DayZ Badlands - good or bad?

Dee and I are back again (though not as a podcast) for a small series on new content and changes to a few of our favorite games. Kicking it off with DayZ with the Badlands DLC. Very fresh content, btw, since it releases today for the princely sum of $24.99.

I MEANT to post this last night and I didn't, welcome to BUSY BRAIN. But hey, join us in our bright eyed hope (that's more Dee than me, I was already cynical) and then I'll add a little bit at the end.

Jordan: I think we first need to address the elephant in the room. I know Badlands isn't a sequel or a second game, it's just another map DLC in the DayZ stable. But. But. I think we should inform folks that we don't have the best track record when it comes to new/huge content drops and OG games we like.

We loved Dying Light (CRANE 4EVER) and disliked (maybe hated) DL2, despite preordering and waiting for delays. (I'm also not terribly enamored by Dying Light Beast, despite it being Crane. Weird.) We loved Remnants and kinda meh'd on Remnants 2. We loved The Forest and we were VERY DISAPPOINTED in the entire early access roll out of Sons of the Forest, to the tune of finishing whatever the fuck version of the game that was and then leaving it for ...ages. Years? Idk. And only - as of this weekend - picking it back up again.
More out of lingering angst on my part than anything else.

Did I miss any (disappointments)?

Dee: Not a sequel and more a DLC, but we struggled with Green Hell's Spirits of Amazonia too. That rep grind was killer. But yeah I think unfortunately sometimes a sequel doesn't live up to the hype or what we liked from the first game, or the base game in terms of updates and DLC. SCUM broke my heart with the changes it made in some of its updates but that's a story for another day. For DayZ I guess maybe the potential worry is that we'll feel the same about this map as we did about the last one? It wasn't bad but it also wasn't that exciting.

Jordan: Ugh, I forgot about SoA! We should probably go back at some point and finish that rep grind tbh. It feels oddly wussy to run from that 'grind' and then willingly (or at least partially, for me) be debating WoW Forever, haha. And yessss I forgot to list the most relevant content: Frostline!

First, never forget the drama when Bohemia said they would bundle Livonia - the eternal bestest wet map in our hearts- with base DayZ, leaving Frostline as the new paid option. Amg, the tears, the sobbing. I can still hear it. Anyway, we were excited, right? COLD! Frozen food! New animals!

But honestly...it was just...eh - especially since we were already familiar with the Namalsk map.

Dee: Ok well, you got me there with the WoW Forever thing. 😔

That Frostline price drama was pretty wild, yeah. Has there been anything similar about the price for Badlands? I haven't really been following anything. The Sakhal map itself was a bit of a downer and there really wasn't anything that significant added to the gameplay: things freeze and you have to wear warm clothes.
Like you said, we'd been doing that on Namalsk already, and Namalsk was just a more interesting map. (I'll never forget the first time we experienced the event.)

J: I actually didn't follow development for Badlands too much to be honest, I didn't want to get disappointed again. The comments in their price announcement thread seem to range from "LOL as if" to "this seems reasonable" and then all over. Weirdly it's dropping at a price tag that is 2 bucks less than the CURRENT price of the previous DLC?

To skip back to Frostline for a sec, I think we were wooed by the whole "harsher survival" BS they were slinging around. To quote the wiki:

"Some major features have been revamped due to the colder environment. DayZ Frostline features frozen foods that can be warmed up using fireplaces (similar to drying clothes), fishing is no longer a viable option inland due to frozen lakes, and overall a colder climate requires fires to be started far more often to survive the harsher weather. Eating snow can induce Heavy Metal Poisoning, a new illness found in Sakhal. "

D: Keep warm, wow! Maybe, again, if we hadn't been playing Namalsk already it would have been more interesting to see those changes.

Jordan: Possibly? These modded maps have been out in the wild for ages, kinda hard to miss - and Cherno gets boring fast. (All my love, Livonia!)

What actually just popped into my head, though, was the article I did about game modding? Ignoring for the moment that DayZ started life as an Arma mod, but! The modding community has spent AGES working on DayZ: creating beautiful maps with additional mechanics and quirks, creating new items or gear or whatever. And it seems like we've modded and moved our way past needing Bohemia to... charge us for shit we already have?

D: That's... a pretty good point. There are so many really well made community maps, you'd hope that the official ones we have to pay for would stand out. I guess maybe you could say it's good for people who would rather not play with mods or on community made maps, though for DayZ in particular I think that'd be missing out on some really really cool stuff. I'll be honest with you though, Badlands has me excited for really only one thing above all else. MOTORCYCLES. FINALLY.

J: Okay, let's look at what's shipping alongside the Badlands release.

• Sandstorms
• Rebuilding mechanics and rebuildable houses
• Motorcycles and their accompanying physics
• Radio gameplay, including Morse code signals that lead to underground shelters
• New regional firearms, clothing, and loot
• New regional wildlife: dogs, desert monitors, and mouflons
• Regional diseases
• Underground facilities and infrastructure powered by the new terrain-hole system, which will also be available for other maps and to the modding community.

I do want to point out that SCUM brought us motorcycles - and wheelbarrows! - ages ago, so point to them. Off the bat I'd prolly strike the motorcycles (been there, ridden that) from the list, and the animals. A lizard, a (type of) goat sheep thing, and...dogs that guard military bases. ..wow. They added new clothing, gear, and weapons. It wouldn't be an announcement from Bohemia without "we've added a gun" - and, tbh, many modders have far nicer clothing packs. The sandstorm looks to be small, in terms of map size. The rebuilding thing is cool...and yet it's not. I know this video is early days WIP/early potatoes, but you'd think with their money and size we could get some better animations than "hammers air and a wall appears."

I suppose it's far more tidy to throw all the mats into one central area of "the house" and then air hammer our way to whatever type of "fixer upper' we want. But, again, perhaps it's because the other games in this niche have moved so far beyond this that it's just kinda underwhelming? AND. If it's going to go to other versions of DayZ eventually, then it just feels like another thing not worth paying for, lol.

Dee: I do like the rebuilding honestly. How many times have we struggled with figuring out where and how to exactly place a wall to block off part of a house we wanted to claim to make it safer? Now at least it's an actual built in mechanic to fix and build up those things even though it'll very clearly be only for specific building types. Though you're not wrong about other games already having this or something similar. There's probably even mods out there that do something like this? Maybe? I still think it's a pretty cool addition. It would be nice to see it make its way to the older maps eventually.

The sandstorm sounds interesting. I'm guessing it probably hurts you to be out during it while also nose diving visibility and stuff. Interesting way to either force you inside or make you really think hard about going out in it. ...Then again, that just sounds like the rain/snowstorms we already have, I guess. Just thematic to the map. Assuming it works that way and I'm not wrong, anyway. Regional diseases? More things for us to struggle to find tetra for!

What's really interesting is that I've seen frequent references to other mod maps, which we HAVEN'T tried. I'm wondering if, like you said earlier, we might be more impressed by avoiding those mod maps for now, at least until we can get our hands on Badlands. (On sale.)

Dee: Maybe, yeah. I guess it is cool that they're adding/modifying things like the diseases and for lack of a better term status affects you have to deal with to the environment of the map. Helps with immersion at least. I dunno. I do appreciate added content, and I think I'll enjoy exploring the new map (especially these areas you supposedly find by using Morse code?? That's sick) but I wish we could get... Something bigger or more elaborate, too.

You know what would be amazing in DayZ? A cooking system that was anywhere near as involved as SCUM's. I'd kill for that.

Jordan: Technically SCUM could have evolved beyond our wildest dreams (we can hope) since the last time we played, though I will SAFELY USHER SCUM TALK TO THE SIDE since it's our next chit-chat. But yea. So far the DayZ DLC maps end up feeling like they copy pasted a community effort just to prove that they could push a content update without talking about guns.
(Or at least ONLY about guns.)

Dee: There must always be more guns, it's DayZ update law. But yeah, I dunno. I do worry about a repeat of what we saw with Frostline - an official map you have to pay for that does things community maps have already been doing for years in a less interesting way. I'd love to be wrong though! I'm easy to please. I think just being able to drive a bike around will be enough to make me happy for a while. Until I hit a pebble in the road and it explodes, because DayZ vehicle physics.

Jordan: Ah, but you can die dramatically with the new ragdoll physics, unlike my previous deaths by car which were far less satisfying. But yea, I feel like it'll be a bit of wandering, a bit of playing dress up (as we do) and then a lot of shelving the game for a while. I'm even kinda leaning towards waiting until it goes on sale...?

Dee: Yeah? I guess that makes sense. I might get swept up by the hype. Maybe. At least for a while. Maybe I'll see what other people are saying about it first.

So right now Badlands is sitting at 238 reviews and a 64% positive rating. If we (cautiously) sidle into the reviews so far (while doing our best to avoid the dramatic low effort votes in either direction..) - it looks like some folks are experiencing performance issues, which seems to happen with every game everywhere. They also apparently removed the high rise building stuff for now, citing performance issues, and - no one that regularly plays this game is surprised by this one - the public servers are, GASP, still full of cheaters/hackers. Frostline eventually clawed itself to positive, so let's see how it goes for Badlands!

Will you be picking it up this weekend?