Back in my second blog entry where I was describing the brief history when console gaming was my primary source of entertainment I mentioned in minor detail the tribal mentality of gamers and the way it feels justified to defend your actions/buying practices for whatever piece of hardware you chose, sometimes to a fanatical degree but what I didn't really jump upon was the fact that the defence of a chosen gaming franchise can be just as brutal as the machine you choose to play it on; a classic example being the Fifa/Pro Evolution Soccer yearly debacle or for a slightly less niche sample over the past 10 years you could use the annual iteration of Activision's Call of Duty when compared to EA's Battlefield/Battlefront cash grab as an example... but that rant is for another time. Coming from an outsider's perspective when it comes to games like these, (I've enjoyed both football and first person shooter games on both sides of the argument over the years but never enough to outright defend the "honour" of them) I find it fascinating that someone would uphold the prestige of a game, any game, for good or ill. Which leads me on to my featured topic for this blog entry, the game DAYZ.
But first: Did you know that I originally started my YouTube channel back in 2012 with 90% of the content being DayZ? I bet you didn't! The reason being for this lack of a past before regular uploads began once again 2 years ago was the fact that I was a little embarrassed to the extent of which I had DayZ content on the channel compared to other games and I didn't want anyone thinking my choice of video content from then is how I feel about gaming today, which I like to think has a much broader scope compared to how it used to be. I also have a lot more disposable income these days which probably helps too but I digress...
Like many of you, I discovered this open world zombie survival game due to a Reddit post to the video The Days Ahead - Welcome to New Chernarus which starred a guy going by the name of CHKilroy as he and a group of "Survivors" went around the Chernarus map in Arma 2 trying to keep the undead hordes at bay in a fairly amusing fashion. This was continued for several episodes before the videos stopped for whatever reason, but by that point and along with over 100,000 other people I was enamoured by the concept of surviving in a open world zombie apocalypse. Now if you haven't guessed it already from what I've showcased on the channel over the last couple of years I think it's safe to say that I am a zombie FREAK. I love all kinds of zombie fiction and I'm sure that come Z day I won't be one of the first to die through lack of knowledge... lack of exercise yes, but not knowledge. So to have this game which dumps you in the middle of the Eastern Bloc and says "get on with it" motivated me to see what all the fuss was about. There was only one problem with my initial hankering for the end of the world; I didn't own Arma 2, let alone know how to play or even mod the bastard and that turned out to be as challenging as learning to play the game itself! For anyone who is unfamiliar with DayZ in the Arma 2 engine all you really need to know is it can be classed as "in depth", (over-complicated) and "clunky" (a janky mess at the best of times). This is partly the fault of using this particular engine for this particular mod; most options available to the modder makes anything created within the engine very customisable but from a player's perspective it could and did lead to having to tweak the game quite robustly in order for it to run smoothly and for some users for it to even work at all. The flip side of the coin to this though is to settle for a less powerful and customisable engine then trying to do more than what it was originally created for, a good example being The WarZ. (Later know as Infestation: Survivor Stories and as it stands it's the largest viewed video of my old recordings with just over 15,000 views... before I deleted it. See, I can be modest!) All this merges in to what can be a very jarring experience to anyone unfamiliar with the intricacies of the Arma 2 engine, which as it turns out was about 99% of the people looking at playing this new mod for a game who would have otherwise never have even given a serious thought to playing this military simulator. A lot of us from a more casual first person shooter experience had to wade through what at times felt like an academical study of all the various buttons and key bindings as well as the contextual menu which would pop up when it felt like it whilst trying to do such mundane things as opening a door, but for me this feeling of being overwhelmed by everything all at once is a feeling I haven't felt since playing World of Warcraft... and if I was going to be completely masochistically honest with you it's a feeling I chase to this very day with every new open world game or MMO I play. The first time I logged in I felt completely lost, even after watching multiple playthroughs of various other YouTubers along with reading as many guides and "hints & tips" as I could for what was at the time a little known mod to a niche game. But I LOVED it. For me it was the first time the phrase "open world" actually construed the game in it's entirety. You were quite literally on you own from the moment you logged in to the server through to your inevitable demise. And it was tense as a lone wolf. The fact that you had this 225km² map with only a handful of players meant you were constantly on edge, not knowing if the next building you (try to) enter is housing someone better geared or better skilled than you who clocked that you were in the area minutes earlier and were laying in wait. That was what made me love that mod. I actually made 2 series over 12 months, one called "DayZ'd & Confused" which chronicled my ups and downs as a casual DayZ player, (with the boring bit sped up) and "3 Lives In..." where I would look at the other maps which housed the DayZ mod and, (surprisingly enough) try to view as much of the map as possible along with loot spawns and on certain maps a lot of player interaction! Suffice to say playing as a lone wolf was never the easiest option, especially if I was unlucky enough to pick a clan server to play on but for both good or ill I never had a dull moment.
And then it happened... on the 16th of December 2012 the DayZ standalone game was released!!!!!
And it was a fucking mess.
Now before I go on, and once again referring to my opening paragraph about tribal mentality when it comes to gaming in general I'd like to throw a word in to the mix which is seldom used on the internet and one which I think needs to be more universally applied to both this article and, (if I may be so bold) life in general. That word is REASONABLE. But we'll come back to this a little further on down...
So, DayZ launches and it appears this standalone version of the mod that everybody fell in love with is released (albeit in ALPHA... they love to stress that) in a worse condition than what the mod housed in an older engine was in. Now I understand that technically this was in the "Arma 2.5" engine, (also affectionately known as a slightly re-worked version of the Take On Helicopters engine) and so there were certain aspects of the mod which would have to be re-jigged, re-written and in some aspects re-thought but I think this was where the developers made their first fatal mistake... they released it too soon. (I say fatal... the game sold over a million copies before the end of 2012!) The hype for the game was so unbelievably fierce when the main developer of the mod Dean Hall announced in August of 2012 that there would be a full blown version of his beloved game that there was bound to be creatively cheaper knockoffs released as soon as possible to catch some of that liquid gold that DayZ had produced, and one of the more "successful" adaptions of this style of game was The WarZ. Now I'm not going to go in to the history of that game which in itself is VERY shady, more so because of the developers involved and past underhanded methods they had used to dupe unsuspecting gamers out of their hard earned cash rather than the actual game itself, but as this was released in October 2012 (again, in ALPHA!) one has to wonder on whether Dean and Bohemia Interactive, the owners of the engine that DayZ was to be built upon got a little ancy in this rival which had been released before their cash cow and in turn might have made them spring their interpretation of an open world zombie survival earlier than they ideally wanted to. But with the insatiable appetite of the impatient gaming public to adhere to surely it would be better to release something rather than putting the game back another few months and let this bunch of cowboy developers steal their sales in the meantime?! In retrospect, probably not. At the time though we were happy to have DayZ along with all the promises and expectations every early access title released through Steam has attached to them and we, (and by "we" I mean the over 1,000,000 people who had bought in to the game) were happy to sit back and play what was given to us as well as having the privilege of helping to mould the game in to what would hopefully be the ultimate zombie survival experience.
So we've established that I think the game was released far too early in order to cash in on it's own hype and also to make sure the monopoly of this emerging "survival simulator" genre was not something they would have to relinquish their large piece of the pie from for the sake of artistic integrity, but ultimately there was a bare bones game there to be worked upon... and that leads me to my second irk with it's development process: Dean Hall announcing he was leaving the DayZ project. I understand that he was half way across the world from where he originated from, (New Zealand I believe) and he had been working with Bohemia Interactive for just over 2 years on the project, (in the Czech Republic) but to me it came across as a rat leaving a sinking ship. And let's face it, 9 months before he eventually left the company as an "adviser" in December 2014 he was giving interviews to gaming journalists saying that the very concept of DayZ as a multiplayer experience was flawed, and that he was a "grenade" which ultimately would do more harm than good if he outstayed his welcome. What the fuck does that even mean? As far as I was concerned DayZ was his baby, his concept. And to see him so easily walk away from this once in a lifetime phenomenon sent alarm bells ringing in my head. Now I'm not one to judge anyone for their actions as no-one can truly understand why somebody chooses to do one thing or another but from an outsider's perspective it looks pretty bad when the father of the immersive zombie survival sim walks out on his child even before it hits puberty... or "Beta" if you prefer. This action alone in my opinion displays an arrogant contempt towards the community who supported and believed in his image of what DayZ could/would be. I'm sure I'm not the only one to feel like this either as Dean's new company Rocketwerkz hasn't been able to capitalise on the celebrity of it's founder and reach the lofty heights of the Steam charts with it's debut games and I genuinely believe this is from a large portion of the DayZ player base feeling cheated from the lack of commitment from the original designer... I mean, if he can't see one project through to a more conceivable ending then what's going to stop him from giving up on another just as easily? It's a fair point I like to think.
Which leads me to my final big irk when it comes to DayZ standalone: After 5 years it's still in fucking ALPHA.
5 years. 5 YEARS!! Whole games have gone from conception to final product within that time span which are far superior to the progress that DayZ has made in that time, Subnautica being a great example. "But Padge, since the release we've seen a whole host of additional content like cars and hunting and crafting and weapon modification and horticulture and diseases along with entire new towns where every building is enterable and not to mention the new physics engine, reworked zombie pathfinding with a dynamic AI and improved graphics and sounds!" I hear you cry, but here's the thing: I didn't want any of that. All I wanted was a more refined version of the mod I fell in love with. I didn't need to be able to pick berries or skin wildlife. I never asked for clothing modification or vehicle repair to be implicated. All I was looking for was a less buggy variant of the original DayZ I played in Arma 2. And I think this is the main problem with the game as it stands right now:
The developers are so engrossed with the perfect experience (in their eyes) they're too busy focusing on what will be DayZ Version 2.0 before they're even finished Version 1.0.
I'm certain the majority of people would have been happy with a cleaned up version of the mod. Now I'm no developer but I'm sure that would have been easy to establish within the 5 year period we have just passed with the team Bohemia Interactive say they have working on DayZ... yet here we all are, mulling over what could have been and still what might be. But I fear now it will all be too late with most people moving away and on to pastures anew and ironically enough to more concentrated forms of what DayZ set out to be in the first place; with Player Unknown's Battlegrounds, Fortnite Battle Royal and more recently Escape From Tarkov gaining in popularity against DayZ's slow demise. And it's fucking sad, man. To not see DayZ even make it out of the starting trap breaks my heart, but hopefully it's a harsh lesson that both people adopting into the early access system and developers learn from. As a customer services rep one of the first things I was taught and I have stuck vehemently to is the rule to "do what you say and say what you do". Basically don't dick people around and string things out unnecessarily as people remember shit like that. So before we get any fanboys ranting at me I'm going to bring back that word from earlier which isn't used nearly enough on the internet: Reasonable.
Is it not reasonable to expect a game released in 2012, (IN ALPHA!!) to be complete or at the very least nearing completion within 5 years?
Is it not reasonable to think that the original developer of the mod would see his brainchild through to the point of at least being feature complete?
Would it not be reasonable to want the developers to concentrate on creating a stable base game on which to add all of these extras that they seem to be concentrating on as maybe free DLC, or even a enhanced DayZ 2?
If we're going to be reasonable about it all... I don't think any of these questions are asking too much considering the size of the company developing it and the funding supposedly put in to it.
Now you may think after reading close to 3000 words from me on this that I'm angry and bitter about it. I'm not. SERIOUSLY! I'm just disappointed. Disappointed that a game which had so much potential with a massive player base from the off can be so seriously mishandled to the point of killing it before it's even officially begun. And again, you'll get people who will say that DayZ isn't dead, but the fact of the matter is not even 10% of the people who bought the game are still playing it. Obviously people come and go from any game and I'm aware that a lot of the die hard fans are waiting for 0.63 to drop as there are going to be some serious changes to the engine, (again) and I'm sure come version 1.0 dropping there will be upsurge in interest, even if it's just for morbid curiosity but the behemoth that could have been will now never be... and to reiterate again, that just makes me feel sad.
I will be there too when the final full version is released. And I'm sure I'll play the hell out of it... MAYBE even resurrect the DayZ'd & Confused series I did many moons ago, but whatever I end up doing when the game goes live it will always be with a thought to the wasted potential of what this game could have been and where this crazy journey could have ended up going. I live in hope that a game directly influenced by DayZ can extend the concept that originally caught the eye of the masses and one day we will be gifted with the "perfect" open world massively multiplayer zombie survival experience.
And I'll see you in the wasteland... eventually.
Thanks once again for taking the time to read this and hopefully I'll see you next time!
Scott.
Check Out My Youtube Channel: www.YouTube.com/PalicoPadge
