ArmA 2 mod: Day Z

[Drunken Savior]

ArmA2: CO is now #2 on Steam!

Also the update has been getting a mixed reception according to my assessment of people on the forums.

[KingOfSentinels]

Wow, a lot of people really want to play this mod.

[Drunken Savior]

So yeah, there's a LOT more zombies now. Luckily, my brother and I found a way to survive.

One thing the game does is have somewhat realistic nights. If the sky is clear, you can turn up the gamma and brightness to allow you to see. However, if there is overcast, having your brightness and gamma at max still gives you completely black silhouettes. The key is using this to your advantage. And the advantage is: You're virtually unsnipable. Snipers can't see you, so the only threat is the zombies as well as other players (rare).

My brother and I like to avoid the PvP aspect of this game, which is found at the coasts. We prefer to explore, going inland and finding enough weapons and items to survive as we rack up as many zombie kills as possible in one life.

During pitch black nights, lights are your best friend. They come in two forms: Glowsticks and Flares. There's flashlights too, but those are rare and glowsticks/flares are common. The glowsticks can only be seen within a 50 m radius of the source, and flares are seen for hundreds of meters away. Using flares, you can light up the towns you find, and glow sticks provide enough light for you to see within you're area.

Avoid zombies means being unseen and unheard. The game provides meters that illustrate how visible and loud you are. Crouching and walking on vegetation renders you unseen/unheard by zombies. Crawling on any surface does the same. Using both of these appropriately will let you navigate a busy city unseen by zombies, allowing you to gather ammo and save ammo by not killing zombies.

When it comes to fighting zombies, your best bet is to let them come to you. Walk backwards slowly, taking good shots, while keeping your partner informed of what you are doing. This will make sure you avoid friendly fire as well as preserve ammo.

This mod has made the game much harder. If you start a new character, there's a good chance you'll die before you can get off the shoreline. It sucks, but since PK'ers stay on the shore (roughly), taking pot shots at newly spawned characters, the rest of the map is virtually free to explore.

Also, this game is about 1000x more enjoyable with someone you can trust.

So far my bother is on an incredible run! 277 zombies downed!
Click for full size

Originally Posted by Dayzmod.com

Realistic "Zombies" with custom animations - These once human creatures will act and behave as if they have a heighten sense of hearing and smell but less sight, on top of that they use motion captured animations such as walking and eating from your unconscious body. If you look into any built up area you'll see them walking around waiting for their next victim which dares to venture in.

New weapons and vehicles! - Ever felt like you needed a Crossbow? Or maybe a less military like weapon? If you have then this is perfect for you as we have both of these created to high quality standards all ready for your use in this wasteland. On top of that you can even pick up the bolts fired from the Crossbow to reuse! Not only that we also have created custom vehicles which can be repaired and ridden around to show the world what you're made of!

Custom Medical System - ArmA II's magic medic feature is a thing of the past with this medical system - If you get shot, expect to bleed and to lose blood until you're bandaged up. Lost too much blood? Then expect to fall over unconscious. If you get shot in the leg then you won't be able to walk until you get morphine so you can man up. Pain is also a factor taken into consideration so without pain killers after taking an injury you'll continue to shake. This is medical at it's best!

Persistent Server - Fed up of spending so many hours working towards a goal or finding supplies and then the server crashes on you losing all your progress? Well with the DayZ server all stat's are saved to our external database so where ever you log off, whatever you have will be keep on you next time you come back in. This means you can spend however long you want doing what you want to do. As long as you don't die during the night!

Tons of new objects - We haven't just added in big things like weapons, we take pride in little details so expect to find things such as water canteens, a number of canned foods, junk and car parts (Along with more!) each of which have their own models, textures and UI imagery, once again all created to that high quality you expect in a full scale modification and we're sure you won't be disappointed with it. Nothing has been rushed.

Hunting and Survival - Eating and drinking is a core part of gameplay, you can tell if you need something by a very subtle GUI which doesn't effect the atmosphere, and if you don't fulfil those needs. You'll die. Wandering animals can killed and gutted (with the right tools) to gain access to their meat which can be eaten so you live longer but also to gain blood. For once these animals actually have a use.

Heavy Optimisation - The DayZ server has been designed to give the best play possible. Custom coding and edits have created a smooth running world which can easily have thousands of zombies spawned at once!

And Much More! - The only way to find out - is to survive!

Requirements:

-ArmA II: CO
-DayZ Mod Files (Available on the downloads page)
-Balls

[Alucard]

Real shame about the PKer noobs. Doing it ingame is one thing, but just camping the newbie spawn area is a joke.

[Drunken Savior]

Excellent interview with the creator of the mod over at Kotaku! When are you so-called PC supporters going to quit making excuses and get this game? You PC fans are all talk, like a bunch of gaggling women at the salon.

Originally Posted by http://kotaku.com/5912878/the-secret-behind-dayzs-success-the-most-interesting-pc-game-of-2012

The Secret Behind the Success of DayZ, the Most Interesting PC "Game" of 2012

BY LUKE PLUNKETT

You can keep your Diablos, the most interesting thing to happen to PC gaming this year has easily been DayZ, a zombie survival mod for military shooter ArmA II.

What's even more impressive than the experience itself, though, is the fact it was created by a single man, New Zealander Dean Hall. So earlier this week we had a little chat to discuss the past, present and future of the mod.
Before we start, though, let's clear something up: this isn't strictly a fan-made mod. One of the reasons DayZ is running so well so early in its life (it's still in alpha) is that Hall actually works for Bohemia Interactive, the developers of ArmA II, where he's been since January after Skype chats with BI's creative director Ivan Buchta turned into a job offer.

"It is definitely an advantage because you can learn about how the engine works, and how you can work with the engine to achieve what you want", Hall says. "In a way, DayZ was a chance for me to really consolidate what I was learning during the day, in the weekends and at night. This allowed me to quickly refine and consolidate my knowledge in the engine."

Don't go calling this an official mod, though. Work on DayZ began long before Hall flew to the Czech Republic. "Much of the actual tech underneath I actually developed prior to turning up, in things I had been developing that was more like a persistent world battlefield (i.e. no infected people). But being at the heart of the development allowed me to learn how to work with the engine in what I was trying to achieve."

When I spoke with ArmA II devs Bohemia Interactive last week, they told me that sales of the game had shot up fivefold since DayZ's release, with the ageing shooter even occasionally topping Steam's sales charts ahead of brand new, AAA blockbusters.

Has this caused any problems for Hall as far as development of the mod goes? You bet it has. "In many ways, it slowed development to a crawl. I had to focus nearly all my time on performance issues associated with the drastically increased numbers."

"But it allowed the concept to be proven in a mass-scale environment. I really didn't have time to think about anything for the first few weeks, it was one problem to the next. Luckily there were members from the community to help me at every turn."

Getting a little deeper than his immediate responses to the flood of people rushing to try the mod, I ask Hall for his thoughts on the game's real hook: its emotional effect on the player, and how the game's lack of design, for want of a better term, was part of its appeal.

"Well I guess it depends what you mean by design", he says. "I think that's the core problem in the game industry at the moment, many people think design largely means story, progression, mechanics. I think as an industry we got stuck on repeat with that and designers started to devote more and more time to that. I spent far more time on design that I did on really anything else within DayZ, but that design was entirely focused on developing and refining how the game would effect the players thinking and develop their emotions, how the mechanics in game with affect the player and what situations the player would be faced with. Because I didn't allow for anything else, I couldn't take the easy way out. The base mechanics had to work because there was nothing else to pull it through."


While DayZ's terrifying appeal is built on keeping things to a relative minimum - an irony given the complexity of ArmA II itself - that doesn't mean the mod is going to simply stay at "man vs zombies vs other men" level. Hall is committed to adding new and more immersive features to DayZ as he and the community see fit.

"I just added the temperature system, I am really passionate about having the game world have a key effect on the players thinking. I think this will make the players feel more engaged with the game. I loved Skyrim's visuals, they made me dreamy, but I always felt disconnected from the world because it had no effect on my character. I didn't have to factor in the rain or the snow, or being in water. I want to explore this concept with the DayZ players and see how this can be refined to add a whole dimension to the gameplay."

Looking at DayZ's success, even given the mod's early development stage and rough code, it's clear that Hall has struck a nerve, giving PC gamers an experience they weren't getting elsewhere, but which they were clearly hanging out for. Which begs the question: rather than simply exist as a mod, could DayZ, or something similar, work as a standalone, dedicated product?

"I think that DayZ has proven that such a concept would not only be a critical success, but a financial one as well. I think it's really just a question of who, on what, and when before this kind of gameplay mode becomes an actual game. I think that's great news for gamers, they have hit directly into the bottom line - and that is what will make studios take notice."

Before we wind up, I have to ask: given the mod can be very difficult for newcomers, what advice does Hall have for those taking their first steps in DayZ?

"Probably the same advice for any natural disaster: Have a plan and don't do anything stupid."

Rocket makes a good point. There is no story in Day Z. Ask anyone who's played the game for any significant time and they have stories of playing the game. Stories that are unique to them. Stories on par with some of the best post apocalyptic stories out there. I'm in the midst of a great story myself. A story where I had to shed my humanity and kill an innocent because I was too scared to trust someone I didn't know who was in my way. Does that make my character a bad person? Probably. But in the end, I'm out to survive. Don't get in my way.

[Alucard]

I'm waiting for the mod to get a little more fleshed out. But mainly trying to finish off all these other games I have. I wonder which company will steal his idea first.

[Drunken Savior]

I take it you haven't read the article. The guy WORKS for Bohemia, the developers of Arma II.

Also...waiting for it to get fleshed out? Lulz, great pun. But you're just making excuses. This game is more fun than most polished games out there. Quit playing your dollhouse sim and come survive the apocalypse like a man.

[Drunken Savior]

Even 'Arnold Schwarzenegger' is playing this game now.

[Alucard]

Fucking LOL

[Alucard]

A whopping 420,000 people are playing the open world survival horror modification, its creator Dean Hall told Eurogamer after his star turn at Rezzed, the PC and indie game show in Brighton. The alpha version of the game launched just three months ago, in April 2012.

That 420,000 figure is accurate as of today, Saturday 7th July 2012.

Yesterday, Friday 6th July 2012, there were 400,000 players.

Tomorrow, there will be more. "We've got 420,000 now. We'll have 430,000 tomorrow," Hall said.

And next week? Half a million, Hall, who believes DayZ will eventually outsell ArmA 2, reckons.

"Currently we're running 22,000 concurrent at full peak, and 10,000 off peak, which is pretty huge numbers considering the original data structure and system was designed to handle 100 concurrents, and two servers," Hall revealed during his developer session.

"We now have 1000 servers. We're getting 110,000 players in a 24 hour period at the moment."

http://www.evilavatar.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=173602

Its probably reached 440k by now. And just wait till the steam sale comes in the next few weeks. BOOM! Another 100k probably!

[Drunken Savior]

Yeah....people have been waiting for the inevitable Steam sale for months now...meanwhile, the game has been in the Steam Sales Top 3 for the past month...

[KingOfSentinels]

I'm patient. I don't rush out and buy every game full price, I wait for sales, it's how I afford so many games without needing to resort to piracy, or buying them used/selling them, and it saves me a heck of a lot of money too in the process. It alludes me why others can't do that, a good game is good regardless of whether you play it at launch or a few months later. It's usually patched up and more playable later too.

It'll hopefully go on sale and I'll pick it up then.

[Drunken Savior]

Well Arma II: Combined Operations is on sale on Steam (20% off) for $24. So get it now!!!1!

[Alucard]

I expect a bigger sale coming.

[Drunken Savior]

New unofficial Day Z map is helping combat the recent stem of script-hacking: Lingor Island!
Seems really cool...I'll be playing it later today!