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.

[James]

ChiGoku a écrit :

1 dev is doing it right, the other isn't ....

I was willing to believe you until you said this.

They are both awful. or maybe its safer to say that Dean and Titov are both awful.

ChiGoku a écrit :

that 1 list alone almost covers every patch warz has tried to have done, in 1 go..

You didn't even TRY to research that claim did you?

[Quix]

snavis™ a écrit :

Play DayZ if you enjoy an open script game where you dont even need to hack to ♥♥♥♥ up the server and everyone's day.

This is true, and is the main reason the cheating in DayZ is so horrendous. Is this the Mods fault? No, it is the fault of the ARMA2 engine because it was designed that way. ARMA2 allows users to freely make changes on the fly using scripts so that people who run games can make interesting scenerios in it without much trouble. Which works great when you are playing ARMA in a closed server with teams of people you trust, and where death or the loss of a game really isn't a big deal because you will just start a new game in a few minutes. It does not work at all in something like DayZ where the world is persistant and death does have meaning. But even though this is not the fault of the mod it IS an inescapable part of the game. When you build a mod on another game engine you have to accept that all of that engines flaws are now flaws of your mod.

Drain a écrit :

This argument is moot because you're comparing a mod to a full game.

This is a falacious argument. The mod is built ontop of a full game, therefore it IS a full game already, it just has more added on.

You don't have to pay for DayZ if you already had Arma 2. This means WarZ is much worse because you'd expect a full game to be all around better, not just a slightly better variant of what is basically a free game

The last statistics I read on this was that something like 95% of the people who owned ARMA2 bought it after DayZ was released most of those only played the mod and not the vanilla game. The VAST majority of people buy ARMA2 only to play DayZ, I know I did. The argument that DayZ is a completely free game is exactly the same type of lie that people blast Hammerpoint over making when WarZ was released. It may on some small level be technically true, but it is not in any real sense the truth.

You forgot to add however in your comparison that WarZ bans its players for no reason at all. You pay for a game and then you can't even play it. I think the most important thing about a game is just being able to play it in the first place, especially if you paid money for it. These horrid Developers are notorious for banning players for no legitimate reason. HF with that, because they will not refund you after doing it.

You are correct, DayZ will not ban you. No matter what. Because they can't, only the server owners can. This means 2 things:
1) People who use the worst cheats and exploits face ZERO consequences for this and will never be removed from the game. They are there for life or until they get bored ruining the game for legitimate players.
2) Server owners have all of the power. They can (and do) kick and ban people from their servers for killing them, or taking their horded vehicles, or for any reason or no reason at all. There is even less of an opportunity to appeal these bans than WarZ gives you.
On many occasions I would pick a server and play on it for a while (setting up tents and storing supplies and such) only to come across a giant camp that someone set up outside of the map boundaries (no mans land that is empty). I take what supplies I could carry and one of the vehicles only to have the server admin restart the server and ban me from it.

Now yes there are a lot of people who played WarZ who say they were banned unfairly. I honestly can't speak to that because I have no way of knowing if they were banned for no reason, or if they were banned for hacking and are now saying they didnt do anything wrong. I do find it a bit odd that so many people say things like "90% of the people in WarZ are hacking" and then when people get banned for hacking those same people say "Look at all of the people who were banned for no reason!". There is a failure of logic between those statements that people seem to overlook. All that I can say is that none of the people I know have ever been banned, and I know for a fact that those people don't use cheats.

[Quix]

opening post edited to include the following section:

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.

[RIOT|Stalkermaster]

Up are lucky as when clans were first released you had to pay, heck they even said that they would have. A proces of friends In the clan joining a server and spawning close by

[AFK]

Forget all the bugs WarZ has, its still the best game out there cause of being able to talk to teammates! Oh wait, game still sucks and full of bugs. DayZ wins.

[Quix]

opening post edited to add:

-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.

[James]

Quix a écrit :

The sounds in WarZ/ISS are very poorly done.

I actually like the gun audio in WarZ... but... yeah.... there are MANY examples of places the audio is god awful in WarZ.

Day Z's worst audio offense was just how annoying the jogging noise got after hours and hours of hearing it loop.

[Lord casque noir]

Quix a écrit :

opening post edited to add:

-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.

You forget that in warz, it is impossible to locate sounds in space. Also, it is impossible to know by sounds, the number od zombies which are in the area.

[James]

Lord casque noir a écrit :

You forget that in warz, it is impossible to locate sounds in space. Also, it is impossible to know by sounds, the number od zombies which are in the area.

I think you just need headphones on... the audio IS directional.

[Quix]

I would dissagree on being unable to locate sounds spatially, I can tell where gunfire or zombie sounds come from. The only thing you cant locate are the night time monster or wolf sounds in the woods and this is because there is nothing to locate, they are just ambient noise.

I do agree that you can't really tell how many zombies are in an area by the sound alone. At best you can tell if there is only 1 or if there are many, but getting an accurate count wont happen (if you feel it is important to be able to do).

[KookiePoo]

Well its night and zombies need their ZzZzZz so they sleep and only awake when you stiumble past them and only then do they begin to mumble. I;ve noticed there is no fire in game yet the charater screen behind the player there is fire? We need a bonfire to corral the zombies and roast n toast em hmmm finger licking good, roasted zombie anyone?

[ShnoopNpoopN]

i love both of these games but i do warz more because dayz has become a little bit old warz may have the most terrible animations but still fun

[RIOT|Stalkermaster]

Its not just the animtions. Dude do you even know what the devs have done

[James]

RIOT|Stalkermaster a écrit :

Its not just the animtions. Dude do you even know what the devs have done

...

[Lord casque noir]

James a écrit :

Lord casque noir a écrit :

You forget that in warz, it is impossible to locate sounds in space. Also, it is impossible to know by sounds, the number od zombies which are in the area.

I think you just need headphones on... the audio IS directional.

Quix a écrit :

I would dissagree on being unable to locate sounds spatially, I can tell where gunfire or zombie sounds come from. The only thing you cant locate are the night time monster or wolf sounds in the woods and this is because there is nothing to locate, they are just ambient noise.

I do agree that you can't really tell how many zombies are in an area by the sound alone. At best you can tell if there is only 1 or if there are many, but getting an accurate count wont happen (if you feel it is important to be able to do).

You are dreaming! Some sounds produce by zombies in front of you seems to come from behind you. And you sometimes hear near you sounds produced by zombies which stands at a distance of 5 meters

You don't know what locating a sound mean. Or perhaps, you don't want to say the truth about this game.