DayZ is one of those titles that an entire anthology could be written about, with a long and difficult history of backtracking through promises, roughly eight years of development in Steam’s Early Access Program, and offering DLC for the title that is fundamentally still broken to the point that your bullets are likely to disappear after you shoot. It’s had peaks and valleys throughout its tenured progress and has somehow managed to upset what was once a steadfast community that defended the standalone title.
DayZ all began as a mod for ARMA 2. It took advantage of ARMA’s consistently excellent bullet physics and action and placed a layer of PvP on top of that. There are zombies too, but they’re far from your biggest worry.
DayZ became renowned for a new type of gameplay of PvPvE, and the action was intense and exciting. Bohemia Interactive willingly lent their engine and hard work to the mod, and ultimately ended up hiring the mod author to work on a standalone version of DayZ.
It’s worth noting that the primary designer behind the DayZ mod was an individual known as Dean Hall; he left Bohemia Interactive in 2014, just two years after he was hired to bring his concept to life in a standalone version. The vacancy spelled trouble for the vast majority of fans of the title, who presumed that something was amiss.
📢 Hello Survivors,
We're finalizing the 1.07 Update, which will bring, alongside other things, the awaited inventory fixes.
While the PC update should roll out tomorrow, it may take up to an extra week for the console update to release.📸 @ItsCueps pic.twitter.com/4XuZOyqLwZ
— DayZ 🖥 🎮 ❤️ (@DayZ) February 10, 2020
This was…2012. In December 2018, DayZ (standalone version) finally released, after a rough couple of years in Early Access where bugs continued to stymie players that just wanted to play, and the resounding chorus that was heard from Steam was ‘Seriously? This is the final release?’
Now, as with every game that has a solid community, there are still those that will vehemently defend Bohemia Interactive and the DayZ developer for what they’re attempting to bring. By and large, however, the community doesn’t take kindly to the title that still struggles with basic tasks, like shooting a bullet in a game about shooting bullets.
The title is also well known in the Steam community for raising the price of its game immediately prior to a sale, and then marking it as 20% off, with the resulting sum being the price of what the game was in the first place.
Still, if you can find some friends it might be worth your time to hop into a server this weekend with them, and explore what is (and isn’t) available in the tumultuous title. Free is a solid price, after all. Worst case scenario, you’ll find all of the reviewers and long-time backers of the project are actually writing about something that people should take more notice of.
