Diversion

Yeah enough thinky stuff.
Game review time!

This thing called DayZ came to my attention.
It's utterly geek friendly. By that I mean a bit of tech knowledge may help even before you launch it.
So what the hell is it?
It's a fairly brutal multi-player game. You're a "survivor" with incredibly basic equipment (depends on the server you log on to, but the standard issue is basic). You're in a world full of zombies. You need food, drink, warmth, and you need to survive, so you need bandages and weapons.

Why am I bothering to write about it? Well it's a "mod" a modification of a game called Arma 2. Arma 2 is a strange game in itself, aiming to be a very realistic modern military simulator. It manages on a lot points. A single bullet will kill you, pretty much instantly. Your storage space is based on your pockets, tool-belt and backpack. It's very limited. You can catch infections, or more rapidly just bleed to death if you can't bandage yourself up fast enough. Pain makes your vision blur and shake. Broken bones stop you moving. Blood loss slowly blurs the entire world in to grey as the pain pounds away. You can forget "I've got 40,000 hit points and a codpiece of non-damage" here.

There's your feel of the game. Now back to the tech bit. It's geek heaven. You can't even run it with just Arma 2 installed. You need a whole mission pack of extras to bolt on to Arma 2 first. Even then, you're best off downloading a further add on called "DayZ Commander" to browse the 6,000+ listed servers and find one right for you, and then download even more maps and variations to play. Once you're in the game the tech assault doesn't end. This isn't your standard GUI. It's not going to hold your hand and tell you what this does to that. It feels like the entire keyboard is configured to do something weird with any key at all, and what you do with your mouse to get things to happen is perplexing to begin with. Think steep learning curve. It makes sense once you get the hang of it, but initially it's a case of "I have no idea how to do anything".

It's worth adding in here that the graphics are up there in the "really very good" category. If anything it relies on blur filters and light contrasts a fair bit, but actually that doesn't harm it at all, and blends with the visual damage from bleeding and throbbing pain. At times it's almost artistic, but it's always very easy to feel you are there. The quality of daylight changes, night time is nicely gothic, the rain really does get you down, and you can see the sun glare slowly fade as you emerge from cover in to bright sunlight again. Lets just say that it's immersive enough. You can moan that you can't get in to more buildings, but that's about it. They still look nice from outside.

So what some genius did was plonk that sort of simulation, in to zombie apocalypse land. The result is fairly intense! To give you an idea, apparently the average life span of a "survivor" is slightly over one hour.

But ... around about your 5th or 6th life time in DayZ, you start to get a bit of a grip on how to survive, (the lessons are fairly brutal), and here's why it has a bit of a cult status. It's not actually the zombies that are the most dangerous things in DayZ. It's the other players. Here the game pings in to a new kind of multi-player environment. There is no dungeon to team up on. You can either fight together or against each other. The rewards for taking down a well equipped player are tempting. You can spend hours or even days scavenging for the same results. On the other hand, your survival rate as a duo at least are hugely enhanced. Blood transfusions can only be made by another player, and that can be a life line. Mentally though, you're still thinking it's another mouth to feed and they better pull some weight. There's not even any moral compass added by the game designers here. This is it. You're a survivor in a world full of zombies, there are other people around sometimes, how do you deal with it?

The whole basic need vs greed morality debate suddenly hits you right between the eyes. How nice are you actually? Given you have to survive in a world full of zombies. How much do you trust other people? Suddenly that "Where are you? Let's meet up." in conversation isn't as simple as it looked.

To add to that mental pressure, this is a game with one life. You start a game, you can log out and back in on the same character with the same equipment right back where you logged out ... until you die. Then you have to start again from zero. That doesn't sound so bad if you're only surviving an hour or so anyway. It becomes a major mental factor when you've managed to survive for a week.

I'm not sure I've managed to get it across in this little review, but this is one hell of a brutal strange little sub-genre of game in all kinds of ways. It seems to bring out the best and worst in people.

So there's your basic review. Insanely hard to get in to. But actually .. something quite special if you ever do. A total departure from immortal, hand holding, user friendly, "which guild are you in?" online games.

But wait up .. something else I noticed. I know many players just treat DayZ like any other game. But I noticed something that reminded me of William Gibson going on. I really do need to be in the right frame of mind to log in to DayZ. It grows when you are in the game. You pause, gather yourself and then plan ahead the next scavenge, open the doors and cautiously look around. Time to move on again... It's the game that finally has me "jacked" in to it. From log on to log out, I'm in DayZ, and that little realisation, is why I bothered to write this blog post.