ARMA II OA running Day Z mod.
Left 4 Dead 2
There are similarities.
- Mostly non-military weapons (though they are accessible in both).
- The Zombies are fast.
- There’s a certain amount of scavenging and defence required.
The differences are considerable.
- Left4Dead uses an episodic format whereas Day Z is a vast open world. The former has no persistence – even between episodes whereas the latter is always persistent (and the effects of death are much more profound)
- In Left4Dead, a horde of zombies is an inconvenience easily distracted by a beeping pipe bomb. In Day Z, a single zombie can send panic into a group of survivors, leading them to accidentally (fatally) wound team members.
- In Left4Dead, your avatar is almost superhuman; tireless, able to dismember zombies easily, and in some cases even able to leap from building to building without harm. Survivors are extremely resistant to accidental hits from team members automatic weapons. In Day Z, it’s the zombies who are tireless and strong. Even a single hit from a zombie can lead to death through blood loss. Even vaulting a fence is a challenge. And gunshots are usually final.
- During a Left4Dead session, you are running from one safe-house to another along a predetermined path and in many cases, the only opposition are AI-controlled zombies and a few (4) “special” infected who, again, are like zombie superheroes. In contrast, Day Z has all players being survivors but there’s no assumed alliance and the ability to easily kill other players with a stray round creates uneasy alliances and paranoid loners.
While I doubt I have the time to play this game (though it enchants me), the idea of applying different gameplay to the same genre is exciting in itself. It challenges the assumptions we have about games development especially in a connected environment (the Internet, Game Center, cloud-games). What if you applied the same persistence principles to Angry Birds, Plants versus Zombies, Farmville, Mario?
I heard about DayZ at the weekend there – the bit that intrigues me is the idea that the game forces a pretty intense survivor role-play mentality on the player without spelling it out. If you chance upon some other player on a road there will be a certain amount of distrust as much as an emergent need to stick together, something that is prevalent in zombie films, and in the walking dead comics, but not really in gaming yet.
The opportunity for ‘griefing’ is massive, but these people will be “tarnished” with a permanent bandit uniform and will not be trustworthy for the rest of their time playing the game.
There were some comments on the forums about how frustrating the “PVP” or “Friendly Fire” aspect was. I think they were missing the point.
I’m interested to see what they do with this, especially in terms of metaphor and metaplot.
I first heard about it on these fella’s recent podcast [http://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/rebel-fm/id301774100] & the guy gave a really good account of it. The game is not something I can play, but I’m delighted that it exists… hope it feeds into emergent storytelling techniques in more mainstream games.
Also this is a great article: [http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/05/14/surviving-in-day-z-part-two/]. “It makes you wonder why it took this long to happen. It’s almost too obvious. And consequently this is already the most intense, evocative, and interesting game I’ve played in 2012.”
Aye, I’ve been following the RPS articles. Thanks for the link on the podcast.