I definitely built up the Dark Zone to be this horrible experience, and it’s really not that bad. Now, to be sure, it’s a no man’s land, where you can fully expect to find a bunch of players that are ready to shoot you down, take your stuff and teabag your corpse. But it really gets a lot of things right, such as they confine their PVP stuff to this geographic area, and it makes thematic sense that the initial hot zone was the worst affected, and basically just walled off and forgotten.
Plus, you can kind of make the Dark Zone be what you want it to be. You don’t have to go in guns blazing, looking to kill or be killed by other player characters. I avoid them. It’s totally doable. Sometimes you’ll just run across some, and on rare occasions, they’ll just gank you out of sheer bloody-mindedness. Most of the time, they’ll pass you by, especially if you aren’t carrying anything. Also yes, you don’t lose all your gear, you only lose what you picked up in the DZ, and only since the last extraction. Once you call in a pickup, attach your gear to it and lift it out, it’s yours. You can’t lose it.
Anyway, one of the shields I’m working on is clearing 25 landmarks, and these are just various points controlled by NPC bad guys, you go in and clear them out, and it’s clear. You don’t have to involve other player characters at all.
Anyway, to cut this rambling short, the Dark Zone is worth a try, even if just to figure out that nope, you don’t like it. I don’t spend much time there, myself. But I do find that the increased risk kind of heightens the experience. Every now and then, it’s even fun.
The shields, at least so far, aren’t all that difficult. I’ve got three, just still working on the “clear 25 landmarks in the DZ”. I have some small worry that future shields will ask us to do something I don’t enjoy - sounds weird but I’ve never gone rogue, hopefully won’t have to. We’ll see.
Speaking of the DZ, because of that shield I’ve ventured deeper in than I had previously and holy crap, I never realized how hellish it gets the further in you go. In DZ09, you’re winding through mazes of massive piles of body bags, some of them on fire, heaped together by abandoned bulldozers. It’s legitimately disturbing.
I am sorry you have problems… but this is one really smooth game, so I am not sure what happened. Go to a cover, press Space and your guy hides in a cover. Right click for him to come up and aim, left to fire. The rest of the mouse move - aim and moving is standard FPS…
As for check point… yeah, get a friend and play with them!
