abigserve posted:

I feel like DayZ would be just as effective as a game even if it was 2D from an Isometric viewpoint. It would probably be a lot more manageable if it was, too. If I sum up what makes DayZ such a great proof of concept I get;

- Challenging gameplay
- Massive and varied world to explore
- Intense stealth moments
- Intense/crazy/hilarious inter-player interaction

And if I had to list what makes DayZ terrible as a game;

- Awful, awful engine that feels broken even when it's working perfectly.
- Tons of bugs and hacking issues, directly caused by the engine itself

Really the fact that's a relatively good looking 3D-world doesn't add much to the experience, I think if rocket wanted to make a stand-alone, more "indie-fied" version of the game but kept all the features that make it great he would make hard cash money.

BlastTyrant posted:

New DayZ Map "Lingor Island"

There is a new Dayz Map available. This map is not condoned by the Dayz dev team and characters played on this map will not update on the Main Hive.

If you decide to try this new map I would advise not to set your hopes too high. There are only a few servers running it and as usual there are version compatibility problems for most people.

csidle posted:

I really don't get the thing with sniping newbies on the beach. Even less than other random murders. What's the point?

Wezlar posted:

It's fun? I don't really get your question. Nothing in this game has a point, unless you're rolling around with a huge crew there are no objectives, even if you are the only objective is to get a car.

The entire game is about killing other players, where better place to find them than on the coast?

Economic Crysis posted:

Actually the whole game is about living for as long as possible, but I'm sure shooting people who lack the capacity to threaten you in any way is totally fun as well.

Economic Crysis posted:

How would combat work in your version of the game?

And Captain Beans - if you "save" your vehicle it should remain in place when the server restarts. It's always worked for me.

Wezlar posted:

Walk into the forest with a hatchet, canteen, hunting knife and matches, congrats you never die I guess?

abigserve posted:

Dunno exactly, but given how terrible combat is in DayZ you couldn't make it much worse.

Economic Crysis posted:

Actually the whole game is about living for as long as possible, but I'm sure shooting people who lack the capacity to threaten you in any way is totally fun as well.

lordblytzkrieg posted:

The game is whatever I want.

It was a night server (2am server time, so really loving dark) which implies that most people playing aren't brand new. I think getting shot at in the pitch black by 2 snipers with ghillie suits and NVGs would be fun.

Can you imagine dodging bullets and zombies while you can't see a drat thing? I'd enjoy both being shot at and being the shooter.

abigserve posted:

Dunno exactly, but given how terrible combat is in DayZ you couldn't make it much worse.

Economic Crysis posted:

I love the combat in DayZ. What about it is terrible exactly?

Wezlar posted:

Walk into the forest with a hatchet, canteen, hunting knife and matches, congrats you never die I guess?

Tolain posted:

This kind of attitude along with "It's an alpha!" is kind of irritating. We understand that it's an alpha, we understand that there are flaws, and so on. Where people are venting frustrations is a sign that they're legitimately holding out to see if things are going to ever be improved, and are curious as to whats going to be done.

Is "stop playing because it's not getting better" really the legit answer, or has there been any speculation on how they can stop things like the rampant hacking? Because honestly I think that makes the difference. Some people (myself included) are willing to look to the light at the end of the tunnel if we expect things will change for the better, but if "Just stop playing" because the odds of it ever being fixed is really that slim, then yeah, we're probably likely to uninstall.

Wadjamaloo posted:

I see a lot of people talking about penalties or deterants for murdering. This game reminds me so much of early Ultima Online, and I really think the Ultima Online criminal system would work very well here.

You basically have 3 states, represented by the color of your name. I hate nameplates in dayz, so some other indicator would probably have to be used.

Blues = Innocent
Grey = Criminal
Red = Murderer

Greys and Reds are basically freely attackable. If you perform any illegal action against a blue such as attacking them, or stealing from their pack you become Grey.

Being grey is a temporary thing that lasts 2 minutes.
If you kill another player, you get 1 murder count. After 5 murder counts, you become a murderer and highlight red. Murder counts would go away after some amount of time, this may or may not work for dayz.

There was a complex system of short term and long term murder counts, its not really relevant here so I will ignore it, but if you died with more than 5 short term murder counts you would suffer stat loss when you rezzed. This was a pretty big way to make massive killing sprees have consequence.
So what you could do in Dayz to apply a similar concept is to prevent murderers from respawning for some amount of time. This is not an ideal situation, since it basically forces people to stop playing the game which is never fun.

Now the other part of this criminal system is town guards. All of the cities in UO had guard NPCs that would attack Greys and Reds on sight. Originally these guards were not instant kill, but very powerful, they did not stop all violence in cities, but they did keep it in check.
Dayz could easily adopt a similar system, have a few areas that have been secured by the military with a few squads of troops patrolling things and protecting the citizens.

I imagine this type of system working our pretty well, and doing a good job of curtailing some of the mindless murdering.

nuclearaddict posted:

I like how it is now. Adding anything to signal to other players that (x) player is a bandit/murderer would just take away part of the suspense from the game.

Azzents posted:

In my experience, everyone is a murderer. The only times I've not been shot on sight is when I've freshly spawned and run into someone else who doesn't have a weapon.

Any system that encourages co-operation over shoot'n'loot would do wonders for the game. Right now to me Dayz seems less like a zombie survival game and more like a COD deathmatch game with zombies.

Bolocko posted:

I also would like to hear more of our take on this. Aside from things like aggro'd zombie run/pop movement being a bitch to aim at and the occasional hit detection oddities, I feel the combat in DayZ is one of its best features, to the point where I find myself gravitating though under-prepared toward high-risk areas like NWAF both expecting and hoping to get into a fire fight, even though most of the time I'm the guy eating soil at the end.

Phoix posted:

The Lingor Island map seems way more fun than Chernarus. Item spawns are pretty buggy right now but otherwise it's great.

E-Tank posted:

Dammit, who was it that told Rocket to take out any and all starting gear? I've died three times because if I want to sneak in and get a weapon, I have to deal with all these assholes shooting at me and I can't fight back.

NerdyMcNerdNerd posted:

The big cities on the coast are pretty much death traps. Even if you're on a server with ten people, a few of them are guaranteed to be there. Sneak into a small town, grab a hatchet, then go for the closest barn or deer stand.

Azeral posted:

Loot is mostly in buildings, so being able to survive (initially) is largely predicated on effectively locating buildings. You can get by with wandering until you hit a road and then following it, maybe sketching out a little map of your own based on signs you see or finding a map in-game so you can learn the basic layout

Vasudus posted:

if the entire point of the game wasn't to have user defined content.

abigserve posted:

Terrible was a pretty harsh call, it's not exactly unplayable by any means, it just feels clunky and loose. Often I can't tell whether I'm hitting a target, sometimes I'll shoot way wide and it'll hit something, othertimes it'll be a point-blank shot to the face and it won't register. You could mark this down to hit-detection weirdness but really there best way I can explain it is you don't get any feedback from the game to show you've hit and killed something until they fall down with the pre-canned death animation (usually with a couple of second lag between the killshot and the fall).

Like I said, terrible was a harsh call, it's not that bad as much as it is a chore. I dread firefights with zombies because it's way more annoying than it is fun and fire fights with people generally end either in an alt-f4 by them or getting murdered because you lost the dice roll and the guy was actually 3 feet to the right of where his model was rendered.

Don't get me wrong, DayZ loving rules in it's own way, but on a "playable game" level it could be a lot better and it's fun to try and think of ways to make that a reality!

Vasudus posted:

I would be content with labels/punishments for mass murders if the entire point of the game wasn't to have user defined content.

Harmonica posted:

What's wrong with having weapons that actually require you spend some time learning how to shoot with them? That's not a Day Z thing, that's another factor of it being built on a milsim engine. When you fire a weapon you need to think about your stance and bullet drop and range before you pull the trigger. If you practice you'll be able to instinctively hit your targets at most ranges (although yes latency on Day Z servers is a bit of a killer). The entire nature of this though means that finding cover and a position to shoot from is absolutely vital. Firefights are rarely over in the first few shots unless someone has their scope trained on you. And suppressive fire works because you really don't want to get hit in Day Z or Arma.

This is not to say that the warping, bullet sponging zombies are working properly, but in most instances it's a bad idea to open fire on them anyway.

I wouldn't expect Rocket to make the gunplay any less challenging in a standalone game.


Exactly. The brutality of it all is what makes it great. I don't think there needs to be in any in built deterrents for banditry, it should just be naturally difficult to play that kind of role if players cooperate together. At this point obviously it's very difficult to get large scale cooperative gameplay going (and there's not many built in tools to help), and it seems like there are more large bandit groups than there are friendlies.

Kazvall posted:

After I have these things I get the gently caress out of town into the woods, where I can begin building towards better gear, and not play like such a fuckwit.

Kazvall posted:

Wadjamaloo posted:

Its not a perfect system, and UO had similar issues.

As for self defense, if its from someone who is murderer or "bandit" there would be no penalty. If its between 2 innocents it would just come down to whoever shoots who first, and yes it would be hard to track misses as actual attacks.
However this is in part why Ultima allowed murder counts to decay over time. You might accidentally get one murder count in a self defense situation, but if you are racking up 5 of them before they decay you probably weren't just defending yourself.
IIRC Murder counts in UO would decay at 1 per 8 hours. If you "accidentally" get 5 murder counts in 8 hours you probably deserve to be labeled a murderer.

The system does have it flaws, anything does really, but it did work really well in Ultima.