658 people found this review helpful
63 people found this review funny
Not Recommended
0.0 hrs last two weeks / 612.1 hrs on record (574.3 hrs at review time)
Posted: Jul 11, 2016 @ 1:18am
Updated: Jun 26, 2024 @ 10:17am

At the time of writing this review I've been playing DayZ for 3 years now (from around patch 0.42 to 0.61) and have seen every tiny thing the game has to offer. And I am sad to say that for a game I spent so many hours on I end up writing a negative review for and not recommending to anyone.
While other players will complain about the performance and such, I will like to look at another issue which basically destroyed the game.


At first, DayZ seemed like the next generation of gaming. It wasn't about killing and getting killed anymore. It was about the players and the interactions between them. A game where you have the option to kill, but you don't. It was more about interacting with the only other living humans; the players. Talking to them, befriending them, betraying them, handcuffing them, saving them, robbing them, torturing them and many other things. Most of which only limited by your imagination. DayZ represented the true face of a Zombie Apocalypse world.
But it was not just about guns, zombie and players. It represented a real survival system in the zombie apocalypse. You could hunt, pick fruit, farm by planting seeds and grow the crops and many other things. There were were also many handy things you could craft.
But all this content wasn't made in the first builds. It took 2 whole years for us to get most (and not all of) these options. After which the developers basically lost their idea of what DayZ was supposed to become.
They started adding generic worthless loot and changing the gameplay from an interactive multiplayer game to a pvp action game. Now it wasn't clothes that were being added or bugs that were getting fixed, it was just new weapons and only weapons. New patch, have this AK-74! Another patch? Here! Have this Winchester! Or this AUG! Which kind of weapon do you find deadliest? We'll bring that! Let's bring the M249 machine gun, or a bazooka! To the point where you could never worry of not having a weapon to kill someone. Slowly, DayZ changed to the game it is today. A game filled with savage players whose only goal is to kill and loot whoever they see. All those funny Youtube videos of people getting handcuffed and messed with got replaced by videos of PVP Battles. So now, all the new players are small minded people who came from Counter-Strike or Call of Duty, which means the only thing they know how to do is kill other players.
Now the funny thing is that the players are not to blame. It's the developers. What do I mean?
The developers kept releasing broken patches that were not even play-tested. One patch the food drop was dropped to something like 2% which forced the players to kill each other for food. The other patch broke the zombies so now they could knock you down in 5 hits or infect you for the rest of your life (which was also because being sick had also been broken). So players had to kill other players for better weapons. Now, you may think that a patch could not change a players gameplay, but it can. These broken patches were not fixed in the following week. No. These patches' life span was AT LEAST A MONTH. And when you're stuck in such situations, you have to adapt or you will die. A situation in which you cannot find food, are scared to death from zombies and are only presented with new guns. The only way to adapt is to start killing other players for food, guns and loot. Keep this up long enough and your players will turn into small minded savages whose only purpose is to find another player to kill and loot. EVEN if they've just spawned, have nothing but their bare hands and the other player is actually offering them help. Yeah, that kind of savage.

We now have an AUG, AKM, AK-101, AK-74, and etc. but we still have no damn use for the syringe that's been available since the first build! I can actually remember 3 items right now that could have been very useful and life saving in survival but were never worked on because apparently guns were more important. Hell, they even want to bring in a Bazooka and the SAW machine gun. How fun for a game that's about interacting with other players right? I'm sure I don't need to offer anyone help because if they want it, they're just gonna take it off my corpse.

Some bugs are neutral, meaning that they don't cause harm if left alone. But who can forget the glitchers right? Players who find their true calling in using the game's bugs and glitches to make other players' life a living hell. The most common one being the statues in town squares. To explain, there are a few statues in a few towns with a pretty big foundation. If you lie down next to it and roll towards it, you will insert the structure and will be able to see everyone on the outside. You wait for a poor player to pass by, then you simply come out by pressing V and shoot him in the back. Fun way to die huh? And that's not even the worst type of glitch. I can go on all day about all the glitches players use for picking infinite fruit in a second, duplicating their gear and etc..

I loved this game. I really did! There's a reason why I played it for 3 years. But I gotta tell ya, half of the time I bared with the game. I faced so many bugs and glitches, most of which always killed me and I still continued to play because I knew what a beautiful game this could be! But apparently the developers only cared about the money. They never cut the price in sales more than 32% for 3 years.
Between my friends I was always known as the most bugged player ever. Because apparently you're not supposed to go fishing. You're not supposed to go hunting either. No, you're only supposed to pick up guns and kill other players. F*ck survival right? A game that's about surviving in the zombie apocalypse has all its survival mechanics bugged to hell, but all its guns work as if they had just been cleaned and oiled by an army officer a minute ago.


Fun fact: Dean Hall the lead of the development team climbed mount everest twice but didn't finish the game. Not only that but he actually left the team! After which another guy took his place who tried to do the right thing but realized it was a dead end project so he left too. Another guy took his place afterwards who is now the team lead and is trying to make DayZ what it was supposed to be and I feel sorry for the guy because the game is so far beyond redemption.
This game had a chance to gain the best reputation among all survival games and instead, it dragged itself to the dirt, achieving the "buggiest and unfinished survival game of all time".

I heard some people say that most of the work in these 3 years went into improving the engine. Well if the engine would take that much work just to give a SMALL portion of the players a solid 60 fps, then the game shouldn't have been made Early Access in the first place! Seriously, 90% of my time in DayZ playing with a fps lower than 30 with my game freezing every now and then. I wanna get started on how awful the performance of this game has been through all these 3 years but even players who haven't played DayZ know how crappy it is. If you want to know more about the performance, just read every other player's review and you'll get what it's like.


In conclusion, if you want to play this game, you must be willing to put up with hackers and glitchers, over 500 different bugs and glitches, KOS players (Kill on sight), walking over 10 kilometers a day and spending years on the game until it finally reaches Beta!


Fun fact:
I might be one of the only 10 DayZ players from the current 11,000 (which is dropping by the day) who knows you can break rocks with a pickaxe and use the stones to sharpen your axe. Why? Because everyone else is busy finding guns new glitches to kill other players. What has this game come to?


Edit:
I disabled the comment section because apparently some people can't handle other opinions. If you can't cope with other players having other opinions then don't drop into the f*cking reviews section!
Was this review helpful? Yes No Funny Award
101 Comments
Chimz May 31, 2017 @ 6:02am 
By next gen game I meant the type of gameplay it offered. But yeah, the ghraphics were bad. They are working on it now but it's too late. As you said, the number of players playing this game has majorly decreased because of how they ripped us off.
Shredder May 31, 2017 @ 4:55am 
This game was never a next gen title. The graphics were tweaked on the old RV3 engine from 2006? i think. In addition, ahardly anyone plays this scam anymore.
heyitsmejayowen Mar 7, 2017 @ 7:42pm 
i was joking lmfao
Heruzu Jan 5, 2017 @ 2:47pm 
I think reading there interview let us feel less disappointed about their actions as they do explain what they are trying to doing. like for example in the no food update they explained that they were testing their central econemy loot system and as you may be able to tell they reverted it quickly (kindof), as the test failed since no server were getting enough food.
Heruzu Jan 5, 2017 @ 2:46pm 
I see, well then you have a pretty valid point there. In that case its a real shame that these events would lead to a KOS mentality. I guess i never notice that these thing affected our mentality ingame. Thats cool.
Dont take this part to heart but thats alpha for you. Maybe in 10 years when the game is down, we wont have to worry as much about KOS.
Also im glad to have read other peoples opition on this game as i do like the game, but i also do see how they are doing some shady things so its not like i can blame ppl giving it bad review. I rated your review as helpful to try to bring it up as it does bring some pretty important point that many people can learn before deciding to buy in.
Chimz Jan 5, 2017 @ 9:27am 
Haha, yeah. You're kinda right.
But about that "mad about the players", well basically players adjust themselves to what situations they are in right? Like in the world. The problem is that the developers made a lot of bugged and bad patches (like the one where zombies would make you infected in 1 hit which you could never recover from until you died or the patches that made food basically unspawnable), and players needed to adjust themselves to these horrible situations. So the solution? Kill another player and take his stuff. Why not just handcuff and steal? Too dangerous.
So basically I don't really blame the players. We have annoying players in every game but in DayZ, the developers turned the players into what they are by releasing buggy patches one after the other.
Heruzu Jan 4, 2017 @ 9:17pm 
Sounds like you are more mad about the player base than the game, but it is true that they are taking a while to make things useful. Also this might have to do with them having to redo the whole Engine that the game ran on (they us to use Arma Engine). And most of a game deving ( I mean any game not just dayz ) is centered on just creating the platform that it runs on, this can take years. Also no one can blame you for not liking the game after 3 years, but remember that most of the three years were spent creating the engine not the amazing philipe screw. Let me add that they are still working on the engine XD.

Also i cant wait till namalsk is in. In 3 more years HAHA
Chimz Aug 21, 2016 @ 4:48am 
Ooh, awesome! I love chicken!
Star Aug 20, 2016 @ 1:38pm 
Thanks, here's a chicken; :SBchicken:
Chimz Aug 11, 2016 @ 9:54am 
Alright thanks for the advice DayZ Sucks.