DayZ Diary: Part 3

Okay, so this is probably my last DayZ post for quite a bit of time. I feel that I’ve reached a point where I’ve seen pretty much everything it currently has to offer. I’ve played on both regular and hardcore servers and I’ve explored most of the map. My current character is now sufficiently stocked with food, water, ammo and medical supplies. Which isn’t all that interesting really, because it’s pretty easy to do.

So let’s talk a bit about the PvP aspect, which I’ve already mentioned doesn’t really appeal to me. It has its moments, but after a couple of hours it just felt like a futile cycle of kill/be killed. And although I have seen some interesting and non-violent player interactions through other people’s videos, it does seem to be exceptionally rare. 99% of the time, when you see another person, one of you will end up dead.

Now, it’s not that I don’t enjoy PvP scenarios, but I prefer it if there’s some goal or motivation for doing so. Killing in DayZ never felt satisfying in any way to me. I didn’t really find it exciting or competitive. It just felt rather hollow and meaningless. It also made me feel like a bit of a jerk bludgeoning people to death for…well… nothing. Like I said, weapons and supplies aren’t exactly hard to come by. I guess I just didn’t see the point of it all.

What attracted me to DayZ were the survival aspects of the game, but right now, they’re all rather rudimentary. And the zombie element remains totally broken. Few in number, they still walk through walls/doors/floors and their senses seem to be divided between completely unresponsive, or pursuing you from a mile away through the middle of a town or forest with the precision of a guided f**king missile.

So yeah, as a zombie survival sim, DayZ in its current state falls very, very far from target. If you’re looking for something like that, then I’d recommend State of Decay. Not perfect by any means, and with some design choices I dislike, but it hits more right notes than DayZ in its current state. Of course, DayZ isn’t finished yet. There’s a long way to go and a lot of this could change.

I don’t want to sound too harsh with DayZ because I have enjoyed my time with it, but since its initial release, updates haven’t exactly been fast to drop, and when they have they’ve added very little to the experience aside from a few incremental performance improvements and a couple of new hats. And until we start seeing some significant content updates I don’t see much point in continuing to play.