To my knowledge, there’s never really been a zombie survival horror game. Just action games that are zombie themed, like Left 4 Dead.
DayZ, a mod for Arma 2, is unique in that it really is an open world survival horror game. There’s no start or finish, no fixed objective, your only goal is survival.
It takes place on a gigantic map (really, probably 20x bigger than anything you’ve ever seen) based on some real place in Russia. You spawn in with nothing but (in the current build) some aspirin. There are various places where loot will spawn - everything from crowbars to, if you raid a military barracks, 50 caliber sniper rifles. And a suite of survival gear.
There is almost nothing to help the user get by in this world. You don’t even start with a map or a compass. To navigate, you’ll have to use a third party map like this and figure out where you are based on landmarks. You can use the sun to figure out your direction, or the movement of the clouds. You can find stuff like a compass and a map in-game that will help you navigate, you’ve got to figure your way out with nothing.
You’ll need to eat and drink. You can raid abandoned grocery stores for that stuff, you can fill canteens in ponds or in wells, and you can even hunt wildlife for meat (if you have a hunting knife to carve them up, a hatchet to get firewood, and matches to start the fire).
Injuries are progressive - if you survive a zombie attack, you may bleed which will need to be patched with bandages. As your blood level decreases, your character faces various obstacles. Your vision gets worse, you can begin shaking, and if it gets low enough, you will occasionally pass out. You can slowly rebuild your blood levels by eating or by transfusion - but the latter case is rather difficulty, you’ll need to raid a hospital for a blood bag and have a friend administer it.
You’ll encounter other players along the way. Some will be friendly, some will be hostile, and it’s hard to be sure which is which. I’ve had a stranger patch me up as I’ve laid on the ground bleeding after zombie attacks, and I’ve had guys shoot me on sight after I’ve tried to signal that I was friendly. There’s no right way to do things.
And there’s no way to win. No ultimate goal. The longer you survive, the more of a chance you have to accumulate useful gear, but that’s pretty much all there is to it.
There’s a lot of tension in that - you could encounter a dangerous situation at any time, and you may have spent hours alive building up to your current level of equipment. That’s a real consequence for dying, and as a result, it really ramps up the suspense. You really care about your own survival, unlike other games where you just respawn or go back to the last checkpoint.
The game isn’t an MMO. Arma 2 servers can only host 40-60 people at any given time. The day z master server saves the data about your character, so when you go from one server to the next you’ll be in the same place on the map with the same gear, but you’ll only be on a server with at most 50-60 people at any given time.
With a group of friendly people, you can look into bigger goals. There are nonfunctional vehicles scattered around the map that you need to scavenge for - getting fuel and spare parts. It’s a lot of effort and pretty rare to get a vehicle, but a lot of fun (I’m guessing) if you get one. So if we do get a bunch of SDMBers to play together, we can take on bigger goals like that, and then do goofy shit like this. Or robbing people. (NSFW language for both. Second video should start at 12:30, but if not, click ahead to that).
That said, there are a lot of problems with it. It’s an early development of an arma 2 mod - which means the mod itself is rough around the edges, and it has to work within Arma 2’s system which has always been rough and unpolished. The arma 2 devs are actually patching the game to better accomodate day z, but it’s a work in progress. I have seen a lot of improvement in the month or so I’ve been playing. Arma 2 also has pretty high system requirements.
But there are glitches and exploits. People can disconnect at any time - the game needs a system like an MMO where once you start the logout sequence you just sit there for 20 seconds. So people can bail suddenly, which is very frustrating. That’s the main problem with the game - not everyone does, maybe less than half.
I’ve decided I’m going to play a relatively exploit-free existance, because the game’s appeal is pretty much the suspense, the consequences of death, the feeling that you could die at any time and death matters. If you circumvent that, you’re missing out on the main point of the game.
The Arma 2 engine can be glitchy - you can die from weird stuff like having a door close on you. Sometimes you’ll spawn in the wrong place, or it won’t have saved your gear correctly from the last time you logged out. If this happens to you after you’ve spent 3 hours gathering up gear, you’ll punch your turtle. The server browser is awful. The interface in general feels sort of clunky. I find that playing in third person makes the game feel smoother. The zombies move somewhat irratically sometimes, although this has been getting better - it mostly has to do with simplifying the zombie scripts to be able to have 500+ of them going at one time on one server without overloading it.
There’s hacking to some extent - I’ve only been killed once by a hacker (using some sort of immortality), but lesser hacking/exploiting allows people to duplicate gear. They have banned tens of thousands of people though and they do seem pretty serious about stamping it out.
The game is growing more hostile over time - people cooperated more early on, but once everyone has that experience that sours them on cooperation - say they try to help a guy who then shoots them to get their beans - they decide well fuck it, I’m going to shoot everything on sight. Which then becomes a vicious cycle.
There used to be a bandit skin system - if you murdered people, you’d wear different clothes - but they removed it because people were becoming bandits by defending themselves and killing someone who had attacked them. Still, it would be good to have some sort of system like that, because the game does track whether you’ve been a murderer, and it would be easier to cooperate if you could figure out who’s been a bad boy.
So it’s a mixed bag. It does stuff no other game has ever attempted to do, and is interesting because of it - but has a lot of rough edges that will piss you off. So I’m not fully recommending it as a 100% awesome SenorBeef pick. But if you’ve always wanted an open world, true survival game, this is definitely something you should look into.
You need Arma 2 Combined Operations - which includes the original and the operation arrowhead expansion. They’re $23 together as a package now on Steam during the sale, but don’t buy it yet - it may go on further discount on a daily sale.
A few videos I’ve recorded:
Hospital sniper. Another SDMBer and I - I forget his sdmb name but I’m sure he’ll post on the thread - were trying to raid the grocery store in one of the main towns when we heard shots coming from the hospital down the street. We use loud weapons which ends up summoning pretty much all the zombies in the city - it looks sort of goofy in this case because they have trouble making the entrance through the broken hospital windows and they can get hung up on them. My aim is also terrible because the combination of arma 2 / fraps makes my mouse lag when I’m recording.
Unlucky Spawn - I had a horde of zombies chasing me near the coast area - all players will spawn somewhere on roughly a 6-10 mile long patch of coast - and this guy just happened to spawn right next to me… This was about a month ago when the zombie movement was glitchier.
Spotter - we were sniping at one of the coastal cities, which is mostly dickish.
Surprise visitor - zombies will generally spawn near lootable items so you don’t generally encounter them randomly in the middle of the woods, so I was surprised to hear one coming from there…
Day Z is always launching new beta versions, and Arma 2 as well to better support day z. The easiest way to keep up with all that stuff is to use six launcher which will update both the Arma 2 and Day Z betas. It functions as a server browser too (Arma 2’s in game server browser is rough and slow), but once you’re up to date, it’s better to use Day Z Commander as a server browser/launcher.
If you’re interested in playing with other SDMBers to set up camps, scavenge for vehicle parts, and generally do organized things, please post in the thread and add me (same name) to your steam friends list.
Absolutely no dickish behavior towards SDMBers will be tolerated - if you end up hurting the group somehow you will be gang raped by squirrels on meth.
