The most important thing to know about DayZ is – this game lives and dies on your choice of server. You are required to join an externally -paid or self- hosted server in order to play. This server can be either public to all or password locked for privacy. Server choice can dictate the specific map you’ll be playing on – it can dictate the type of people you encounter, the availability and types of loot, the details & specifics of base building and more- it’s all based on how the server owner chooses to set things up.
If you aren’t a fan of Player vs Player (PvP) play you may also have a hard time with the game because you will become, at various times, a victim of ‘the gank’, ‘the griefing’, and my personal favorite- the ‘I’m friendly!’ (Before they suddenly become less friendly and you find yourself unconscious, or pelted with grenades’, or just flat out dead). Even aiming for a server that claims to be ‘Non PvP/No KOS’ or ‘PvE Only’ is only as reliable as the attention span of the moderators policing it. Also remember that each time you die you lose all your shit. (I mean the actual items on your body, not your mental state. Though frankly you might lose that too.)
I have to say though I honestly just love the game because in some aspects it’s the most realistic of the survival games that I have in my library. Maps- Cherno, Livonia, Namalsk– are detailed and authentic looking. With the weather, lighting, and ambient noises the game comes across as immersive- I’m even a fan of the rhythmic tread of your character jogging across the terrain, the soft swish of the grass as you cut through the fields.
While it’s not a crafting game per se, it does have some base building and a metric ton of crap to loot including novelty items, weapons, tools, and (most importantly) clothing. While you can fish or hunt- typically deer or boars- for food, many servers do allow the loot system to spawn in ready to eat food like canned tuna or beans. You can also do some modest base building which, akin to the lootables, can be enhanced/altered by the addition of server modifications.
Final Thoughts
Overall when it comes to just kicking back and surviving, I’m a huge fan of the game. The weather/environmental aspects are impactful (visibility goes down in snowstorms or storms, you can get sick from wearing wet clothing) and provide little bits of game-play to manage. The building is a bit wonky but relatively easy and probably falls on the middle of the “grind” o-meter of most games.
I personally prefer few guns (if any) in my survival games because I feel like they can put you on too high a power curve too quickly. But given the setting/time-frame of the game, it makes sense. It still fills my gritty survival niche quite nicely – even with the zombies.
The one issue that I have is just how varied OR screwed the experience can be depending on choice of public server. Chain killed for no material benefit, missing items because spawn rate is capped, map locations locked out due to an adversarial groups presence. While your results may vary- at the end of the day there are still a ton of servers available to try on the server list, or you can always rent or host your own. So give it a shot!
