Day Z- Mod for ARMA 2 Zombie Survival on a 15 Mile island

[Widgetcraft]

When my friend got the game, he didn't even consider, not for one second, ever being a 'friendly.' He just straight up hunts people, and that is all he cares about.

[Krispy]

Your friend lacks honor. (Kidding. Kind of.)

[Widgetcraft]

No, he totally does.

[Krispy]

I can't help but feel like there should be some situations that force cooperation or insure mutual destruction.

[RandoM51]

Originally Posted by Krispy

I can't help but feel like there should be some situations that force cooperation or insure mutual destruction.

There are some.

As far as built right in to the system you can't give yourself a blood transfusion, which is the only way to get a full heal quickly. You have 12000 blood (HP), if this drops below 5k your vision gets messed up and there is a chance for you to pass out at any time. There are only 2 ways to gain HP, eat food or get a transfusion. Food is problematic because canned food only regenerates 200HP and you don't have unlimited inventory to pick up every can of food you stumble across. Cooked meat regenerates 600HP but has a number of prerequisites that place it out of reach of many.

If you break your leg and don't have any morphine on you you're pretty much fucked unless you've got buddies who can bring you some. If your leg is broken you can't stand up. There are a few hospitals/med tents in the game where morphine is readily found, it can show up other places with a very small chance. The bandits know where the morphine is too, though, so getting to those hospitals can be a challenge if you have to crawl all the way there by yourself.

Lastly, the highest concentrations of good gear are at a handful of places. If you walk into any of these places by yourself you're going to get wasted. Go in with a group and you have a much better chance of scoring some good loot and making it back out alive.

Now the problem with trying to be friendly, trying to work together, is that there are no indications whatsoever about who you're dealing with. The bad guys look just like the good guys. The only way you know somebody is a bandit---which is how you're classed if you've killed another player---is if they get within 15ft of you you hear a loud heartbeat sound. Thing is, 15ft isn't the optimal engagement range if you have any choice whatsoever, lol. So what happens is that the people who want to try to work together get screwed over by people just pretending. This happens to you a couple times and it isn't hard to decide to shoot first and ask questions later.

It only took me 2 days to switch to bandit mode. Only trust people you know outside of the game and you won't get screwed.

[Reverant]

Originally Posted by RandoM51

What else would it be? A server of 50 people coexisting in peace and harmony, blissfully sharing limited resources?

It wasn't quite that way when I began playing in May. Player interaction was a lot more sociable then. The last few times I tried to play, it was instant murder every time.

[Handmade.Mercury]

This is why zombies need to be more threatening.

[torrefaction]

There just needs to be walking dead style roving hordes that rotate among the high value loot areas.

Sent from my T-Mobile G2 using Tapatalk 2

[Scaryfaced]

Which is true in a way, but making zombies harder to kill would push toward making solo play all but impossible. It's currently very difficult to go it alone and zombies are a serious threat all the time, even in their current state. I've made it several hours solo, but I inevitably stumble into a few zombies, take an especially large hit and I'm dead. They aren't the push over 5 players with automatic weapons make them out to be.

My last solo character was armed decently and sporting about 8k blood. I alerted a single zombie, ran him into the forest to not draw any more and tried to kill him quickly. Instead, i missed my shot and he killed me instantly. One hit sent arterial blood jetting from my neck, I went unconscious and I was dead in 30 seconds. Zombies are pretty weak when you have a group supporting you and keeping you at full health. Without it, they're still a serious threat.

[Vandabo]

Individual zombies shouldn't be more threatening. They should be significantly less threatening (mainly slower), but there should be thousands of them. There should be only two ways of surviving: extraordinary stealth or overwhelming firepower/teamwork.

This is how we get it to not be a deathmatch. In order to get into any of the built-up areas (cities, army bases) you would need to deal with hundreds of zombies. So either you belly crawl for hours or you go in with a team. Imagine Dead Rising on the scale of Chernarus. There should be plentiful melee weapons and ways to effectively fight zombies (or run away from them) until you manage to actually get some heavier weapons (only available in the built up areas). There should be massive stocks of good stuff in the cities and bases, but you have very limited inventories. So you need to decide whether to fortify an area in the city, using barricades that slowly fall to the zombies, or grab as much as you can and escape with it, thus requiring another trip fairly soon. There could still be PvP, but nobody is going to get anywhere by killing the first survivor they see after they spawn. It would be more of a case of groups fighting each other to steal supplies or fortified areas in cities.

There could perhaps even be an ultimate goal of escaping the area by repairing a helicopter or boat. But in order to do this you would need several people working together over multiple play sessions. There could be real-world time limitations to make sure it couldn't be run through in one shot (the resin has to set on the fiberglass repair job you just did, wait 8 hours). Successfully escaping could give you an in game item or costume that could be used as a badge of honor on subsequent playthroughs.

I'm sure the biggest issue with this is the engine of the game, so I wouldn't expect this to be accomplished until they rolled out a standalone game. But that is the kind of thing that I think needs to happen to this game to make it something more than a clever mod.

Also, if they were able to pull what I just described off, I'm sure they could also have servers that just had a cleaned up version of the current gameplay, for the people who like it the way it is and want a less long-term play style. I would love to have both options. Maybe have two characters at any given time, one on the escape-oriented servers and the other in the 50 player deathmatch with zombies mode. Everyone wins, and the players with mentalities geared either way would be less likely to annoy each other.

[Wolvie]

Yeah, lone wolfing it is brutal. I know a guy who says he's played 17 hours without dying. He's either very good or very lucky.

Edit: I feel like I can't go 17 minutes without dying.

[torrefaction]

I made it for like 2 hours last time I played with my friend. It was pretty rough with a lot of patches where we thought we were fucked.

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[Wolvie]

Ever get stuck in guard booth while a zombie shambles by? And you're sure you are about to get eaten? Only to have him luckily not notice you?

Yeah that happened to me the last time I played. I swear my heart was pounding out of my chest, my eyes were bulging out of my skull and I think sweat was forming on my forehead. This game has tense moments like a Micheal Bay movie has explosions.

[Scaryfaced]

Lol I've had that exact same experience, Wolvie. Only in my version, I made the mistake of accidentally rolling over while prone, making the tiniest bit of noise on the stupidly loud floor and getting eaten alive. My successful version was hiding in what looked like a large dog house, in a pitch black backyard in Electro, while it was pouring rain. Watching a barely visible zombie stumble by, I think I even held in my breath IRL.

[Wolvie]

Please don't see me please don't see me please don't see me please don't see me please don't see me please don't see me please don't see me please don't see me.

Is what we were probably chanting in our heads while that was going on.

[RandoM51]

It was pitch black on US servers this evening so I went over and hit some almost-empty servers in France/UK. They were perfect, nighttime but the nighttime where you can still see just fine. Must have been a full moon or something.

Added a GPS to my suite of tools. Now I'll know exactly where I am.

[Badger]

If anything, my orienteering skills have improved dramatically. I even know how to locate the north star in case I can't find a compass. GPS? Pah!

[iHap]

Here's Random and I after we found a dirt bike Saturday.




Here's some Screenshots of My 2 brothers, a friend, Random, and I after we stumbled upon 3 guys standing outside their Jeep. We then later found an ATV which Random and I went Army of 2 on.







I have about 45 minutes of video I need to go through soon.

[Reverant]

Eh, you don't need to go through it. People will watch 20 minutes straight of uneventful DayZ footage.

[Handmade.Mercury]

I never had any trouble playing solo. As long as you're careful (which means basically always crawling in towns and being aware of chokepoints), going solo is perfectly reasonable. That is until you run into a bandit. I think if the zombies were a bigger threat, it would encourage group play, and solo play could still be feasible for people who have the skill for it or who have the patience, which is how it would be in real life, anyway.

Really, at least to me, DayZ is a FFA deathmatch on a large map with some zombies thrown in just because.