The inevitable conclusion of Dayz
I, too, was enamored with this experiment of a game when I first played it. I told friends about it, urged them to give it a try, and played it tirelessly for weeks, even months. I think I probably had about the same experience it with that anyone does while running with a moderate size of friends (3-5, depending on the day): I learned how to make my way around the world, I found some decent gear, I got killed, rinsed and repeated over and over.
We had plenty of high moments: we found some really nice gear, and some vehicles, even a chopper that we were able to ride around in style. The game was quite fun while you had the upper hand, and were on top of the world, but even then, the inevitable moment of your demise only makes the truth about this game even more clear than when you're killed by some hidden bandit while you're completely unarmed: this game has no future.
It's a craze, even I'll admit that. The fact that it increased Arma 2's sale by an exponential amount proves that, and I won't bother arguing that the game, if in no other way than attracting sheer numbers to it (however briefly), was a success. And as word of mouth spreads the news of its uniqueness there will be more that try it, I'm sure. Then again, Beta Max worked well. In that regard, you could have called it a success too.
However, if you visit the game's website on any given day you'll see a couple of telling facts:
1. Total "unique" (i.e. different) people that have played the game during its history is about 1.5 million.
2. On any given day this number is usually below 60,000.
So of all the people that have every tried the game, no more than 4% play it on a daily basis, maybe 10% on the weekends.
You might argue that a lot of players have moved away from "public hive" games (i.e. those hosted by servers directly connected to the mod developers) to "private hives", but I would contend that, while this is true, the number of those private hives is below 10% of the remaining public ones. Which would account for, at most, another 6,000-10,000 players. Hardly a signifcant argument against my point.
Moving away from cold, hard numbers, let's dissect this game's content, and figure out where their roots.
The website itself offers the following advice:
-Step 1: Scavenge
-Step 2: Kill Zombies and bandits
-Step 3: Survive
There's a couple of problems with this list.
The first problem is that there's no guarantee of you getting to do any of this. The gameplay is very technical (I use that word instead of deep because it is accurate and requires skill, but is not necessarily innovative in any way, and does not offer anything that its root, Arma 2, doesn't.), but comes with an extremely steep learning curve. Finding your way around this massive map can be a challenge even with the right tools, and for those without the knowledge of online resources like daydb.com/map, you're more likely to walk from one end of the map to the next and starve to death before you find something worth finding.
Scavenging is as easy as finding something worth picking up and clicking a button (if you can figure out what button it is), provided you don't get swamped and killed by zombies or get shot by a player first. Even if you can avoid these two dangers the likelihood of you finding something that would help protect yourself against them in the future is low, even abysmal.
The instructions would then have you kill zombies and bandits with your scavenged items. Zombies are plentiful, and spawn in veritable droves anywhere human settlements can be found, but killing them is extremely pointless, unless you're trapped and have no other alternative. Even then, killing them with a firearm is usually only wise as an absolute last resort, as the noise will inevitably attract more zombies and, more worrisome, the aforementioned players. Either way, zombies never contain anything more useful than a bandage or a can of food (which can more easily and safely be attained by scores of other means), so actively hunting them is an exercise in pointless ammo wasting, while asking for the dangerous attention of other players.
Killing players, on the other hand, is virtually the only draw of the game. They certainly contain better gear to scavenge than a zombie. Then again, they'll be actively trying to kill you at the same time, so this isn't exactly an easy feat. Since no one keeps anything after death (unless you were lucky enough to have friends nearby to scavenge your body and give it back to you), you're technically on equal footing as far as what can be found in the game and where, but that's a pretty nominal assessment of the truth. And the truth of the matter is: whoever has the biggest group of well armed people will win. Of course a clever, skilled player might take out a few people on his own, under the right circumstances. He might even get away with it a couple times. But against a group of fifteen or so players, who could easily sacrifice half their numbers to kill you, knowing full well that once you're dead they can simply grab all the dropped gear, stick it in a vehicle, and go pick up their team mates as they respawn... there's always a clear winner.
And did I mention that most of this action was sandwiched on either side by hours and hours of travelling and waiting? Even the earliest youtube commentaries on this subject went out of their way to illustrate this point. If I had to put some raw statistics to it, I'd say that Dayz is about 90% travelling, 8% dissapointment, and 2% payoff.
Not that all of this isn't fun. The game has a certain draw to it, a certain style and quality. But it's short lived, with an inevitable expiration date stamped on it. That much can already be seen by the player count. 90-96% of a game's total population doesn't play it any more? Vaporware incoming.
But why?
Because for all the style that the game has, for all of its innovation (if that's what you'd like to call it), all the ways that it differs from every game out there on the market, it offers no longevity. The last instruction, "survive", is a lie.
You can survive, for a time, but you will eventually fail. You will eventually die while your friends aren't around (either because you were playing alone or because they got killed too), and lose your gear, and you'll see that respawn screen and you'll realize... you're right back where you started the very first time you created a character. All your hours of work; travelling, scavenging, killing, surviving, and you have absolutely nothing to show for it.
This is the kind of model you see in a more mainstream FPS game, i.e. "round-based" combat like Call of Duty, Battlefield, Counterstrike, etc. You die, you respawn, you go on. Except... In those games you don't spend hours just trying to find basic equipment, and dozens of hours waiting for action.
Those games give you a starting set of gear with which you can contend against given challenges, i.e. other players.
Dayz doesnt.
Other modern FPS games set an appropriate amount of time to respawn and get back into the action of playing the game.
Dayz doesn't.
The second problem with the website's player instructions is that the instructions themselves are both a lie and a representation of the game's entirety. They tell you what you can do (while failing to mention that you'll rarely get to do any of it successfully for very long. In fact the average lifespan of a player is a little over an hour, compared to the immense amount of total time put into the game), but in reality those three things are all you can do. Once you've scavenged, killed players/zombies, and survived for an indistinct but inevitably limited amount of time, you'll have experienced everything the game has to offer. Of course, that's summarizing it in a fairly harsh way, but in the stricter sense of things it's the truth. You can go about doing those three things in a ton of different ways, but the cycle always ends with you dying, and starting with nothing.
There's no longevity in that. The more elitist, hardcore players of the game tout its harshness as its fun. They say that the point of surviving is to survive. How long can that possibly last? The average player, and then some, have already abandoned the game. Survival only for survival's sake? Will you have fun along the way? Maybe, maybe not. There is fun to be found in there, but you'll have to scavenge for it just like everything else in the game. At the end of the day though, I think most players, myself included, have just come to expect more from a game. Pouring time into something, whether it be minutes or hundreds of hours, should have some kind of reward-something to show for your time.
Dayz doesn't.