It could have been staged. In fairness though, I’ve watched Twitch streams in which similar stuff happened and it seemed unplanned.
I’ve been robbed at gunpoint in DayZ. Getting killed in DayZ, if you’ve been playing and gathering for long enough, is really bad. It’s akin to a character wipe in a MMO. When someone gets the drop on you and tells you to put your hands up, you do it because you’re hoping they just want to pass by peacefully and don’t want you to have quick access to your weapons. If they’re intent on robbery, you hope they only want a can opener or some ammo and not your whole kit. Maybe they’ll just handcuff you and be on their way? On the flipside, I’ve been the rat-bastard holding someone else up because, hey zombie apocalypse! The order of the day is paranoia.
Regarding the Arma engine, it’s the only thing that I think really holds DayZ back. It’s undoubtedly popular, but imagine how good it could be without the jank of that engine?
Q: Why didn’t they just shoot you?
Q2: When you’re robbing, why not just shoot them?
In real life there’s a whole host of reasons why you wouldn’t rob or shoot another human being. Most of them boil down to the law and a conscience. With the absence of the law (due to Zombies), there’s only human conscience left. (And as some very destructive people on Earth don’t have one, you end up with these ‘survival’ scenarios, should an IRL zombie apocalypse ever happen :))
I’ve not played this game. So other than a self imposed morality, I don’t see why a player of this game wouldn’t just shoot other players and loot their stuff. What’s in it for them to let the captured person live? Maybe you can damage the things they’re wearing? Or can they somehow remember you names and hunt you down when they respawn? I guess people feel guilty about causing other people to reset? Which, interestingly, is as close to games can get to making players feel guilty about ‘killing’ someone that is ‘alive’. (I’d like to think upsetting a real person, rather than a scripted one ala Clementine from The Walking Dead, genuinely upsets players… but then there’s griefers :P)
One real problem with the Arma engine for this specific game is that isn’t really prepared for player-driven constructions (or any kind of permanent modifications of the environment), and it’s something that people really wants in this game, to have their own base for their “faction”, to have an hideout, etc. In fact that’s why it seems they are going to use a very weird system to put bases in game: underground bases, that doesn’t exist in the map, but are instanced and there will be a “loading level” moment when entering. It isn’t exactly ideal.
Is it really? My understanding is that you don’t have character stats in DayZ, only loot. So if someone robs you of that or kills you and picks it from your body, it’s all really the same, right?
Sort of. Keep in mind that getting killed means starting out again in the dreaded newbie coastal zone which is a predator haven. Bandits will team up and wait around in the coastal towns to kill newbies over and over again. Newbies have to go to the towns near their spawn point because the food and water meter is constantly running down. If you try to beeline past the starter towns, you’ll just collapse and die in the woods.
Getting robbed sucks because you lose some of your stuff, but at least you’re not in the newbie zone. You can restock relatively quickly. Getting killed sucks a lot more because you start in the newbie zone with nothing to defend yourself with and raiders like to victimize the newbs.
7 Days to Die gets around this by making the process of getting a powerful weapon really easy. In fact, it’s not uncommon to find a pistol, ammo, jugs of water, and some food within the first couple of minutes.
Rust starts you out with a rock and nothing else. Not even pants.
I haven’t played any of these yet, but I think I’d agree with this sentiment. For example there was a a coop map in Operation Flashpoint that was pretty open. A fairly big island where we had to go take a base about a mile or so from where we started. We almost never made it there. All our antics and best storytelling came from our failures and clowning around in the open world. But it helped to have that objective there anyway to put a structure to the madness and to have a goal in mind. The time we finally made it and finished the mission was pretty boring and not memorable.
I think these games do a great job of setting up the kind of shitty, bleak, dog-eat-dog existence you have depicted in post-apocalyptic fiction. Of course raiders would victimize the weak. Of course people would kill or rob others based on nothing but paranoia or just for kicks.
On the other end, when someone does something nice, it’s pretty awesome. Sometimes the guy you thought was going to rob or kill you gives you food or ammo instead. Sometimes the guy you’ve never met before teams up with you to take on some raiders. I’ve walked up to newbs and given them a weapon or clothing, because it just made me feel good. That kind of thing is pretty neat.
Here’s an experience. This guy gets robbed in DayZ and his robber finds him on Twitter outside of the game to commiserate and promises to be nice next time.
Is anyone else totally turned off the game by these stories? It sounds like the worst game to me. I don’t want some jackass with a couple friends and some assault rifles to victimize me.
I’d say it’s not for everyone. It can be harsh and awful. A bit like the The Road.
I guess it’s a lot like EVE, except those folks sometimes have a lot of real-world money riding on their transactions. It’s completely player-driven whether you have a good experience.
Yeah, pretty much. No way I’d play a game like this. And I sure as hell force anyone to kill me before I’d surrender to them. Ain’t no way that happening.
You can always try to run or try to fight your way, I think the bizarre encounter where you are tortured only happens if you really want. You may end dead if you run or fight, but that end result isn’t so different to being killed in any other action game.
It’s worth noting that the difference between these and Eve is that in Eve, everyone is playing in the same world, and if you get a reputation for being a horrible person, everyone will know (and treat you appropriately when they encounter you). When the population is split among many servers, that doesn’t tend to happen (and people can always abandon a server if they get tired of dealing with someone, or if they become known as someone to shoot on sight).
I’m pretty sure that the popularity of these kinds of games is a direct reaction to the extremely guided nature of modern game design. I suspect that they fundamentally appeal to only a fairly small set of gamers (although many of them are opinion leaders).
Personally, I wouldn’t put a ton of money into following this trend if I were a studio, because I think it will have a (relatively) brief lifespan.
The other thing about these kinds of games for small teams is that you don’t need to provide a ton of extra content because players will generate their own, so you don’t need to have a bunch of people or spend a lot of time doing level design, scripting, etc.
The Day Z alpha has sold almost a million copies. Rust has made more money in 3 weeks that Gary’s mod made over its entire lifespan. Both games have held the #1 & #2 spots pretty consistently on the steam best seller list since they have been released, even through the Christmas sale.
I don’t think you can brushing these games off as some kind of fad any more than you can MOBAs or builder games (minecraft, starbound, etc).
