DayZ

DayZ Cory Sprague

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The game I chose to play was DayZ. This game is extremely alpha – meaning it’s in its early stages of development so it contains many glitches and unfinished parts. Although this game is in its early stages, it is still available to play to the public if you pay for it. The game allows you to control a virtual character in a vast world of post-apocalyptic housing and based forest landscapes. The graphics are fairly good for a game in such its early stages. The character you control starts out with virtually nothing and you have to survive by dodging zombies and hunger in order to pick up useful objects within houses and (hopefully) vacant buildings. You character constantly must eat, drink, and repair themselves with bandages in order to survive, and, to make the game even more challenging, other players can kill you.

Playing this game requires you to learn the button commands and the environment. There are no tutorials available yet, and there is no in-game map available. The game doesn’t even have a plot or storyline yet. However, the learning curve is huge in order to become self-sufficient. I played over 8 hours and was still constantly dying. You have to learn how to hide yourself in large cities, find ways to avoid zombies, and discover where resources are. I even spent over a half hour simply searching for my friend who was also online.

The game teaching you by reprimanding you for your errors… all of them. For example, if you try to open a can of beans with a shovel, you are only allotted a small portion of the can to eat. If you try something more efficient like an axe, you get more of the resource. If you waltz into a large city hoping for riches, you get shot by experienced players who camp out in sniping positions. If you try to fight a zombie with your bare hands, you have a small chance of winning, but your wounds eventually kill you. Because there are no tutorials, the only way to learn is by error.

DayZ has a forum location, http://forums.dayzgame.com/ and a dedicated wiki page, http://dayz.gamepedia.com/?cookieSetup=true. Also, the game developers, Bohemia Interactive, have a page dedicated to it on their site, https://store.bistudio.com/products/dayz. However, the very first site that comes up on a search is a site dedicated to modding, https://dayzmod.com/. There are actually fewer sites dedicated to it than I would have imagined, as the game has picked up quite the online following.



Because the game is in Alpha, many players attempt to use cheats in order to easily kill other players. There are some locations online devoted to this, however, the consequence for being caught is a blacklist of your account name. In this case – according to my friend who has participated in this illicit activity – you have to purchase the game again in order to play. He is on his fourth account as of today.

The game was extremely challenging and the learning curve was long. I didn’t take advantage of any online resources devoted to the game and only relied on information from my more experienced friend. This game is useful to players who do not want to play with low-skill gamers and players who like to figure out things for themselves. I found the game much too difficult to enjoy, despite playing online with two of my friends. For example of my frustration, when you see a zombie in the game, you have to run an extremely far distance in order to leave the zombie. The running, in the meantime, drains your resources. Many time I would play from the respawn only to devote an hour to running away from zombies and dying of starvation and thirst.