backlog and decide against doing it. But yeah, having a few friendlies around to start with would probably mean as much in this game as it would in a real zombie apocalypse.

I hear that Arma II sales have skyrocketed because of this mod.

My current plan is that if ARMA II goes on sale I’m picking it up and installing the mod.

I’ve been playing the past couple of nights, about an hour at a time. It took me a bit to regain some semblance of familiarity with Arma and the control scheme.

It is suspenseful, and thus far I haven’t died once - mostly because I’m being very cautious. I still haven’t found anything useful, despite searching one structure, so no weapons. And, I’m starting to get pretty hungry, so if I don’t have scavenging success soon (either with a weapon to kill an animal or some canned beans), I’m going to starve to death. Two of the structures I dared to venture to last night both had un-openable doors, which really peeved me.

One of the cool things about it is it is designed to be persistent, in the sense that if you logoff while alive, and rejoin a day later - even on a completely different server - you should pop back up at the same place with the same equipment.

Sounds cool, I’ve been wanting to play Arma2. Is it online-only?

Arma2 is not online-only, but DayZ itself is online-only.

For those getting started I would recommend perusing this collection of forum posts and guides:
http://dayzmod.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=11995

There’s one in there that includes key mappings, which will certainly help those that are not used to Arma2.

Yeah I meant the mod. Tried to get it going but it keeps complaining about missing or invalid key files in the Addons folder when I try to join a server. I don’t play much multiplayer, I might have to delete the contents of the Addons folder to get DayZ working. I think I dumped various mods in there like Isla Duala.

If you haven’t already, use the Six Launcher that they refer to on their site. It seems to manage all that painlessly.

I got it working by renaming my Addons folder to Addons.bak and moving the files ARMA2 complained about back to Addons until it would launch. If it seemed like the addon was an offical one, I moved all the others with the same date as well. Best I could tell it was having map packs in the Addons folder that caused the problem.

Anyway, on to the game. It’s lonely, it’s creepy, but I didn’t have good luck scavenging and the gameplay just wasn’t very good for all the time I invested wandering around. I’ll probably give it another shot before calling it quits. If they had a way to spawn with a friend it would make it more interesting.

Here’s what I (and a cow-orker) have realized: because it takes so long, so much work and sweat and tension, to get a few basic items, it makes the “death penalty” all that much more harsh. When you die, you don’t respawn 5 seconds later with an M16 and a pistol - you respawn with nothing, and most likely miles away from where you died.

The only other game I’ve played that had as crushing a death penalty was EVE Online, but in that you have the option of insurance and, most importantly, a market at which to buy replacements. No such thing in DayZ.

Yeah I guess that’s why I hear that the players with all the goodies just shoot you on sight, it’s not worth the risk of figuring out your intentions. The game need some sort of goal, escape, eradicate all the zombies, something.

Agreed.

Sounds like the game would be ruled by trolls that set out to kill everyone they come in contact with.

The whole point of the exercise is the isolation, paranoia, and brutality. There is a goal, and it’s survival. Though as the game becomes more popular and people start forming larger bands, the horror-survival tension completely goes away and is replaced by the tension of, as you mentioned, avoiding groups of trolls setting out to kill everyone, which is not nearly as charming as what the game originally set out to be. It’s a shame, but it seems like success and popularity is going to kill what made DayZ so special to begin with.

The alpa standalone is on Steam!

I was in the doctors’ office when the release was tweeted so I had to wait till I got home. So far I like it. I’m getting used to the controls but the thirst and hunger meters are gone which makes it hard to gauge your health.

Someone was complaining that he was jumped, right after he spawned, by a fully armed group who hand cuffed him and proceeded to tap his blood in to blood bags.
What’s next organ harvesting?

That’s really the point and I’m not sure why anyone would think any differently. Think about shows like The Walking Dead or the Romero zombie films. Or any zombie film, really. 90% of the threat comes from other scared and desperate people.

You can knock people out and force feed them disinfectant until they die.

Since I know it’s only a game my reaction to reading this was to laugh out loud and shout “Brilliant!”

It looks like a cool game. But the alpha is so, so buggy. I watched my boyfriend playing it yesterday and he had a really well-stocked backpack. Set it down for a second and it fell through a wall. He couldn’t get it back. He also logged out once with a good pile of stuff, logged back in, and the game completely forgot everything he had. Like he was freshly spawned. It’s also far too easy to server-hop or alt-f4 when you’re about to lose a fight. They need to prevent logouts and server-hopping during combat with some kind of combat-lock.

I’ll think about playing it once the gamebreaking bugs are worked out.