Just hearing about DayZ isn’t going to get you excited for it. In fact, it’ll probably turn you off. It doesn’t sound fun and there’s really nothing that exciting that you can gather from the description. It just sounds like another hardcore PC mod that only hardcore PC players can enjoy. As it turns out, that’s the furthest from the truth.
After spawning on a beach, I tried to get my footing. The controls are weird. Well, they’re different than most first-person shooters, but that has more to do with Arma II than it does DayZ. Once I was able to figure out the basics of movement, I looked around. There wasn’t much there besides a hill, the ocean, and a lighthouse. I started to make my way toward the lighthouse, but I caught the attention of a passing zombie and had to starting running away. It was at this point that I noticed an eye and an ear icon in the upper right corner of the screen, both resting at full bars. I could only assume that at this point I was completely visible and could be heard from quite a distance.
While I lay on the ground passed out from my blood loss, another player comes along and shoots all the zombies. It surprised me, as I was told that other players don’t really help you out that often. It’s a kill or be killed situation and most players will just shoot on site (Though that isn’t always the case and makes for some really cool videos like this one, where players commit a highway robbery). Unfortunately, he ran away toward the nearest town while I was still out. I’m not sure why he bothered helping me at all, but then again, I'm not sure about most things in this game.
When I finally came to, I noticed that the blood number in the upper right was dropping significantly and that I needed to do something about it quickly before I died. I opened up my backpack and grabbed the bandages, hoping that it would stop the bloodloss. It did, just shy of 6000 blood (whatever that means as a metric). I thought that maybe I had gotten lucky and I could actually work on finding a weapon of some kind now.
I couldn’t believe that something like that could happen and the only solution would be to crawl around, hoping to avoid zombies and find some morphine. I couldn’t rely on a fellow player to give me any, why should they waste that one me when they could just kill me and take everything anyway. It was brutal and devastating to me that there was nothing for me to do but restart. Restarting would put me on a completely new area of the map, an area that I would still have no knowledge of in relation to anything else in the world.
Where would I find weapons?
Would I run into other players on my path?
Could I manage to sneak away from zombies until I was able to defend myself?
As these questions ran through my mind, I realized why DayZ has been able to reach the audience that it had. It’s thought provoking. It’s real. It isn’t a shooter at all, it’s a survival game. And not in the “It’s a survival game, but here’s a gun five minutes into the game”-type of survival game. It truly is about survival on a deeper level. There’s nothing easy about it. When you die, you lose everything. Things that you’ve spent dozens of hours scouring for, only to have them ripped from you in a split-second’s choice. DayZ is unlike anything I’ve ever played before and it isn’t even a real game. It’s a mod to an expansion pack that has managed to bring a two year-old shooter into the top ten games on Steam. DayZ is the reason that we play games, we want meaningful experiences, and that’s exactly what this is.