WarZ (ISS) vs DayZ

[Quix]

There is a lot of hate for this game out there. Some of it is deserved, some of it is not.
The main focus of negative reviews can be divided into three main categories:
1) The Devs of WarZ are liars and the game is a scam.
2) WarZ is a ripoff of DayZ and is an inferior game to DayZ.
3) WarZ standing on it's own is a bad game.

Point 3 would honestly be the most relevant opinion to have but it is the one that is expressed far less often than the other two. Personally I find WarZ to be an enjoyable game, but this is personal opinion and open to disagreement.

Point 1 I don't really feel has much to do with if the game is any good or not. There is no doubt that the company had shady dealings and misstated facts. If your sense of "moral outrage" forces you to not buy a product from the company because of that then no amount of discussion of the game itself will change your mind, so feel free to not play it.

So I am choosing to focus on point 2 (though my feelings on point 3 will be clear from this discussion also). I have spent 200 hours in Day Z and 120+ hours in War Z so there is a foundation of experience upon which I base my opinions. When DayZ first came out I was on board, loved it and had a lot of fun playing it. That opinion changed with time as the game got progressively worse as each update introduced new bugs and hacking got worse and worse. When WarZ came out I bought it and have to agree that it is largely the same game with differences in the details.

Here is my quick comparison:

-Graphics: Winner War Z
There is a noticeable difference between these games. WarZ feel more vibrant, and the animations (while not great) are less clunky than in DayZ.
DayZ looks like a FPS that came out 10 years ago and has never been updated. The characters models and zombies are blocky and flat. The cities are dull and uninteresting, filled with ugly copy and pasted buildings.

-Sounds: Winner DayZ
The sounds in DayZ are what you would expect. There is nothing special here, but nothing done wrong either.
The sounds in WarZ/ISS are very poorly done. Walking on rocks sounds like you are walking on a metal roof. Ambient noise cuts in and out randomly and is far too loud (birds chirping and river noises near splinter are great examples of this), and zombies will from time to time become completely silent.

-Loot spawning: Winner War Z
Day Z only spawns zombies/loot when a player is in the area, which can easily be used as a type of radar to tell if other players are around. In War Z the entire world spawns regardless of if anyone is near it or not.
DayZ also spawns the best loot at random helicopter crash sites. These spawn on server start up and the loot, once taken, does not respawn so it is first come first served. This leads to a situation where the people in control of the server get the best loot and everyone else has much less chance of getting it.
WarZ is not without loot spawn issues however. The Devs are constantly changing what spawns where and how often. I see this as an attempt to find the right balance, but many people get very upset over it because they would rather have the loot spawns be static and known rather than in flux.

-Melee combat: Clear Winner War Z
Melee in Day Z is and feels like an afterthought. There is only one melee weapon and it is glitchy and takes up your primary weapon slot, and it is an uncommon item (not rare, but uncommon).
Melee in WarZ is a central component of the game. There are a multitude of weapon choices with varying degrees of effectiveness. This does lead to a situation where there are a few weapons that are simply much better than the others and some of these are not uncommon so many of the weapons are simply moot because of this.

-Gun combat: Winner Day Z
War Z guns used to be insanely innacurate, this has been fixed and they are back to an acceptable level of accuracy. There is recoil and bullet spread and bullet drop, but they are still more arcadish than realistic.
DayZ guns are appropriately accurate, and you can take down other players at a decent range. That being said using a gun in a town will bring down on you every zombie within nearly a mile. This makes using them much less attractive.

-The Inventory managment system: Clear winner WarZ
WarZ has a simple easy to use and understand inventory system.
DayZ has possibly the worst inventory system I have ever encountered. It always makes peoples lists of things they dislike about DayZ. It is so bad it is offensive.

-Hacking: Clear winner War Z
Yes War Z has a lot of hackers, people run ESP, Wallhack, No Spread, and occasionally teleport hacks.
DayZ..... I struggle to think of a single example where the hacking has been worse than it was in DayZ. I have personally seen people spawning battleships on top of other people, or teleporting everyone on a server into the air to fall to their deaths, or turning into invincible dogs and leading packs of zombies around the map to over run people, or setting entire cities on fire. This is not mentioning the horror stories of hacks that I have read about but not personally seen.

-Number of bugs: War Z gets the nod
7 out of 10 of all of my deaths in Day Z for me were due to bugs like: laying down next to a tree and breaking my leg, or logging in next to a tree and finding myself on top of it and falling to my death, or bumping into a friend on accident and we both instant die, or being hit by a zombie who is on the other side of a brick wall from me, or even just walking along perfectly flat and featureless ground and breaking my leg and bleeding to death. Nearly every aspect of the game is prone to having bugs and nearly every bug can be fatal.
WarZ is certainly not free of bugs, but they are not as bad or as prominent as in DayZ. Most of its bugs are minor and very few are fatal.

-Map: DayZ gets the nod
The Day Z map is much larger than the War Z map is. This is increased... well infinitely when you consider that Day z map has no real edge. When you get to the end of the map you go into a no-mans-land that has no end and stretches for as long as you feel like running even though there is nothing there. While the larger map of Day Z is nice, the no mans land is just a giant exploit where people hide all of the vehicles so no one else can get them.
The towns and villages feel more real in DayZ. The downside is that the majority of space in the DayZ map is empty and wasted. You can spend an hour or more running from one location to the next location without seeing anything at all.
WarZ towns feel small and cramped in comparison, but has less wasted space. Five minutes walk will get you from any location to the next location.

Grouping/Clans: Winner WarZ
In ISS/WarZ there are several very nice features for grouping with other people. First off you have the ability totalk to your group maotes in a dedicated chat chanel that others can't see (I do wish this was expanded to include private voice chat), you can see the location of your group members on the map, and all of your group members have a colored chevron above their heads so that you know at a glance who they are (this reduces instances of unintentional friendly fire by several orders of magnitude). All of these features also apply to people who are in your clan, so that even if you are not grouped with a clan member you can still see where they are and they have a differently colored chevron so that you dont accidently shoot them.
In DayZ you have none of these features. The only thing that DayZ has going for it in the grouping/clan discussion is that groups and clans can help each other fix vehicles and set up tent cities, as both of these can be difficult without other players.

Joining a Server: Clear winner WarZ/ISS
It is kind of sad that this even requires being a category for comparison, but it is.
With WarZ/ISS the public and private servers are clearly seperated, and logging into one of them is quick and easy and works every time. All servers run the same version of the game so every server is essentially the same except for the number of people on them (and a few private servers that turn crosshairs off). This is exactly what you would expect from an online game.
In DayZ it is not uncommon to spend 30+ minutes trying to find a server to play on. There are a multitude of different or outdated versions of the game being run on servers all of the time, and if you don't have the exact same version then you can't get on that server. This was bad enough when I played all of the time but it has been made worse by all of the community mods and maps that have been added since. And once you do find a server running the same version that you have, you can easily find yourself starting at a loading screen for 10-15 minutes before you give up and exit out before ever getting into the game. There were times when I was playing with my three IRL friends that we would litteraly spend an hour trying to find a server that all of us could succesfully connect to. There is simply no excuse for this.

-Vehicles:
Day Z has vehicles, War Z does not.
They take away from the feel of the game to me, and vehicles are a negative to me. Many people love them and it is a plus to them.
The WarZ map is small enough and it's locations are close enough to each other that vehicles are not needed and wouldn't really make sense on it.
The map in DayZ is so large that vehicles are certainly helpful and make sense (also they serve as mobile backpacks), the only problem is that most of them are hidden off of the map and you cant find them. If you get lucky enough to find one it will most likely be broken so you can look forward to several hours worth of running around trying to find all of the parts (can be up to like 6 or 8 different parts needed, and they are not normally common spawns) in order to fix it. This gets frustrating because someone else could be doing the same thing and fix it before you, or just waiting for you to set down to fix it and kill you when your back is turned and steal the vehicle you worked so hard to fix.

-Item Storage:
WarZ uses a safe zone system and a global inventory that can be shared between all of your characters. This allows you to store extra weapons, food, meds, ect for later use. Your global inventory cannot be stolen from you and is always safe.
DayZ has no safe zones anywhere. The only item storage system it uses are tents that can hold a fixed amount of gear, but that can be accessed by anyone who comes along. These tents are also famously unreliable and may not save your gear upon a server reset, that also might get stuck on a certain inventory and respawn those items even once they have been removed from the tent (creating an infiinate number of copies).
Which of these is better is purely a matter of personal preference. If you want something easier to play, easier to re-equip after you die so that you can get back into playing faster then WarZ is for you. If you want something harsher, more realistic, with more of a penalty to death (assuming you don't participate in exploits) then DayZ is more for you.

-Marketplace:
WarZ has a in game marketplace that allows you to purchase items with either GC (currency only avaliable by spending real money) or Cash (in game currency that drop from killing zombies).
To me this is a detracting feature of the game since it takes you out of the "survival" aspect that is one of the major draws to the genre for me.

-Zombie Agro:
In DayZ the zombies will agro onto you from an insane distance away. God help you if you fire a gun in one of the large cities because you will be swarmed by 30+ undead within seconds. This is comounded by the fact that melee combat is such an afterthought in the game, so your only options are to use a gun or to crawl through a city and hope that you dont get picked off by sniper fire.
In WarZ the zombie agro range is much more forgiving, perhaps too much so. Yes moving and firing guns will agro Zombies but the radius is much smaller than in DayZ. To the point that you can fire a shotgun and be comfortable that you will only draw zombies from within the same block as you, where as the noise can be heard from much farther away.
I can't give a winner here because I think that neither game has this right yet. WarZ is too forgiving, and DayZ takes it too far.

The other major difference between the two is that Day Z is built off of the ARMA 2 engine and is a MilSim game. So if you want more realism (i.e. no map to start with and when you find one it won't show you where you are because that is not how maps work irl) then Day Z is the better game. If you want something that is more accessible and easier to just jump into and play then War Z is more for you.

Overall: WarZ wins for me.
Despite it's issues I still have fun in the game and keep coming back to it. The number and severity of DayZs bugs coupled with the extreme amount and types of hacking that go on in it just make it not very much fun to play.

[Nemesis]

dayz is the winner m8, the only reason that it doesnt look so great is because its old engine

[James]

you didn't do basic controls either... the main reason I switched from Day Z to War Z was because even just walking and looking around feels uncomfortable and stiff in day Z (nearly the same feeling I get when I try to play and fps with a controller instead of mouse/keyboard).

Edit: also... War Z IS a bad game... it is just also happens to be the best in its super niche genre which is the only reason I've enjoyed playing it.

[Cronik]

Originally posted by James:

you didn't do basic controls either... the main reason I switched from Day Z to War Z was because even just walking and looking around feels uncomfortable and stiff in day Z (nearly the same feeling I get when I try to play and fps with a controller instead of mouse/keyboard).

Edit: also... War Z IS a bad game... it is just also happens to be the best in its super niche genre which is the only reason I've enjoyed playing it.

I like your comments James you always seem to have a balanced and reasonable view and I agree with most you say, feeling the same way.

[Sarsipius]

I think you are missing an important one, Content, what is there to do in the game. This for me overshadows a lot of that list.

Also on Hackers, it has literally been months since I have seen a hacker on Dayz. I do play on either whitlisted servers or low pop ones because I don't like pvp but I re installed this game in December (after having a couple of months break) and have not seen a hacker in that time.

[Makiki]

Originally posted by Redshift:

There is a lot of hate for this game out there. Some of it is deserved, some of it is not.
The main focus of negative reviews can be divided into three main categories:
1) The Devs of WarZ are liars and the game is a scam.
2) WarZ is a ripoff of DayZ and is an inferior game to DayZ.
3) WarZ standing on it's own is a bad game.

Point 3 would honestly be the most relevant opinion to have but it is the one that is expressed far less often than the other two. Personally I find WarZ to be an enjoyable game, but this is personal opinion and open to disagreement.

Point 1 I don't really feel has much to do with if the game is any good or not. There is no doubt that the company had shady dealings and misstated facts. If your sense of "moral outrage" forces you to not buy a product from the company because of that then no amount of discussion of the game itself will change your mind, so feel free to not play it.

So I am choosing to focus on point 2 (though my feelings on point 3 will be clear from this discussion also). I have spent 200 hours in Day Z and 120+ hours in War Z so there is a foundation of experience upon which I base my opinions. When DayZ first came out I was on board, loved it and had a lot of fun playing it. That opinion changed with time as the game got progressively worse as each update introduced new bugs and hacking got worse and worse. When WarZ came out I bought it and have to agree that it is largely the same game with differences in the details.

Here is my quick comparison:

-Graphics: A nod to War Z.
There is not a huge difference here, but it is a noticeable one. WarZ feel more vibrant, and the animations (while not great) are less blocky than in DayZ.

-Loot spawning: Winner War Z
Day Z only spawns zombies/loot when a player is in the area, which can easily be used as a type of radar to tell if other players are around. In War Z the entire world spawns regardless of if anyone is near it or not.
DayZ also spawns the best loot at random helicopter crash sites. These spawn on server start up and the loot, once taken, does not respawn so it is first come first served. This leads to a situation where the people in control of the server get the best loot and everyone else has much less chance of getting it.
WarZ is not without loot spawn issues however. The Devs are constantly changing what spawns where and how often. I see this as an attempt to find the right balance, but many people get very upset over it because they would rather have the loot spawns be static and known rather than in flux.
WarZ weapon spawns are much more common than in DayZ. Whether this is a good thing or not is completely open to personal opinion.

-Melee combat: Winner War Z
Melee in Day Z is and feels like an afterthought. There is only one melee weapon and it is glitchy and takes up your primary weapon slot, and it is an uncommon item (not rare, but uncommon).
Melee in WarZ is a central component of the game. There are a multitude of weapon choices with varying degrees of effectiveness. This does lead to a situation where there are a few weapons that are simply much better than the others and some of these are not uncommon so many of the weapons are simply moot because of this.

-Gun combat: Winner Day Z
War Z guns are far too inaccurate. Even at short ranges many of the guns will go wide of the target. This has not always been the case, but it is also not a bug. This is a conscious decision the Devs made and have not backed off from yet.
DayZ guns are appropriately accurate, and you can take down other players at a decent range. That being said using a gun in a town will bring down on you every zombie within nearly a mile. This makes using them much less attractive.

-The Inventory managment system: Clear winner WarZ
WarZ has a simple easy to use and understand inventory system.
DayZ has possibly the worst inventory system I have ever encountered. It always makes peoples lists of things they dislike about DayZ. It is so bad it is offensive.

-Hacking: Clear winner War Z
Yes War Z has a lot of hackers, people run ESP, Wallhack, No Spread, and occasionally teleport hacks.
DayZ..... I struggle to think of a single example where the hacking has been worse than it was in DayZ. I have personally seen people spawning battleships on top of other people, or teleporting everyone on a server into the air to fall to their deaths, or turning into invincible dogs and leading packs of zombies around the map to over run people, or setting entire cities on fire. This is not mentioning the horror stories of hacks that I have read about but not personally seen.

-Number of bugs: War Z gets the nod
7 out of 10 of all of my deaths in Day Z for me were due to bugs like: laying down next to a tree and breaking my leg, or logging in next to a tree and finding myself on top of it and falling to my death, or bumping into a friend on accident and we both instant die, or being hit by a zombie who is on the other side of a brick wall from me, or even just walking along perfectly flat and featureless ground and breaking my leg and bleeding to death.
WarZ is certainly not free of bugs, but they are not as bad or as prominent as in DayZ.

-Map: DayZ gets the nod
The Day Z map is much larger than the War Z map is. This is increased... well infinitely when you consider that Day z map has no real edge. When you get to the end of the map you go into a no-mans-land that has no end and stretches for as long as you feel like running even though there is nothing there. While the larger map of Day Z is nice, the no mans land is just a giant exploit where people hide all of the vehicles so no one else can get them.
The towns and villages feel more real in DayZ. The downside is that the majority of space in the DayZ map is empty and wasted.
WarZ towns feel small and cramped in comparison, but has less wasted space.

-Day Z has vehicles, War Z does not.

The other major difference between the two is that Day Z is built off of the ARMA 2 engine and is a MilSim game. So if you want more realism (i.e. no map to start with and when you find one it won't show you where you are because that is not how maps work irl) then Day Z is the better game. If you want something that is more accessible and easier to just jump into and play then War Z is more for you.

Overall: WarZ wins for me.
Despite it's issues I still have fun in the game and keep coming back to it.

What is it with you fans comparing the game. It's like you are intentionally trying to start a fight with that DayZ-WarZ comparison.
It's like your only weapon against the haters is to compare DayZ and WarZ.

[Quix]

Originally posted by Sarsipius:

I think you are missing an important one, Content, what is there to do in the game. This for me overshadows a lot of that list.

Also on Hackers, it has literally been months since I have seen a hacker on Dayz. I do play on either whitlisted servers or low pop ones because I don't like pvp but I re installed this game in December (after having a couple of months break) and have not seen a hacker in that time.

While I can't comment on the state of hackers atm in DayZ since it has been a few months since I've played it. But at that time running into more than one obvious hacker was a daily occurrence.

As for content "what is there to do" I didn't address it because it is pretty much the exact same in both War Z and Day Z. Kill zombies, kill players, wander around and try to stay alive while looting. I suppose that Day Z adds in "find car parts and fix vehicles", though honestly this normally translated more accurately into "spend hours upon hours wandering around *off map* trying to find where other players have hidden the vehicles". Though the balance would be that in War Z killing zombies has a purpose (getting skills for your character).

[Quix]

Originally posted by lennako-:

What is it with you fans comparing the game. It's like you are intentionally trying to start a fight with that DayZ-WarZ comparison.
It's like your only weapon against the haters is to compare DayZ and WarZ.

First off, I stated why I was comparing the two at the start of my post.
Secondly, by pointing out the flaws I see in War Z and why I still enjoy the game despite them I give my opinion of War Z irregardless of Day Z.
Third, I don't care about "weapon against haters". Im not trying to win an argument, I am simply putting my opinion out there. People can take it or leave it as they wish.
Fourth.... please see point 1 in my original post. We all understand you don't like the company, and your sense of moral outrage makes you feel all tingly inside and you want to force that opinion down everyone elses throats. But it's not applicable to this thread so please dont launch into another tirade where you say the exact same things you say in every other thread.

[BSNB]

Doesn't anyone see it? It is funny the fanboys of WarZ resort to comparing their beloved game to a mod. (DayZ) Pretty sad when a mod gives a game a run for it's money. IMO DayZ is the best. I love complicated sim like games.

[Sarsipius]

Originally posted by Redshift:

As for content "what is there to do" I didn't address it because it is pretty much the exact same in both War Z and Day Z. Kill zombies, kill players, wander around and try to stay alive while looting. I suppose that Day Z adds in "find car parts and fix vehicles", though honestly this normally translated more accurately into "spend hours upon hours wandering around *off map* trying to find where other players have hidden the vehicles". Though the balance would be that in War Z killing zombies has a purpose (getting skills for your character).

I'm not too sure if the content is the same. Last night a group of us got onto the Panthera map (one of 9 maps I have installed at present, there are more I have not gotten around to yet) and after it took us about 30 minutes to repair a chopper and plane (doesn't take long if you look in the industrial buidlings) we spent the next few hours having air to air battles. When we died it was a quick re gear up using boats,cars, buses, bikes to get back up and running. By that time more people had come in and after helping out the friendlys we had a group of 15 people all with thier own vehicles be that choppers, cars or boats. That was a 5 hour game session.

Tonight we are trying out the Fallujah map which is one big city many kilometers in size for a change from the rolling meadows and deep valleys that is the Panthera map.

You do make some valid points. Yes WarZ has better graphics, a better inventory system, better melee and if all you want to do is run around a compacted area killing other people then perhaps WarZ has it's points but as I mentioned before I will take content over gloss anytime.

PS. That's not even going into the development teams. One team that has a genuine love of the genre (that's is why he ended up creating it) versus a team that loves money.

[T H I N G S]

OP has been smoking some heavy ♥♥♥♥

[Makiki]

Originally posted by Redshift:

Originally posted by lennako-:

What is it with you fans comparing the game. It's like you are intentionally trying to start a fight with that DayZ-WarZ comparison.
It's like your only weapon against the haters is to compare DayZ and WarZ.

First off, I stated why I was comparing the two at the start of my post.
Secondly, by pointing out the flaws I see in War Z and why I still enjoy the game despite them I give my opinion of War Z irregardless of Day Z.
Third, I don't care about "weapon against haters". Im not trying to win an argument, I am simply putting my opinion out there. People can take it or leave it as they wish.
Fourth.... please see point 1 in my original post. We all understand you don't like the company, and your sense of moral outrage makes you feel all tingly inside and you want to force that opinion down everyone elses throats. But it's not applicable to this thread so please dont launch into another tirade where you say the exact same things you say in every other thread.

You are using it as a weapon since all you WarZ fans can do to the haters is counter attack and say WarZ never copied anything from DayZ, yet you are always comparing those two and saying how W has better graphics and better zombie AI and etc making it look like WarZ really is similar to DayZ. It's like you are saying something but doing the opposite.

[Sigma]

Originally posted by lennako-:

Originally posted by Redshift:

First off, I stated why I was comparing the two at the start of my post.
Secondly, by pointing out the flaws I see in War Z and why I still enjoy the game despite them I give my opinion of War Z irregardless of Day Z.
Third, I don't care about "weapon against haters". Im not trying to win an argument, I am simply putting my opinion out there. People can take it or leave it as they wish.
Fourth.... please see point 1 in my original post. We all understand you don't like the company, and your sense of moral outrage makes you feel all tingly inside and you want to force that opinion down everyone elses throats. But it's not applicable to this thread so please dont launch into another tirade where you say the exact same things you say in every other thread.

You are using it as a weapon since all you WarZ fans can do to the haters is counter attack and say WarZ never copied anything from DayZ, yet you are always comparing those two and saying how W has better graphics and better zombie AI and etc. It's like you are saying something but doing the opposite.

Yeah Day Z got their product out first but he actually doing a good compare. I myself never play dayz so I don't know anything about day z. However i like to play dayz if I have arma 2.

[Quix]

To be honest what you described Sarsipus would not make me enjoy Day Z more, it would make me enjoy it less. If I wanted that type of gameplay I would play Battlefield 2. I dont want air to air battles in a zombie game. I want a zombie survival game, and the vehicles especially air vehicles (to me) take you out of that genre and changes the whole feel of the game.

[Quix]

Originally posted by lennako-:

You are using it as a weapon since all you WarZ fans can do to the haters is counter attack and say WarZ never copied anything from DayZ, yet you are always comparing those two and saying how W has better graphics and better zombie AI and etc making it look like WarZ really is similar to DayZ. It's like you are saying something but doing the opposite.

When did I say WarZ didnt steal anything from DayZ? In fact I know I have said the exact opposite. War Z is a pretty darn close copy of Day Z, and I think it is fairly obvious that WarZ stole/borrowed/copied many of its ideas from DayZ. I simply don't think that is much of an issue. If game A comes out with an idea and game B steals all of game A's ideas, but improves on them, then I will play game B. When game C comes out and uses those ideas in an even better way to make a better game then I will drop game B and play game C. I have no brand loyalty.

[Sarsipius]

Originally posted by Redshift:

To be honest what you described Sarsipus would not make me enjoy Day Z more, it would make me enjoy it less. If I wanted that type of gameplay I would play Battlefield 2. I dont want air to air battles in a zombie game. I want a zombie survival game, and the vehicles especially air vehicles (to me) take you out of that genre and changes the whole feel of the game.

You can use that logic on all points though. If I wanted a melee game I would play Dead Island, if I wanted graphics I wuold play the latest greatest release, if I wanted gun combat I would play BF or COD, if I wanted loot I would play Diablo or Torchwood.

Personally I find having a marketplace takes a lot away from the game. You started this thread to discuss DayZ v WarZ not which features are prefered over which are not.