Now Playing: DayZ

More than a year has passed since I last set foot into DayZ. Although I enjoyed my initial time with the game, I soon lost interest after little in the way of stable or noteworthy improvements to performance or game mechanics, and without any major content updates. So I was quite optimistic about returning, hoping that, even though the game remains in Early Access, the core experience would be refined and expanded by fresh content.

You can imagine my disappointment when I discovered that DayZ, in its current state, is hardly any better than it was over a year ago. In fact, it’s hard to see what, if any, progress has been made. In terms of performance, DayZ remains a shoddy mess, stuttering along at an inconsistent 40-60 FPS. It also somehow looks worse than I remember, even though I cranked up a few more settings.

With regards to server/connection stability, this also hasn’t really improved, and based on what I’ve experienced, I think it’s even more unstable. In the handful of hours I played, I had more disconnects and server time outs than I did in all of the previous twenty or so I put into the title last year.

I’m sure quite a bit of new content has been added in my absence, primarily new items and survival mechanics, but I really don’t see the point of adding more types of hats or ways to cook food if the game remains fundamentally broken when it comes to one of its core features. It’s that ‘Z’ part of DayZ. Yeah, the zombies. Remember those?

 

After more than another year of development, the zombies remain a broken mess. In a f**king zombie survival game, the zombies, which should be a key element, are quite simply pathetic. The only good thing I can say about the zombies is that they no longer appear to clip through the floor of buildings. But the zombies remain few in number and are now even less threatening. They seem completely oblivious to your presence unless you run straight up to them and jump up and down like a prat.

I’m pleased to say that melee weapons other than fire axes are now more effective at putting a zombie down, but hit detection for melee is still bloody awful leading to comical ‘fights’ as you repeatedly bludgeon a zombie and depending on where it decides you’ve hit, it can take anywhere from 3 to 12 hits to drop. Oh, and whilst the zombies no longer appear to clip through the scenery (or I just didn’t see it, but it wouldn’t surprise me if they still did), they can and do damage you by attacking through a wall several feet away. Yeah.

And I’m not sure how zombies are being spawned, but I came across multiple copies of the same zombie in a very small area. Which is, admittedly, kind of funny when you get them all chasing you like an angry zombie clone army.

There’s nothing new in DayZ about the world in terms of environments to talk about. I didn’t see any new interiors. It’s all the same buildings, the same sparse layouts and – hell, they’ve still got the same ‘locked’ doors in many buildings, particularly to upper floors, that I thought would have been expanded into by now.

 

Oh, and bugs! Back when I was playing DayZ last year, there was a bug that would cause your screen to blur and remain blurred until you opened and closed the video options menu to reset it. More than a year later, and this bug persists but is now even more prevalent – every time I took damage from a zombie it would blur my screen forcing me to go into the options to restore it. Not only has this bug not been fixed, it’s actually worse.

I was debating whether to do this review given that DayZ still isn’t quite ‘finished’. But f**k it – at this rate, DayZ will be in Early Access ‘alpha’ until the end of days. I suspect the time will come, when the developers are finally sick of it and don’t think they can milk it any more, that DayZ will be ‘released’ as a ‘final build’ – when in fact it will remain as unpolished, content shallow and broken as it is now.

DayZ can be fun for a time and hell, if it was on sale and you’re interested, maybe even worth a punt if only for that early exploration/survival buzz. But even after another year of development, DayZ is an incomplete, broken mess and I doubt it’s going to get much better. Maybe in another year or two I’ll return to it again, but by that time I suspect it will have either been left to rot forever in Early Access hell, or simply released as a final build, but one full of broken code and promises.

Sadly, it now appears that DayZ was simply dead on arrival. And unless they can pull off a miracle, this is one corpse that won’t be getting up and shambling about any time soon.

It might punch you through a wall though.

3/10